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1776 All-Stars: Why a Pseudonymous Anti-Federalist Is My Favorite Founder

The man known only as "A Farmer" warned against the "sword of government."

Jesse Walker | From the July 2026 issue

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(Illustration: Joanna Andreasson, ChatGPT-5.4; Source images: Wikimedia)

This is part of 1776 All-Stars, a series about Reason's favorite American Founders. Read more here.

I do not know my favorite Founder's name. I just know that in 1788 a Baltimore newspaper published a series of pseudonymous essays where he warned against standing armies, called for a bill of rights, and declared, paraphrasing Jonathan Swift, that "laws are cobwebs, catching only the flies and letting the wasps escape." See-sawing between fears of an aristocratic legislature and a tyrannical executive, he argued that we'd be best off with the highly decentralized democracy found in certain Swiss cantons. "If I am told that the people are incapable of governing themselves" like the Swiss, he wrote, "I shall answer that [it has] never been tried in America, except among the native Indians, who are free and happy, and who prove that self-government is the growth of our soil." He signed these articles "A........

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