The Federalist: An Introduction
Over the next months, we will be presenting a series on The Federalist, which many persons and scholars take to be the definitive interpretation of The Constitution. That is not a view I would hold without extreme qualifications, but neither would I gainsay the contribution of The Federalist to our political thinking in general and to the American experiment in particular.
For those unfamiliar: after the Constitution was completed at the convention in Philadelphia in September of 1787, the document was sent to the states for ratification. There it met serious resistance. The secretive proceedings of the convention created concern about the final product itself — Patrick Henry had opined that “I smell a rat in Philadephia” — and the document itself, once in the possession of those in the states charged with ratifying under Article VII, did little to allay those fears. Centralization of power and a “squint[ing] toward monarchy” seemed to be its primary features.
One must imagine how many Americans, if a proposal for the united world government were on the table and part of its approval was the abdication of US sovereignty, would vote to approve such a document. What if this world government had the authority to tax citizens in ratifying nations, and to exercise its powers directly on those citizens — would we still think it the best possible solution to the problems we face?
In some ways, this was the challenge the so-called Federalists faced. (At the convention itself “the federalists” were the persons who opposed the centralization of power, only to see the term taken over by the Constitution’s defenders and to see themselves labeled pejoratively as “Anti-federalists,” as if they stood for nothing.) The Constitution’s critics fired the opening salvos, patiently and comprehensively laying out for the delegates at the ratifying conventions the reasons for disapproval. A sober assessment of their arguments can only create respect for their prescience.
The Anti-federalists, being more locally and state-oriented, presented no coordinated and comprehensive attack on the Constitution. Their piecemeal approach left them vulnerable to an organized effort to support ratification. The dynamics intensified in the larger states such as Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, and Massachusetts. Pennsylvania, not in spite of but because of some of the chicanery that took place during the vote, and Massachusetts were relatively early ratifiers. But the debates were intense in New York and Virginia. Two of the three New York delegates to the Constitutional Convention left in protest, and one of the Virginia delegates, George Mason, vowed he would rather cut his hand off than use it to sign the document. By June and July of 1788, as the other two states were nearing their vote, the future of the document was very much in doubt, even though it had already received the nine votes needed. If New York and Virginia, however, refused ratification, it would be difficult to see how there could be a functional union, even though nine other states ratified and put the Constitution into operation.
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote The Federalist under the pseudonym “Publius,” a respected Roman statesman considered responsible for the creation of the Roman Republic. Writing under pseudonyms was a typical practice of that time. For one thing, it allowed the arguments to stand on their own merits by making it impossible to engage in ad hominem attacks against the author (a practice worth revisiting), and it also lended a kind of authority to the arguments as the authors could appropriate the ideas of and the respect for the persona they adopted. That the main Anti-federalist authors adopted the pseudonyms “Cato” and “Brutus,” defenders of the Roman Republic against the pretensions of empire, would not have been lost on anyone at the time.
Responding to Anti-federalist arguments, Hamilton et. al. proceeded on a series of essays that had the immediate purpose of supporting ratification, but had a larger purpose of developing, or congealing, a whole system of political thinking. Their effect on ratification may have been more limited than we suppose. For one thing, they were published in New York and the extent of their dissemination beyond those borders was limited. For another, by the time Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania ratified, only 23 of the 85 papers had been published. By the time New Hampshire ratified in June of 1788, becoming the ninth state to do so and thus putting the Constitution into effect, 80 of the 85 papers had been written.
Given its polemical purpose, its use of multiple authors, and its piecemeal dissemination, plus the authors often not knowing what the others were writing, The Federalist presents a surprisingly coherent way of thinking about politics, as testified to by the enduring interest in its arguments.
It didn’t always have the authority it has for us today. Its authoritative status results from two sources: the first is our need to have some sort of interpretive framework for a document that was written 247 years ago, and the second is that the Supreme Court has often used The Federalist as an interpretive guide for trying to understand what the Constitution’s authors “meant” by much of their ambiguous phrasing, such understanding being a definitive guide for judges of a more “originalist” bent.
John Jay wrote only five of the papers, and we will deal with those in a couple of weeks. Hamilton and Madison, at this time allies and later to become rivals as Madison reconsidered his support of the Constitution, are the main authors who deftly combined a good deal of the thinking of the day.
One prominent interpretation of the Constitution holds that it instantiates “Lockean liberalism,” and The Federalist is often scanned for supporting evidence. I don’t think this opinion holds up well to careful scrutiny. Granted, Locke had some influence on that generation, but not as much as others thinkers such as Montesquieu and Blackstone and Hume (and the Bible!), and in any case, whether Locke advocated for the “Lockean liberalism” inveighed against by contemporary critics seems pretty suspect to me. It is worth remembering that, aside from the Bible, the document that carried the most authority for writers of that generation was Magna Carta, which dates from A.D. 1215, a good 400-plus years before Locke’s birth in 1632. Whatever is true of the complex thought evinced in The Federalist, it cannot be captured by reduction to a single thinker or school of thought. One might best say that it codifies the lessons learned in hundreds of years of political experience.
Over the next months, we will be guiding our readers, chronologically, through the arguments of The Federalist. Our hope is that they will gain a better understanding of the animating ideas and principles behind our system of government, as well as an appreciation for just how difficult it is to get politics right, and to create a representative system of government that can abide as a Novus Ordo Seclurum (a new order for the ages). We invite readers to read along with us as we go through The Federalist and to submit their own thoughts in the comments section.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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