The Federalist Papers (4 page)

Stylistic cohesion came from yet another source. Each of the three authors of
The Federalist
became gentlemen of letters through a college education, a rarity of the times. Hamilton and Jay attended King’s College, which later became Columbia University, and Madison graduated from the College of New Jersey, soon to become Princeton. The elevated tone, careful civility, abstract claims of felicity, and stresses on decorum and candor of The Federalist were typical features in the eighteenth-century epistolary tradition of college clubs and literary circles. These virtues in writing were also signposts of station and, therefore, of authority in communal affairs. As important in its own way as the ideas presented in
The Federalist,
the etiquette of eighteenth-century writing secured the uniformity of style that everyone notes about the collaboration and its claim to authority.

Anonymity was also a complicated virtue in such writing. A true gentleman of letters wrote under a veil of secrecy in public and only then if the writing could be shown to assist the common good. An inner circle of peers generally knew the identity of an author and contributed ideas and corrections during private circulation of a manuscript before encouraging actual publication. It followed that publication was often understood in collective terms. An assertive claim of personal authorship could be dismissed as a vulgar trait obscuring the civic goal that justified publication in the first place. In perhaps the most extraordinary example of the phenomenon, no one beyond intimates knew that Gouverneur Morris composed the finished draft of the Constitution until forty years after the event. These mannerisms of “polite letters” are forgotten or satirized today as empty courtesies, but they were the stabilizing sources of sequestered negotiation and compromise in early republican politics. Neither the United States Constitution nor The Federalist could have been written without these accepted standards. Who can imagine a comparable degree of respected confidentiality in a major political gathering today?

Among the collaborators, Alexander Hamilton was the moving force, the organizer, the dominant contributor, the figure who arranged for publication in four of five New York City newspapers, and the editor who gathered the individual papers into book form. By conservative estimate and discounting minor addenda from the other authors, he composed fifty-one of the eighty-five papers himself, with Madison writing twenty-nine, and Jay adding just five more. Hamilton had argued for a new constitution and the means to achieve it as early as 1780. “If a Convention is called,” he wrote then, “the minds of all the states and the people ought to be prepared to receive its determinations by sensible and popular writings.”
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Typical of the man, he knew exactly what had to be done long before it could happen. Seven years later, The
Federalist
essays would be those “popular writings” and more. It would be Hamilton, in an added touch of creativity, who would conceive of the ephemeral newspaper series as a permanent book. Never just a thinker, the restless Hamilton seized initiative at every opportunity. He had been one of the prime architects of the Constitutional Convention, personally drafting the resolution in 1786 that called for it to meet in Philadelphia and enlarge the powers of the Confederation. No one was better suited to write a commentary on the new Constitution.

Here, in effect, is another answer to the power and achievement of
The Federalist.
Among the founding generation there were three persons of unambiguous genius. The rest were figures who fortuitously prepared for the unexpected roles that they had to play and then played them well. Genius, in these terms, refers to individuals who, given half a chance, would rise to prominence in any context through foresight, ability, and unusual qualities. The first two intellects of note were, of course, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. The third was Alexander Hamilton, and he had the farthest to climb, beginning as he did in the lowest level of society and coming from a disdained minor province beyond the thirteen colonies. Of illegitimate birth, Hamilton began in an unsupportive, dysfunctional, and contentious family in Nevis, in the British West Indies. He was on his own at the age of twelve, largely self-taught, and rose entirely through his own prowess and energy. No one at any point needed a second glance to see the brilliance in this outgoing, often argumentative youth; those with whom he worked learned that he could make the most of any opportunity.

Hamilton’s talents describe only part of him, but they are worth summarizing in thinking about
The Federalist.
He wrote with amazing rapidity and with one of the neatest and most stylish hands of the age. Even today an observer can read one of Hamilton’s now withered letters while standing some distance away from them. These were distinct advantages in the haphazard and often desperate needs of eighteenth-century newspaper publication. Hamilton was always available with something written that was more than sensible and easily set into print. Only such a man could have sustained the pace that occasionally required two and three long newspaper essays a week from Publius. Hamilton saw the nature of problems just as clearly and quickly as he wrote about them and seems to never have been without an answer to them. Ambitious to a fault, he knew how to make others around him better than they were—not least, George Washington, whom he served as aide-de-camp in the Revolutionary Army from 1777 to 1781. Just twenty-two, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel at the time and already a recognized pamphleteer in the propaganda wars of the Revolution, Hamilton would prove of inestimable value throughout Washington’s career as an organizer, strategist, and writer. No one found or articulated the root of a matter more rapidly than Hamilton. Typically, he would demand and receive an examination and then gain admission to the New York Bar in 1782 after just three months of legal study and immediately take his place as one of its most brilliant members.

There is, however, something more difficult to grasp in the brilliance of Hamilton, and it explains the first virtue of The
Federalist
. As his foresight over the need for a constitutional convention implies, Hamilton possessed a singular knack for rearranging the different pieces of a dilemma into a farsighted solution. One can see it in his Revolutionary War letters over key issues of military strategy. It appears again when, as the country’s first secretary of the Treasury, he organized the economy and national bank. His Report on Manufactures in 1791 would be uniquely prescient in mapping the relations of government to economic growth and private capital. In virtually every debate of note, Hamilton possessed a better grasp of the economic and social variables at work in America than others. Call it a scrutiny that led to comprehensiveness of view. Hamilton would use it to his advantage in the collaboration of
The Federalist
by making sure that every imaginable aspect of constitutional controversy, whether near or far in the distant future, was raised and answered. It is hard to find a serious governmental problem in the history of the United States that is not first mentioned here.

