The Federalist Papers (3 page)

These minimal facts are important because they contain the puzzles that a reader today must solve to understand The
Federalist
. The first puzzle involves the original anonymity of the essays. Throughout their collaboration, Hamilton, Jay, and Madison hid behind the shared pen name Publius, after Publius Valerius, a founder of the Roman Republic. Resort to a pseudonym was a convention of the period among gentlemen of letters appearing in print, and classical reference was common in this regard. Even so, there was more to the choice of a name in this case than meets the eye. Why was this figure selected from the host of admired and better-known figures of antiquity?

The original Publius was also known as Publicola—literally, “pleaser of the people”—and the Publius of 1787 ardently sought this identification for himself. The three authors belonged to the elite among early republican leaders, but they were not popular men, and they were defending a proposal that would curb the people’s power through a stronger central government. Why should the people bother to listen, much less accept, their arguments? The writers of
The Federalist
made themselves “Publius” in search of a common touch and bond with a general audience of citizens. Their efforts, while philosophically complex, would be couched in simple tones and a polemical style. How this adroit combination of sophistication and commonality worked is one measure of creativity in the Publius essays.

Pleasing the people through the symbolic signature had another virtue. It covered differences between the collaborators. Better far to write as Publius than as Hamilton, the belligerent and often divisive upstart from the British West Indies, or as the genteel Jay, from the highest stratum of New York society, or as the painfully shy and scholarly Madison, from the squirearchy of Virginia, which he personally deplored. The writers knew they would have to fashion themselves beyond their own mundane reality, and their success raises a second major puzzle. Men of obvious talent but recent colonials, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay were relatively dispersed and parochial figures living on the outer limits of the English-speaking world. What enabled these very different men to come together effectively—so effectively that critics still argue over who wrote given sections of The Federalist and turn to statistical theory and computer analysis to bolster their competing claims of authorship? Once joined, how did these busy men of affairs transcend their situation as writers? How did they produce a timeless work of literature out of the political rancor of their moment?

The remaining puzzles turn on the nature of influence. Publius spoke for the people but meant to curb their excesses in the body politic through federal authority. Does The Federalist confirm and save the Revolution or more deviously cap its broader intentions? Are the rhetorical strategies of inclusiveness to be taken seriously, or is Publius more realistically the spokesperson of a conservative elite? The Federalist is authoritative today as a legal citation in leading court cases, and it appears as a resource in every constitutional crisis. Where, in its pages, does the verbiage of wily politicians end and the statesmanship of proclaimed lawgivers take over? And who gets to make that determination?

The Federalist had a limited impact on the ratification of the Federal Constitution except perhaps in New York, where the Constitution would be ratified by the narrow margin of thirty to twenty-seven votes in the state assembly called for that purpose. How does
The Federalist
become a universal source of national explanation? How can the modern reader take on such a dense text with pleasure and profit? Even eighteenth-century citizens complained of tedium when faced with this endless flow of newspaper articles, and it is the rare individual in any era who can pick up Publius and follow him straight through. How, then, should
The Federalist
be approached today?

These puzzles are ones that every reader must solve in approaching a national text that grows slowly out of pamphlets dashed off in episodic bursts more than two centuries ago. They must be solved because no citizen of the world can afford to ignore
The Federalist,
despite its mysteries and arcane limitations. Its wisdom on common political problems cannot be gainsaid. Like every major work of political science and social theory, this one must also be understood with its integrities in mind. Value lies not in the ability to quote selectively from
The Federalist,
a favorite ploy in both politics and law, but in coming to grips with writings that envisage and then explain how a new kind of nation, an uncertain experiment at best, could thrive on the American strand. In the success of the United States, now the oldest republic in the world, Publius continues to speak to the twenty-first century, but his words offer more than confirmation. The reader will find a poignant series of cautionary tales in these pages. The many warnings about correct governance in
The Federalist
protect the rule of law and should be required reading for both ruler and ruled.

It is easier to describe the creativity that produced the literature of public documents than to explain it. The men who crafted national understandings wrote with strong beliefs in place. Their convictions can be summarized briefly: Principles could alter history. Good ideas would convince reasonable people everywhere of their merit. The right answers to problems would spread throughout the world. As writers, they assumed that the structure of thought was of a piece with knowledge, that the correct placement of language could encompass the most complicated and intractable of difficulties, and that eighteenth-century political theory could produce a better world for all of humanity. Most important of all, they thought they possessed the means to fulfill these goals in America. “Federalist No. 1” opened with a colossal claim:

Forever? Everything was at stake for all peoples in such language. Knowledge would be the legacy of the New World with the United States of America as its leading exponent.

These ideas are still afloat today, but early republican writers embraced them with an assurance that we can no longer match. John Adams, hardly an optimist but an expert in what he called “the divine science of politics,” believed so strongly in these assumptions that he wrote of being “sent into life at a time when the greatest lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to live.” Edmund Randolph, a man of uncertainties, could nonetheless open the Constitutional Convention by talking about how rapidly new knowledge would bring change. He argued that the framers in Philadelphia were in a much better position as lawgivers than the first patriots who wrote the Articles of Confederation a mere decade before. Those first drafters in 1776 had written their defective document “in the then infancy of the science, of constitutions, & of confederacies.”
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The men of 1787 knew so much more! Where does this confidence in creating a dramatically better form of government come from? Why were these recent colonials so sure of their expertise as they contemplated saving the world?

