The Federalist Papers (2 page)

Alexander Hamilton
(c.1755-1804) was born on the Caribbean island of Nevis, the illegitimate son of a married woman and a struggling Scottish businessman. After the death of his mother, Hamilton left the West Indies for New York, where he settled in 1772. Bright and ambitious, he enrolled in King’s College (now Columbia University), intending to become a doctor. Serving as General George Washington’s aide-de-camp during the Revolutionary War, he became a member of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Hamilton, who believed economic prosperity required a strong government, was an outspoken proponent of centralized government and the architect of the country’s financial institutions. He later served as the first secretary of the Treasury (1789-1795), exerted significant influence over foreign policy, and played a crucial role in shaping the government. His caustic wit earned him many enemies, including Aaron Burr, whose political career suffered under Hamilton’s criticism. Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel and on July 11, 1804, delivered a mortal wound. Hamilton died the next day.

James Madison
( 1751-1836) was the son of a Virginia planter and a member of the southern aristocracy. Though his health kept him from military service, he was active in revolutionary politics in his home state and was chosen for the Continental Congress (1780) and then the Constitutional Convention. Because of his efforts and influence at the convention, he is sometimes called the “father of the Constitution.” Madison served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1789 to 1797 and was secretary of state for eight years under Thomas Jefferson, whom he helped in engineering the Louisiana Purchase. In 1809 Madison succeeded Jefferson and was elected the nation’s fourth president; he won a second term in 1812 and, although a proponent of peace, led the United States to victory in that year’s war with Britain. Madison was the last of the leading founders to die when he passed away on June 28, 1836.

John Jay
(1745-1829) was born in New York City. He became an attorney in 1768 and gained early fame with
The Address to the People of Great Britain
(1774), a tract outlining colonial demands on the mother country, which Jay wrote while representing New York in the First Continental Congress. He drafted New York’s earliest constitution and in 1777 was made the state’s first chief justice. Minister to Spain from 1779 to 1782, he spent much of the Revolutionary War on diplomatic service in Europe, where, along with Benjamin Franklin, he negotiated the Treaty of Paris, which was signed in 1783. Jay did not attend the Constitutional Convention, but his work in foreign affairs in the late 1780s under the encumbering Articles of Confederation shaped his support for a new U.S. Constitution; his five
Federalist
essays primarily concern foreign affairs. In 1789 President Washington appointed Jay the country’s first chief justice of the Supreme Court, and his measured stewardship helped cement the court’s reputation for impartiality. The unpopular Jay Treaty of 1794 with Great Britain spoiled Jay’s hopes to succeed Washington as president, although he was elected governor of New York the following year. John Jay died on May 17, 1829.

The greatest American contribution to world literature has come through the country’s originating: claims. Between 1776 and 1820, the most intense philosophical period of civic discourse ever known, a literature of public documents dominates intellectual creativity in the United States. It consists of pamphlets, orations, declarations, ordinances of expansion, bills of rights, petitions of toleration, constitutions of all kinds. and a handful of judicial opinions. The best of these works reach for national identity through claims of universal rights and faith in the dignity of humankind. The words they contain are the aspirations that have attracted so many to American shores. More concretely, the same writings create representative government as we know it and a continental republicanism previously unimaginable. The obvious capstones of this literature are the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the Constitution of the United States in 1787. official texts honored throughout the world. Not far behind them. however, and a commentary on both, comes a collaboration of essays known as The Federalist. Printed first as ephemeral newspaper articles amid factional clamor but then as a two-volume book, it stands alone today as a practical guide to political theory and a sourcebook of civic understanding.

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay were the three very different and mostly separate authors of the eighty-five papers that make up
The Federalist.
They proceeded under a general plan set by Hamilton. but they worked independently on individual assignments. The loose partnership would last ten months, from October 27, 1787, until August 16, 1788, and when it was done, the result, better than any other writing of the time, would come closest to articulating what the new and struggling United States might become. The
Federalist
took its direction and tone from the most vital dispute in American history. At issue was acceptance or rejection of the newly proposed Federal Constitution of 1787, and the debate over it was an acrimonious one. Citizens were being forced to make a choice between radically different conceptions of their country at a time when few observers could predict with confidence that the states would survive for long as one nation.

We forget how controversial the Constitution was in the moment of its birth. The document that now governs the United States was drafted in secrecy by men who knew that they had acted beyond the mandate given to them. Sent as state delegates to Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 to discuss problems in the new union, they had been told to make any adjustments within the Articles of Confederation as the official compact of union. The Articles had been drafted in the anti-authoritarian moment and spirit of 1776. It was a companion document to the Declaration of Independence, and it left autonomy in the hands of the individual states. Nonetheless, five years would pass before the apprehensive states approved even this loose coalition, and they did so in 1781 only after many revisions by Revolutionary leaders who feared centralized authority. The framers of the Constitution in Philadelphia basically ignored these fears. Instead of tinkering with the arrangement, they junked the Articles of Confederation altogether and wrote out their own document of fundamental principles. When they were done, they had substituted a much stronger ideal of union than the suspicious compromisers of the original Confederation had contemplated or would have allowed.

Nor was that all. When the framers in Philadelphia made their document public on September 17, 1787, after four long months of closed deliberation, they tacked on a string of non-negotiable demands. They insisted that their document, the new Constitution, be submitted unchanged by Confederation authorities to the states for ratification, that it be approved through state conventions for that purpose rather than through the existing state legislatures, that ratification require only a strong majority of the states rather than the unanimity stipulated under the original compact, and that their own deliberations remain secret and inviolable during debate over the document that they had written. Finally, the framers resisted any reconsideration by a comparable deliberative body of the kind that they had just conducted among themselves. When asked toward the end of the Convention about possible amendments through another general conclave because “it was improper to say to the people, take this or nothing,” Charles Pinckney answered for all of the framers when he replied, “Conventions are serious things, and ought not to be repeated.”
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The early responses to the framers’ proposals ranged from uncertainty to outrage. If the Constitution was to be accepted, clearly much would have to be explained and quickly. The essays that make up
The Federalist
sought to be that explanation. They began to appear almost immediately. The first two anonymous newspaper essays were in print the month after the Constitution became public.
The Federalist,
in this sense, must be read as a partisan response to the anxiety that most early republicans felt as they tried to absorb the altered plan of union offered to them. The initial articles were treated, in fact, as political bluster for the popular press. When they continued to appear and accumulate, they won another dubious distinction: The eighty-five assembled papers would be the most protracted and prolix pamphlet series Americans had seen in an age of obsessive pamphleteering. Beleaguered opponents dubbed them the most tiresome production they had ever encountered. Supporters, of course, found higher qualities; a few even saw what the essays would become. When Thomas Jefferson, ambassador to France, read his own copy of The Federalist in Paris in late 1788, he called it “the best commentary on the principles of government, which ever was written,” a claim that holds up well today.
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There is no other book in constitutional thought in any language quite like The Federalist for its careful and thorough blend of range, penetration, principle, structure, and practical implication.