The Federalist Papers Read Free Page A

conclave because “it was improper to say to the people, take this or nothing,” Charles Pinckney answered for all of the framers when he replied, “Conventions are serious things, and ought not to be repeated.” 1
    The early responses to the framers’ proposals ranged from uncertainty to outrage. If the Constitution was to be accepted, clearly much would have to be explained and quickly. The essays that make up The Federalist sought to be that explanation. They began to appear almost immediately. The first two anonymous newspaper essays were in print the month after the Constitution became public. The Federalist, in this sense, must be read as a partisan response to the anxiety that most early republicans felt as they tried to absorb the altered plan of union offered to them. The initial articles were treated, in fact, as political bluster for the popular press. When they continued to appear and accumulate, they won another dubious distinction: The eighty-five assembled papers would be the most protracted and prolix pamphlet series Americans had seen in an age of obsessive pamphleteering. Beleaguered opponents dubbed them the most tiresome production they had ever encountered. Supporters, of course, found higher qualities; a few even saw what the essays would become. When Thomas Jefferson, ambassador to France, read his own copy of The Federalist in Paris in late 1788, he called it “the best commentary on the principles of government, which ever was written,” a claim that holds up well today. 2 There is no other book in constitutional thought in any language quite like The Federalist for its careful and thorough blend of range, penetration, principle, structure, and practical implication.
    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