The Federalist Papers - Alexander Hamilton [6]
Given their famous falling out a few years later, after which they remained bitter political enemies, Hamilton and Madison might seem unlikely co-authors. Indeed, several scholars in the twentieth century have exercised themselves over the alleged schizophrenia of Publius, straining to identify latent disagreements between the principal co-authors.14 This approach clearly risked reading back into the 1780s the fierce partisan disputes of the 1790s. Besides, it has actually proved very difficult to determine who wrote several numbers of The Federalist (particularly Nos. 55–58 and 62–63) claimed by both Madison and Hamilton. Even more scholarly ink has been spilled on this authorship controversy than on the book’s supposed "split personality." External evidence is inconclusive, and internal evidence (drawing on subject matter, arguments, style) has not dispelled the ambiguity.15 Researchers have resorted to computer analysis of the text in the attempt to settle who wrote what, but they have been hard-pressed to find a distinction they could rely on—sentence length, "marker" words—all the more obvious tests failed to turn up a distinction that made a difference. Finally, a statistical difference was found in the use of utterly trivial words, but this threatened to make the differences between Hamilton and Madison utterly trivial.16
So similar, then, were the two men’s arguments and writing style in The Federalist that their efforts to disguise themselves as Publius must be judged an extraordinary success. They clearly did not regard this as a personal or idiosyncratic work. Indeed, they kept their authorship secret (at least publicly) for many years, and later in their careers, each more or less disclaimed the book as an adequate statement of his own political principles.17 So there is a very real sense in which Publius is the author of The Federalist, because each writer strove to write as "Publius," to write to the collective mark being set in the accumulating papers of The Federalist. After all, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay were in New York City together from October 1787 to March 1788. And although they did not look over each other’s shoulder while composing, it is likely that they did consult with one another on the general direction of the series and the division of labor emerging within it, and they may occasionally have edited one another’s copy. They certainly read one another’s essays eventually, if only in order to maintain the series’ consistent argument and tone.
When Hamilton decided to issue the collected papers in two hardcover volumes (published on March 22 and May 28, 1788), he added a Preface to the first volume in which he apologized for the "violations of method and repetitions of ideas" involved in the transformation of a newspaper series into a book. He admitted, however, that the "latter defect" had been "intentionally indulged" for rhetorical purposes—that is, in order to more effectively persuade the readers. It was not "anxiety for the literary character of the performance" that compelled the apology, he added, but "respect for public opinion," which would recognize repetition when it saw it. Hamilton intended the series to appeal to both "a critical reader" and the public, then, and the two audiences were compatible because the latter, the public, was respectable, i.e.,