The Federalist Papers - Alexander Hamilton [3]
Preface
The Declaration of Independence
The Articles of Confederation
The Constitution of the United States of America, Collated withThe Federalist Papers
Notes onThe Federalist Papers
Selected Bibliography 633
Index of Ideas
Introduction
The Constitution that emerged from the Philadelphia Convention in September 1787 has been called a "bundle of compromises," but at the time it struck many Americans as something more ominous. In its opponents’ eyes, the proposed Constitution was flawed at best and at worst downright sinister. George Mason, for example, the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights and one of the most distinguished delegates to the Federal Convention, refused to sign the document because of the unfortunate mistakes he detected in it. "This Government will commence in a moderate Aristocracy," he predicted, and though it was impossible to tell whether "in its Operation" it would produce "a Monarchy, or a corrupt oppressive Aristocracy," it would probably "vibrate some years between the two, and then terminate in the one or the other." Other critics were less charitable. They discerned in the document an "insidious design to deprive us of our liberties." The Constitution, one wrote, was the "most daring attempt to establish a despotic aristocracy among freemen, that the world has ever witnessed."1 (For all notes in the Introduction, see Endnotes [pp. xxxiii–xxxv].)
The Constitution’s friends were not satisfied with the document, either. "No man’s ideas were more remote from the plan than [mine] were known to be," Alexander Hamilton announced to the Convention on the day he signed the Constitution. James Madison confided to Thomas Jefferson "that the plan should it be adopted will neither effectually answer its national object nor prevent the local mischiefs which every where excite disgust against the state governments."2 Its friends, in short, vii feared that the Convention’s compromises had resulted in a plan of government too weak and incoherent to save American republicanism; its opponents suspected that the Constitution, whether by accident or by design, was a formidable engine that would subvert republicanism in favor of some form of aristocratic domination.
The great accomplishment of The Federalist (popularly known as The Federalist Papers) was to show that the Constitution was both coherent and republican. Suppressing their private doubts and disappointments, Hamilton and Madison, joined by John Jay, undertook the series of essays in order to expound the merits of the new Constitution and to answer the objections to it that had already begun to appear in newspaper columns in New York and across the United States. More than any other speech or writing in defense of the new plan of government, The Federalist showed that the Constitution contained an inherent constitutionalism, which gave a purpose to the whole document and to each of its parts.3 To put it differently, The Federalist articulated the overall integrity of the Constitution, showing how it fit the requirements of republican government as a whole. Without denying the plan’s origin in political give-and-take, The Federalist thus interpreted the Federal Convention as having been a forum not for (at least not mostly for) self-interested bargaining, but for public-spirited deliberation. The product of those deliberations was a "fundamental law," sufficiently rational and coherent to be regarded almost as the product of a single wise mind or legislator.4
The U.S. Constitution, unlike the laws of many ancient cities, was not of course the work of one wise lawgiver, a point that The Federalist emphasizes.5 Moreover, the Constitution contained compromises, obscurities, imperfections: "I never expect to see a perfect work from imperfect man," the final Federalist paper admitted. But the obscurities and imperfections were turned to account as additional reasons why this law needed the elaboration, explanation, and defense of a single commentator, whose commentary soon became accepted as authoritative and so helped to fix the meaning