When the Constitutional Convention convened Massachusetts on 9 January 1788, Anti-Federalists were in the majority. Two days earlier "near four hundred of the most respectable real Tradesmen" of Boston, led by Paul Revere, John Lucas, and Benjamin Russell, met at the Green Dragon Tavern and approved resolutions supporting the Constitution:

trade and navigation will revive and increase, employ and subsistence will be afforded to many of our townsmen, who are now suffering from want of the necessaries life . . . it will promote industry and morality; render respectable as a nation; and procure us all the blessings which we are now entitled from the natural wealth of country, our capacity for improvement, from our industry, our freedom and independence. . . .

On 9 February 1788, three...