The Federalist Papers
/When the constitutional convention ended in September, 1787, the draft constitution was no more than recommendations by the 39 men who signed it. It had no force or authority. It had no public support. Nevertheless, the authors declared in Article VII that it would take effect as soon as nine states approved it. Debates began in each state as to whether it would approve or oppose the plan. Delaware and Pennsylvania approved in early December, 1787. Other states took more time. Rhode Island had not sent delegates to the convention and had not the slightest interest in approving.
Alexander Hamilton recognized the need to boost the proposal’s chances in his state of New York. Beginning in late October, Hamilton, joined by James Madison and John Jay, published in various New York newspapers a series of essays arguing for the Constitution. The essays were collected and later published in book form. The collection of 85 essays is known as The Federalist Papers or simply The Federalist. The story is told this way in the musical Hamilton:
Alexander joins forces with James Madison and John Jay to write a series of essays
Defending the new United States Constitution
Entitled The Federalist Papers
The plan was to write a total of twenty-five essays
The work divided evenly among the three men
In the end, they wrote eighty-five essays, in the span of six months
John Jay got sick after writing five
James Madison wrote twenty-nine
Hamilton wrote the other fifty-one
The essays were published at a tremendous rate. This was a necessary part of Hamilton’s plan to overwhelm the public with fresh ideas and strong arguments. By the time opponents (and there were many opponents to the proposed Constitution) could reply to one essay, there was already another Federalist essay or two circulating in the newspapers. Briefly, the 85 Federalist essays follow this pattern:
Essays #1-14 provide a summary of what the Constitution is about
#15-22 explain the deficiencies of the old government
#23-36 argue that the new government needs to be more “energetic” than the old one.
#37-40 recounts the process of the convention that wrote the new Constitution
#41-46 reassures states about the loss of state sovereignty required by the Constitution
#47-51 explains separation of powers
#52-58 details the role of the House of Representatives
#59-61 discusses elections
#62-66 considers the Senate
#67-77 discusses the president
#78-83 considers federal courts
#84-85 are concluding remarks
Each Federalist essay was signed “Publius” after the ancient statesman Publius Valerius who helped establish the Roman Republic around 500 BC. By signing their essays with that name, Hamilton, Madison and Jay implied a parallel between Rome’s great past and America’s auspicious future.
In the end, the tremendous effort had little effect. New York ratified the Constitution in late July, 1788. By that time, nine other states had already voted approval and the Constitution was official. New York’s decision was anti-climactic, and the influence of The Federalist was academic.
But the Federalist essays remain influential. The Federalist Papers are important and worth reading because they explain what the founders believed and why they organized the new government as they did. In 2015, Professor Sanford Levinson wrote, “The Federalist is, without doubt, the best known, most widely read and analyzed extended work of American political thought.”
Despite their significance, The Federalist Papers are not gospel truth. Occasionally, they aren’t even fair or sensible. They contain a lot of guesswork, some flawed reasoning, unsubstantiated claims, and not a little low-down, mudslinging. The authors wrote them to win an argument, not to make friends.
Levinson wasn’t kidding when he wrote that The Federalist is the “most analyzed” extended work of political thought in American history. There is no shortage of links with information about the essays. The text of the essays are available online for free at this official congressional website and from the Yale Law School and from many other online sources. Other sites summarize each essay. But most readers won’t need help to understand them. The essays are short and in plain English.
There is, however, a shortage of critical commentary for citizen readers — and especially for commentary that critiques the essays in view of modern realities. Consider this site. It provides accurate and comprehensible summaries of each essay that might be useful for a high school reader trying to complete an assignment without reading the essay. But the analysis provided at the link is only historical. In its analysis of #68, for example, it says, “In designing the electoral college, the founders sought to insulate the selection of president from the convulsions of the multitudes. The college was essentially an extra layer of security helping to guarantee that the president would be a truly capable individual.”
That is a fair summary of what the founders intended and what seemed reasonable to them at the start of the nation’s history. But a reader today should not hold that same hopeful naivete. It would be foolish to ignore the experience of 230 years. The founders hoped the “extra layer of security . . . [would] guarantee that the president [is] a truly capable individual.” We know that it hasn’t.
Levinson’s book, “An Argument Open to All: Reading The Federalist in the 21st Century” critiques each federalist essay with the insight and authority of one of America’s top Constitutional scholars. His book is the best source of updated reflection on The Federalist. The essays that follow here in A Citizen’s Syllabus are informed by Levinson’s and other experts’ commentaries, but are written for students and ordinary citizens.
About grammar in these essays:
The Federalist essays were written more than 230 years ago. That puts them in the past. But the mindset is consistently toward the future, as the authors imagine how their constitutional plan will pave the way to a great future. And those ideas strike readers in the present. To say consistently that “Madison wrote” would make the essays seem stale and dusty. But to always say “Madison tells us” diminishes the historical context of these old documents. The Congenial Iconoclast copes with this conundrum by using both past and present tenses almost at random. The inconsistency is, more or less, deliberate.