John Jay wrote just five of The Federalist essays, but his role in the collaboration was more significant than mere numbers suggest. Forty-one years old in 1787, Jay was a better-known and more polished politician and diplomat than either Hamilton at thirty-two or Madison at thirty-six. No doubt Hamilton asked him to join the enterprise because of Jay’s greater reputation and ideological compatibility as another conservative New York lawyer who favored the new Constitution. Jay had been active in the defense of New York during the Revolution and in writing the first New York state constitution. He had been instrumental in getting George Washington to attend the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and he already had served effectively as chief justice of New York, president of the Continental Congress, ambassador to Spain, and one of the three peace commissioners to negotiate and sign the Treaty of Paris ending the war with England in 1783. Jay also had worked hard and long as the permanent foreign secretary of the United States while other positions rotated under the Articles of Confederation. This experience gave him greater knowledge than others in diagnosing the weaknesses of the Confederation as well as unique credibility in public debates on the subject.

The major contribution of Jay came early in the collaboration. He wrote Essays Nos. 2, 3, 4, and 5 of The Federalist before bowing out because of illness, and then, much later, Essay No. 64. His first four offerings dealt mostly with the dangers of foreign influence and the need for a stronger union to cope with them; his last essay explained the Senate’s role in the treaty-making power. But if workmanlike on the facts, Jay’s essays accomplished something far more important for the overall tone and direction of the collaboration. Alexander Hamilton had been mired in petty squabbles over the new Constitution even as a delegate at the Convention. Immediately after, he became the instigator in vitriolic newspaper exchanges with the opposition, and it showed in his own first essay introducing the collaboration. Deeply embroiled, Hamilton couldn’t help himself even though he realized that a higher register was called for in
The Federalist.
“Federalist No. 1” would devote whole paragraphs to the ”obvious interest,“ perverted ambition,” and “preconceived jealousies and fears” of the ”classes” of men who opposed the Constitution. It called for objectivity but compulsively returned again and again to enemies guided by ”ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives, not more laudable than these” (p. 10). It was not a tactic that could hope to win friends and influence people to accept the new Constitution.

Jay would quell these tendencies of party spirit with a more inclusive reading of the problem in ratification. In “Federalist No. 2” he welcomed all parties into the new union through “sedate and candid conversation.” Instead of acrimony, a new aesthetics of ratification and goodwill through “isible union” dominated Jay’s contributions. Citizens, in Jay’s view, would stop arguing to the extent that they saw their interest clearly. In ”Federalist No. 64,” he would write: ”In proportion as the United States assume a national form, and a national character, so will the good of the whole be more and more an object of attention” (p. 360). The opposition was not perverted by ambition so much as it was sadly mistaken. In Enlightenment terms, the problem of those who opposed the Constitution was ignorance and a simple lack of education. Jay urged everyone to learn to belong together instead of standing apart.

Here, as well, was the adroit creation by Publius of a new and more favorable meaning of the word “federal.” Originally, the term provided an antidote to proponents of further nationalism and consolidation under the Confederation. One of the boldest rhetorical achievements of
The Federalist
would be to attach a new meaning of “federal” to the proposed Constitution through its self-proclaimed “federalist” supporters and writings. In the wake of Publius, all opponents to the Constitution would be “antifederalists,” a designation that quickly carried the implications of gloomy partiality for something less than joyous union with other Americans. Always a fast learner, Hamilton would see Jay’s strategy and adopt it as his own in subsequent papers. His abrasive tones would resurface, but Jay’s composure and equanimity in the positive claim of union, also more in keeping with Madison’s temperament, would guide and control the tone of
The Federalist
henceforth.

James Madison, as the last to join, is harder to figure as a logical collaborator until one looks at the facts. Madison and Hamilton were temperamentally unsuited for each other and would become political enemies in 1789, during George Washington’s first administration, but there was a great deal to hold them together in 1787. It made sense for Hamilton to reach out to a leader from another state, especially Virginia, in his nationalist project of union. Madison was available in New York after the Convention as a representative in Congress. Previously, the two men had joined as instigators of the Annapolis Convention of 1786, which brought together delegates from five states to discuss the economic problems of the union and ended by calling for a more general constitutional convention, and they then became firm allies as delegates in Philadelphia the following year. Both were strong unionists, and Madison, by common consensus even then, had been the guide for others in framing the Constitution in Philadelphia. William Pierce, a delegate from Georgia, wrote thumbnail sketches of the other framers in Philadelphia and found Madison to be “the best informed Man of any point in debate. The affairs of the United States, he perhaps, has the most correct knowledge of, of any Man in the Union.”
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This evaluation would be borne out again in The Federalist. For while Hamilton had the tougher and more comprehensive view of politics, Madison would prove the deeper reader of theoretical possibilities and would provide philosophical heft. A scholar first and man of affairs only after, the reclusive Madison had schooled himself with great care in the history of congresses and confederacies. He had identified all of the problems and knew how to create imaginative solutions to them.

Today Madison’s first contribution to the collaboration, “Federalist No. 10,” is accepted as a separate tour de force within the collection. It gave, among other things, a new philosophical answer to the problem of an extended republic. Madison claimed that an enlarged sphere with proper representation could best balance competing interests and protect minorities from majoritarian pressures. He also fused federalism and republicanism as joint operations under the Constitution and soothed fears about the bugaboo of the age, namely factionalism. “Liberty is to faction, what air is to fire,” Madison wrote in one of his boldest strokes, “an aliment, without which it instantly expires” (p. 53). Liberty, like fire, was dangerous when uncontrolled but a virtue when properly exercised.