The Federalist Papers (6 page)

The first task of any reader must be to appreciate the organization of
The Federalist
for what it is. Hamilton presents his overall plan for the collaboration in “Federalist No. 1,” and he holds the partnership of writers to that understanding across the ten months of haphazard newspaper production and political adjustment. The breakdown of subjects covered by the full pamphlet series falls into six basic units:

Historians, political scientists, biographers, constitutionalists, politicians, and the student of civic affairs will naturally approach each unit in different ways.
The Federalist
is inevitably a digest to be mined by specific interests. But every reader, whether specialized or general, should remember that Hamilton designed the series as an urgent plea against a sea of troubles. If his strategies were controversial in their time, they belong to conventional wisdom today, and there is a problem in this. The very success of the plan can blind one to the intricate strategies that made it successful.

It follows that the second task of the interested reader must be to entertain a certain suspension of disbelief. Publius emerges in all of his creativity only if he is regarded as a persona crafted for crisis and made to think hard about the difficulties that he must encounter as a model citizen. It helps to think of Publius as the nation’s first significant fictional character—predating Washington Irvings Rip Van Winkle by more than three decades. The narrator of
The Federalist
develops in episodic ways and through moments of stress across the collaboration, and these patterns can help to hold a reader’s interest.

Essays No. 1-22 of
The Federalist
contend with the anxieties that pervade Revolutionary America as colonials turn themselves into the first uneasy citizens of a republic. They are marked by a curious manic-depressive tone in argument. Gloom and gladness chase each other across the page in “the dark catalogue of our public misfortunes” under the Confederation. In “Federalist No. 15,” Publius comes close to despair: “The frail and tottering edifice seems ready to fall upon our heads, and to crush us beneath its ruins” (p. 86). These same essays describe the depressing history of failed republics and confederacies from antiquity to the present. Yet Publius is confident that he can change history with “a different prospect.” He says he has “the cure for which we are seeking.” Mostly, this unit is the place to study Publius’s discovery of himself and the collaboration’s achievement of a tonal equanimity that will disarm frustrated opponents.

Essays No. 23—36 present the case for greater energy in the union, and they are understandably defensive as they joust with the status quo and try to answer objections from the states over centralized authority. Publius feels his way slowly, though right away in “Federalist No. 23” he introduces the theme of this unit: “the quantity of power necessary” for such unpopular measures as military defense and taxation. He worries openly in ”Federalist No. 26” that “we shall never be likely to make any material change for the better.” “Federalist No. 31” then points to the intractable nature of people set in their ways and to the need to proceed with caution as “a necessary armor against error and imposition.” Hamilton is the author of this entire section, and he believed more strongly than his partners in the legitimacy of power, but he seems strangely handicapped in arguing for it as a general need. ”Federalist No. 31” reveals his frustration: “The moment we launch into conjectures about the usurpations of the federal government,” he complains, “we get into an unfathomable abyss, and fairly put ourselves out of the reach of all reasoning” (p. 166). This unit of
The Federalist
strives to rise above its negative terms, and it illustrates an interesting feature of the emerging rhetoric in American nationalism. Few political figures have wanted to identify themselves with powerful government after Thomas Paine convinced the country in 1776 that government “is but a necessary evil” and “the badge of lost innocence.”
⁸

Madison takes over in “Federalist No. 37,” and although he too complains about difficulties, he lifts Publius out of an incipient despond. Essays No. 37—51 are Madison’s, and this more reflective-minded version of Publius brings three great positives to bear on the problems of the union. He finds a remarkable and saving altruism in the framers of the Convention (many of whom were war heroes), he tempers Hamilton’s earlier calls for power with more attention to the goal of liberty, and he adjusts an independent federalism to a national federalism under the proposed Constitution. Notable rhetorical range supports all three assertions. Madison, who obviously knew better from his own experience, expresses “wonder” and “astonishment” over “a unanimity almost as unprecedented as it must have been unexpected” in the Constitutional Convention.
⁹
This claim of unanimity appeals somewhat cynically to a bible culture steeped in Revolutionary ardor. “It is impossible, for the man of pious reflection,” Publius exclaims, “not to perceive in it a finger of that Almighty Hand, which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution” (p. 200). More important in the run-up to the present is the changing meaning of federalism offered by Madison in these fourteen essays. “Federalist No. 39” conflates federalism and nationalism to such an imaginative extent that the Constitution becomes “in strictness, neither a national nor a federal Constitution, but a composition of both.” Publius is perhaps most boldly creative here. Anyone interested in current political battles over whether state or federal authority should control the country will want to study these essays with particular care.

Although Madison contributes early on, Hamilton is again the dominating force of the next and longest unit of
The Federalist,
Essays No. 52-83. These papers cover the specific powers and checks on the three branches of government, and they do it in impressive detail. Publius is in full cry in these sections as an analyst of politics, and the subject matter suits Hamilton well. His legalistic precision in these papers makes him a commentator any time the branches of the federal government come into conflict or a specific branch is accused of overreaching its authority. To be sure, Hamilton writes more with ratification in mind than his own theory of power politics, but he does it with consummate skill—so much so that the theory of checks and balances that it contains are much more than a theory in these pages. Hamilton is a serious student of institutions. He sees how they must work and the dangers in each. Effort, insight, and calculation over the particulars combine here to give us the Publius that most readers remember.

