Number #85, which finally concludes the great project of The Federalist Papers, begins with Hamilton committing the tu quoque logical fallacy. Responding to critics who complained that the proposed Constitution lacked certain desirable elements, Hamilton only observes that those elements were also missing from the state constitution of New York:

Among the pretended defects [in the Constitution] are the re-eligibility of the Executive, the want of a council, the omission of a formal bill of rights, the omission of a provision respecting the liberty of the press. These and several others which have been noted in the course of our inquiries are as much chargeable on the existing constitution of [New York] State, as on the one proposed for the Union; and a man must have slender pretensions to consistency, who can rail at the latter for imperfections which he finds no difficulty in excusing in the former.

It shouldn’t matter what was or wasn’t in New York’s state constitution. The proposed national constitution was the issue. The state constitution was already in place. The national Constitution was being voted on. Hamilton scolds the people who hoped for better conditions in the newer document, saying only that they had “slender pretensions to consistency.” They might have have retorted at him, “Forget consistency! We want improvement!”

But there’s more. Hamilton was also suggesting that people had no reason to ask for greater assurances from the national government than from their state government. This was not reasonable. The states were established and familiar to the voters. The states were limited in size and power. And the states were relatively homogeneous. New York’s state government was run by New Yorkers. Georgia’s government was run by Georgians. The proposed national government was going to be radical and new. Adopting the Constitution meant submitting to the rule of a government where the majority would always be out-of-staters. The Constitution demanded that each state give up power and autonomy. Citizens reasonably wanted greater assurances about the Constitution than they needed from their familiar state governments.

Hamilton’s answer stands this concern on its head, promising that the national government would protect the people from local despots and “the ambitions of powerful individuals in single states.” He repeats the promise he first made in #8, that adopting the Constitution would prevent war between the states. (It didn’t. The states went to war with each other in 1861 and the Constitution didn’t prevent it.)

Despite its flawed argument, essay #85 contains perhaps the most endearing passage in the whole collection. Hamilton admits that, perhaps, he has occasionally gotten heated up in his enthusiasm to defend the Constitution. He asks readers to excuse his unintended “intemperances of expression.” He says the “wanton and malignant” opponents drove him to it:

The charge of a conspiracy against the liberties of the people, which has been indiscriminately brought against the advocates of the plan, has something in it too wanton and too malignant, not to excite the indignation of every man who feels in his own bosom a refutation of the calumny. The perpetual changes which have been rung upon the wealthy, the well-born, and the great, have been such as to inspire the disgust of all sensible men. And the unwarrantable concealments and misrepresentations which have been in various ways practiced to keep the truth from the public eye, have been of a nature to demand the reprobation of all honest men. It is not impossible that these circumstances may have occasionally betrayed me into intemperances of expression which I did not intend; it is certain that I have frequently felt a struggle between sensibility and moderation; and if the former has in some instances prevailed, it must be my excuse that it has been neither often nor much.

We don’t know fully how provoking those anti-Constitution voices had been during campaign to approve the Constitution. Some of them are collected in The Anti-Federalist Papers. Those essays are not as numerous as the Federalist, but they are reasonable and compelling. Hamilton’s ire was probably not provoked by the conscientious arguments that history remembers, but rather by the less informed and less reasonably argued criticisms he read in the daily papers and heard in the taverns.

During the weeks and months of 1787 and 1788 when the question was being decided, every voting citizen of New York had to sift through the arguments pro and con — including the reasonable ones and the fake news ones — and decide whether to support the Constitution or not. Hamilton reminds his readers of the importance of the decision they were about to make. He urges them to decide with the highest sense of duty.

No partial motive, no particular interest, no pride of opinion, no temporary passion or prejudice, will justify to himself, to his country, or to his posterity, an improper election of the part he is to act. Let him beware of an obstinate adherence to party; let him reflect that the object upon which he is to decide is not a particular interest of the community, but the very existence of the nation.

Federalist #85 was published in a local newspaper in August of 1788. New York had already voted to approve the Constitution a couple of weeks earlier. And that was also anti-climactic, because the Constitution had been officially adopted several weeks earlier after New Hampshire became the 9th state to approve it.

The final essay had no great effect on history. But it serves as a fitting close to the effort.