Federalist Papers

The Federalist Papers is a series of eighty-five political-theory articles published between 1787 and 1788 (and published collectively in two volumes in 1788) that were designed to rally and secure public support for the ratification of the proposed US Constitution. At the time, the passage of the Constitution was uncertain, particularly in New York where the articles were initially published. It was, after all, a radical proposal to replace the loose confederation of states defined by the Articles of Confederation with a far more cohesive union and powerful federal government. The Federalists believed strongly that such a union, carefully defined and mutually accepted by all member states, could alone preserve the economic well-being, peace, and long-term security of the United States against the threat of foreign invasion or the possibility of internal collapse. The essays have long since become some of the most significant documents in American history and political theory as collectively they lay out, clearly and concisely, the logic and reasoning behind the vision for the emerging government system of the new nation.

History

In the fall of 1787, defenders of the proposed Constitution as prepared by the Constitutional Convention viewed four states—Virginia, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York—as crucial in its ratification. As defined by the Constitutional Convention, the ratification process required the approval of nine of the thirteen states to put the new government into place. Of the four pivotal states, New York was considered the most vulnerable, largely because its governor, George Clinton (1739–1812), was among the most vocal opponents of the proposed Constitution and feared any diminishment of the sovereignty of the states under a strengthened federal government. Indeed, opponents of the proposed Constitution began publishing attacks on the document soon after it was proposed—the essays that later became known as the Federalist Papers were actually written as an answer to those attacks.

Organized by Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804), who later served as the nation’s first secretary of the Treasury, the Federalist Papers were essentially a well-executed public-relations campaign, an unabashed propaganda hard sell of the Constitution’s viability as a government blueprint. Realizing both that time was of the essence and the massive scale of the document’s vision, Hamilton enlisted the help of two other Federalist political theorists who had been central in framing the Constitution: Virginian James Madison (1751–1836), widely regarded now as the father of the Constitution, and fellow New Yorker John Jay (1745–1829), who served as the US secretary for foreign affairs from 1784 to 1789 and later became the first chief justice of the United States. As with most incendiary public political essays published in newspapers at the time, the identities of the writers were never revealed; rather, the articles were each published under the same pseudonym, Publius (historically, an astute and respected Roman politician known for his vociferous and spirited defense of the republican form of government). Indeed, even modern historians dispute the authorship of some of the eighty-five articles between Hamilton, Madison, and Jay. However, it is generally agreed that Hamilton and Madison wrote the majority of the essays; Jay fell ill in the spring of 1788 and contributed only five.

The barrage of essays proved quite sensational and successful when seventy-seven of the essays were published in two New York newspapers between October 1787 and August 1788. The total eighty-five essays were ultimately collected in two volumes. But as Hamilton rightly conceived it, the newspaper essays had an immediacy that the bound publication lacked; the weekly articles became a kind of saturation defense of the Constitution—two or three essays appearing each week for nearly one year. Hamilton’s strategy was to overwhelm the opposition and give it little chance to respond, a strategy that has become a fundamental principle in public relations and in the strategy of political campaigns.

Although the essays reviewed a wide range of issues raised by the Constitution, the most important issues explicated by the essays include the definition of republican government itself (a central federal government run by freely elected representatives from each state); the separation of powers (the division of the central government into three equally powerful branches—the legislative, the judicial, and the executive); the single executive (the logic behind the executive branch being run by a single president elected by the entire nation); the necessity of judicial review (the empowering of the judicial branch—the single branch whose members would not be elected—with the power to nullify actions by the other two branches); the system of checks and balances (the careful distribution of specific responsibilities and powers to enable each branch to prevent one branch from exceeding its authority); and the premise of states’ rights (the allocation of specific responsibilities and powers to the states rather than to the federal government). Hamilton opposed only the idea of attaching a Bill of Rights to the original Constitution, citing the document’s limited responsibility to define the reach of the central government, leaving the definition of individual rights to the states.

Today

Historians are quick to point out that contextually—that is, within their historic time—the Federalist Papers had little significant impact on the actual ratification of the Constitution. They appealed only to a single state—and the delegates in New York did not ratify the Constitution until one month after the requisite nine states had ratified the document, thereby officially establishing a new government under the Constitution. By the time the serial publication of the Federalist Papers had concluded in August 1788, New York had already become the eleventh state to ratify the document, having no other real option save political and economic isolation from the emerging new nation. But the Federalist Papers, each essay a methodical, dispassionate, and consummately logical defense of the Constitution, remains today the most articulate and most comprehensive defense of a bold new model of government and thus one of the landmark conceptual works of US history and political theory.

Bibliography

Broadwater, Jeff. James Madison: A Son of Virginia and a Father of the Nation. U of North Carolina P, 2012.

Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton. Penguin, 2004.

Connelly, William J., Jr. James Madison Rules America: The Constitutional Origins of Congressional Partisanship. Rowman, 2010.

"Federalist Papers: Primary Documents in American History." Library of Congress, guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers. Accessed 17 Dec. 2024.

Ketcham, Ralph, editor. The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debate. Signet, 2003.

Scott, Kyle. The Federalist Papers: A Reader’s Guide. Bloomsbury, 2013.