The Federalist

New York, early fall, 1787. A new Constitution for America had miraculously come forth from the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia after four months of intense argument and fateful compromise during a historic summer. But it would not become the basis of a new federal government until ratified by nine of the thirteen states.

Criticism from opponents of the Constitution began pouring into the public press even before the Constitution was made public. These opponents would come to be called “Anti-Federalists.” Alexander Hamilton, who had been a delegate from New York to the Constitutional Convention, recruited fellow New Yorker John Jay and fellow Convention delegate James Madison (from Virginia) to answer the Anti-Federalist criticism.

Beginning on October 27, and continuing through May of the following year, under the pseudonym “Publius,” the three of them (mainly Hamilton and Madison) published 85 essays in New York newspapers defending and explaining the proposed Constitution. Even before they were all published in newspapers, the essays were gathered in two volumes, giving them a more permanent form while their urgent immediate purpose — to secure ratification of the Constitution — still hung in the balance. The title given to the two-volume work was The Federalist.

It’s usually hard to know, in the midst of working for urgent immediate purposes, whether your efforts possess any enduring qualities. If you achieve your immediate ends — in this case, securing ratification of the Constitution — your efforts can be measured by what they accomplished, even if they contain no treasures for the ages. In truth, no one could tell at the time whether the essays by the mystery author “Publius” had any effect in helping to get the Constitution ratified.

But even before a new government was formed under the ratified Constitution, no less a judge than George Washington found in these essays something of more than passing interest. Long after the “transient circumstances” of America’s constitutional crisis had disappeared, he wrote, The Federalist “will merit the notice of posterity; because in it are candidly and ably discussed the principles of freedom and the topics of government, which will always be interesting to mankind.” Around the same time, Thomas Jefferson expressed a similar judgment. The Federalist, he wrote, was “the best commentary on the principles of government which ever was written.” And his respect for The Federalist endured to the end of his life, even through the party struggles of the 1790s and the Revolution of 1800, during which he and Hamilton were leaders of political parties each of which accused the other of being a traitor to the American Revolution. In the course of Jefferson’s last great life’s work, the establishment of the University of Virginia, when recommending readings for students in the principles of government, he listed The Federalist as one of the “best guides” to “the distinctive principles of . . . the United States” and an authority on the “genuine meaning” of the Constitution.

So, whatever effect the efforts of the authors of The Federalist had on their immediate purpose, the best possible judges at the time thought their work contained treasures for the ages. But the world offers no guarantee that merit will receive the regard it deserves. Philosophers greater than Plato, composers greater than Bach, might live and die unnoticed or be dismissed as eccentrics. After the crisis of the founding, The Federalist moldered for more than a century in the archives of near oblivion. Then in the twentieth century, things picked up — fast.

Charles Beard, one of the most influential American historians of the early 20th century, echoed Jefferson, writing that The Federalist was “the most instructive work in political science ever written in the United States,” and that it “ranks first in the world’s literature of political science.” Midway through the second half of the 20th century, editions of The Federalist began selling, if not like hotcakes, at least like good cannoli.

Selections from The Federalist were included in high school American government textbooks. The whole collection of 85 essays became a standard reading assignment in college political science and history courses. Serious scholarly books and articles were written on the essays, especially what became the most famous of them, Federalist Ten, by James Madison. Among American historians and political scientists, there was a broad consensus that The Federalist represented the single most authoritative and comprehensive articulation of the political thought of the American founding and was the classic explanation of the provisions and purposes of our Constitution. The editor of the most widely used modern edition of The Federalist went so far as to call it “the most important work in political science that has ever been written, or is likely ever to be written, in the United States.”

Young and upcoming students of politics should take that not as an insult but as a challenge. As the course of human events carries America year by year farther away in time from the first appearance of The Federalist, it seems safe to say Washington and Jefferson were right. Those 85 essays contain wisdom for the ages — about American political principles and institutions, and about politics and the human condition generally. Whatever the future holds, The Federalist will remain an invaluable guide and mentor to our statesmen and citizens. And its first lesson will always be that it is up to us — as it was for “Publius” — to do our best to bring the wisdom of the ages and a clear-eyed grasp of the moment to bear in our sovereign judgments of what will conduce to the safety and happiness of the American people.