Robert Yates (politician)

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Robert Yates (1738-1801) was a United States politician well known for his Anti-Federalist stances. Most scholars believe that he was the author of a series of sixteen articles written against the ratification of the United States Constitution under the pseudonym Brutus after Marcus Junius Brutus, who helped assassinate Julius Caesar in order to preserve the Roman Republic.

The essays, addressed to the “Citizens of the State of New York,” appeared in the New York Journal beginning in October 1787. Yates, along with John Lansing, Jr. and Alexander Hamilton, was at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787.

But Lansing and Yates, sensing that what was happening in Philadelphia overstepped their initial obligation of working out problems in the Articles of Confederation, left the convention early. He did not sign the Constitution, but later accepted it. He did not accept it because he thought it gave the government too much power over the people and their rights.