Hamilton’s conclusion to
The Federalist,
Essays No. 84 and 85, brings another change in tone and direction. These papers are the work of an author who has been writing alone over the last twenty contributions to the collection, and he is away from the influence of his more conciliatory colleagues. In any case, Publius reverts here to the belligerence of “Federalist No. 1,” once again taking full aim at opponents, real and imaginary. He sees just two kinds of Americans in the end: “sincere lovers of the Union” and “enemies to a national government in every possible shape.” These last words magnify an overwhelming foe, and they are the last ones that Publius will speak. Hamilton’s anxieties have returned in full force. Back where he was in the first essay, he reiterates “the awful spectacle” of failure and gives yet another catalogue of horrors, including civil war, anarchy, perpetual alienation, demagoguery, and military despotism. The objections of others have come to annoy instead of interest Publius in the end. He has exhausted himself and lost all patience with his opponents. These last essays sweep away reasonable inquiries about the need for a bill of rights in the proposed Constitution and sneer at worries from the strapped states about the added expense of a stronger central government.

Nothing pleases this final figure, and the nature of his efforts expose him for what he always has been, a writer uneasy in his own skin. Closing down the series in “Federalist No. 85,” Hamilton pauses rather awkwardly, aware of his predicament. He openly apologizes for “intemperances of expression which I did not intend” but continues to write on intemperately nonetheless. “I have frequently felt a struggle between sensibility and moderation,” he confesses (p. 483). These admissions are illuminating. Hamilton could be such a force in an era of volatile change precisely because of his personal sense of dislocation. He is, in consequence, the ultimate puzzle of his production, a figure for every reader to conjure with.

Just a little earlier in
The Federalist,
we receive a glimpse of what drives this impossibly energetic and difficult man. His ambition was a goad, and the basis of it surfaces in an unguarded moment. As Publius in “Federalist No. 72” Hamilton writes of converting the desire for reward into service by making interest coincide with duty. First on his list of interests is “love of fame, the ruling passion of the noblest minds” (p. 401). Fame comes first because it will “prompt a man to plan and undertake extensive and arduous enterprises for the public benefit.” Hamilton made no secret of his desire for this brand of glory, and it is only fair to give him his due. Publius is a crowning achievement. For whatever else
The Federalist
appears to be, it fits its creator’s own exacting standards. It is an extensive and arduous enterprise for the public benefit, and it deserves the fame that it receives.

 

Robert A. Ferguson
is George Edward Woodberry Professor in Law, Literature, and Criticism at Columbia University; he teaches in both the Law School and the English Department. His books include
Law and Letters in American Culture, The American Enlightenment, 1750—1820,
and
Reading the Early Republic.
He is currently at work on a book about courtroom trials as rituals in a republic of laws.

1
Max Farrand, ed.,
The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 4
vols., 1911; revised edition, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966); for this quote, see vol. 2, p. 632.

2
Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, November 18, 1788, in Thomas Jefferson,
The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, 1776—1826,
3 vols., edited by James Morton Smith (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), vol. 1, p. 567.

3
John Adams, “Thoughts on Government,” in Adrienne Koch, ed.,
The American Enlightenment: The Shaping of the American Experiment and a Free Society
(New York: G. Braziller, 1965), pp. 246, 250, and Farrand, ed.,
The Records of the Federal Convention,
vol. 1, p. 18.

4
Thomas Jefferson to William Green Mumford, June 18, 1799, in Koch, ed.,
The American Enlightenment,
pp. 340-341.

5
Alexander Hamilton to James Duane, September 3, 1780, in Koch, ed.,
The American Enlightenment,
p. 571.

6
Farrand, ed.,
The Records of the Federal Convention, vol.
3, p. 94.

7
National Gazette,
January 19, 1792; quoted in James Madison,
The Complete Madison: His Basic Writings,
edited and with an introduction by Saul K. Padover (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1953), p. 335.

8
Thomas Paine,
Common Sense,
in Philip S. Foner, ed.,
The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine,
2 vols. (New York: Citadel Press, 1945), vol. 1, p. 4.

9
Publius exaggerates here in “Federalist No. 37.” Three leaders of the Convention—Edmund Randolph, George Mason, and Elbridge Gerry—refused to sign the Constitution at the end, and half a dozen other dissenters left the Convention before its end. The claim of unanimity is not even true by state. Alexander Hamilton’s signature could not stand for New York in the absence of the two other delegates, Robert Yates and John Lansing, Jr., both of whom had left earlier in protest.

The present edition of the Federalist contains all the numbers of that work, as revised by their authors; and it is the only one to which the remark will apply. Former editions, indeed, it is understood, had the advantage of a revisal from Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Jay, but the numbers written by Mr. Madison still remained in the state in which they originally issued from the press, and contained many inaccuracies. The publisher of this volume has been so fortunate as to procure from Mr. Madison the copy of the work which that gentleman had preserved for himself, with corrections of the papers, of which he is the author, in his own hand. The publication of the Federalist, therefore, may be considered, in this instance, as perfect; and it is confidently presented to the public as a standard edition.

Some altercation has occasionally taken place concerning the authorship of certain numbers of the Federalist, a few of those now ascertained to have been written by Mr. Madison having been claimed for Mr. Hamilton. It is difficult to perceive the propriety or utility of such an altercation; for whether we assign the disputed papers to the one or to the other, they are all admitted to be genuine, and there will still remain to either of these gentlemen an unquestioned number sufficient to establish for him a solid reputation for sagacity, wisdom, and patriotism. It is not the
extent
of a man’s writings, but the
excellence
of them, that constitutes his claim upon his contemporaries and upon posterity for the character of intellectual superiority: and, to the reader, the difference in this case is nothing, since
he
will receive instruction from the perusal, let them have been written by whom they may.