Four fundamentals contribute to their creativity, and each is a dominant element in The Federalist. First and counter-intuitively, Americans were more adept at writing out instruments of government than the English counterparts to whom they often looked. They had to be. There were no customs to call up in the New World, no established legal institutions to fall back upon. The first colonists had to draft formal compacts that would define acceptable behavior as they carved new communities out of the wilderness. Much was borrowed from English traditions, but everything had to be readjusted to fresh circumstances. Americans of succeeding generations, many starting over, also formalized their arrangements and with a growing appreciation for procedure and form. In literary terms, no writer composes a masterpiece on the first attempt; one learns from the sequent toil of each new composition. By 1787 early republicans had thoroughly mastered the craft of composing compacts. Every state except Rhode Island and Connecticut wrote, debated, and adopted a new constitution between 1776 and 1784. Seventeen constitutions in all were written during the course of the Revolution. The Federal Constitution would contain many innovations, but procedurally and generically it belonged to a familiar past and came out of a set of intellectual skills that few cultures in history could match. The Federalist, with its thorough grasp of constitutionalism, was part of a general sophistication in making officialdom available to the people.

The ideals of the secular Enlightenment were a second factor in the writers’ creativity and reception. Belief in the progress of ideas and in the capacity of any rational person to benefit from them had a lot to do with an early American faith in the dissemination of knowledge. Thomas Jefferson would scorn all backward thinking when he wrote, “Thank heaven the American mind is already too much opened, to listen to these impostures; and while the art of printing is left to us, science can never be retrograde; what is once acquired of real knowledge can never be lost.”
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Progress was a matter of better understanding; the proper writing would encourage order from below instead of having it imposed from above. Excitement over the spread of ideas also had its technological side, as Jefferson’s words indicated. The invention of the portable printing press made publication available everywhere; it created a republic of letters that knew no boundaries. Anyone who had access to print could become a member. The international scope of this republic of letters guaranteed that ideas could come from any stratum of society or any location. Needless to say, Revolutionary American writers benefited. Intellectuals in Europe looked to the new United States as a plausible solution to larger problems. It was no accident that the first edition to carry the names of the authors of
The Federalist
would appear in France in 1792, where another set of political leaders were struggling to bring order to their own revolution.

The third source of literary self-confidence may seem the simplest. The success of the Revolution gave early republicans a worldwide subject and the assurance to write it. Defeat of the British and the heroes who accomplished it made for a fascinating story and not just in America. The triumph of revolutionary principles gave hope to the oppressed everywhere. Interested observers could see that the Revolution had been fought with the pen as much as the sword. They could see that principles had mattered. But, that said, admitting the relevance of principle raised a new question to be answered: Where would those principles lead next? Only three generations of American writers have ever held the immediate attention of Europe. The first settlers in the New World held on to that honor as emigrants who were still Europeans. Much later, in the 1920s, the novelists and poets of “the lost generation” would attain a similar cachet; they were voluntary exiles in Europe after performing as welcome allies in World War I. Between these two epochs, only the writers of the Revolutionary generation could easily see themselves as equal to European literati in their own time. Their radical experiment in government was thought to have lessons for the world, and they could count on an international audience for whatever they decided to say or write about it.

A problem rather than a resource supplied the fourth basis of creativity in the literature of public documents. The problem was uncontrolled space. To what extent could one create social form out of “empty” land? Land as property was the measure of meaning and power in the Anglo-American world of the eighteenth century. What did one do when there was too much land not owned by anyone or, alternatively, huge chunks of it claimed abstractly by political claimants? The greatest anxieties in the early republic involved the open territory to the west of every state and the sometimes terrifying tribes of peoples already there. Who would seize these territories? The imperialism of neighboring states as well as foreign powers raised ugly suspicions on all sides. Some citizens were in favor of the incorporation of new territories; others were not. The plausibility of a large republic remained a question.

The task of the writer in this situation was to make a virtue out of necessity. Publius offers a perfect example. “It has often given me pleasure to observe,” he would write in “Federalist No. 2,” “that independent America was not composed of detached and distant territories, but that one connected, fertile, wide spreading country, was the portion of our western sons of liberty” (p. 14). Nothing could have been further from the case in 1787, but the style and strategy of the writer were sound. Imagination was the main prerequisite in circumscribing a United States that no map could yet define. Early republican writers would use language to impose form and structure in the absence of concrete reality. Documents like the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 projected ideal societies long before early republicans could build them. The Federalist depended on the same skill. It imposed abstractions over a host of evils and made claims that would become self-fulfilling prophecies.

The four impulses of creative confidence just noted fueled the collaboration. Hamilton, Jay, and Madison shared these impulses to an extraordinary degree. All three men possessed detailed knowledge and practical experience in the writing of official documents. All three shared the optimism that made self-evidence in ideas the mode of address to enlightened citizens of the world. All three held positions of high honor and success in the Revolution, and all three believed that only a new and proper structure could save a failing union on the verge of chaos and collapse; correct form was missing, and only the new “frame” of the proposed Constitution could supply it. Even Hamilton, easily the most cynical of the three authors, would write in “Federalist No. 11” that ”wisdom” was the key in making America ”the admiration and envy of the world” (p. 62). He spoke of grand opportunities: ”It belongs to us to vindicate the honor of the human race” (p. 65).