The Federalist Papers

Between October 1787 and August 1788, as the states debated whether to adopt the new Constitution, three men writing under the single name Publius published eighty-five essays in the New York press. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote in real time, against a deadline set by ratification itself, to persuade a divided and skeptical people that the proposed government was worth the risk of union.

They did not write a treatise. They wrote arguments, one after another, answering the objections of the day as those objections arrived. Taken singly, each essay addresses a particular fear: that the union would collapse into rival states, that the government would grow too strong, that the presidency was a king in disguise, that the absence of a bill of rights left liberty unguarded. Taken together, the eighty-five essays are something larger. They are the most complete account we have of what the Constitution was meant to do and why its authors believed it would hold.

That is why the Federalist belongs beside the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights as a founding document. The Declaration states the promise. The Constitution builds the machine. The Bill of Rights names what the machine may never do. The Federalist is the argument that persuaded the country to adopt the machine in the first place. It is one work, made of many parts, and it is read here whole.

The argument, in six movements

The essays move through the case roughly in order, and the library groups them into six themed collections that follow that order.

The Union and Its Necessity opens the case for union itself, that a single people is safer, freer, and more prosperous together than apart.

The Failure of the Confederation turns to the government already in place and shows why a union that can ask but never require is no government at all.

Energetic Government, Defense and Taxation argues that a government held responsible for defense and revenue must be given the means to act.

Republican Principles and the Structure of Power sets out the theory of the design: separation of powers, checks and balances, and a republic large enough to temper faction.

The Congress: House and Senate examines the legislature branch by branch, the House close to the people, the Senate a steadier counterweight.

The Executive and the Judiciary defends a single energetic executive and an independent judiciary, including the first clear case for judicial review.

Who wrote what

Hamilton wrote fifty-one of the essays, Madison twenty-six, and Jay five. Three were written jointly by Hamilton and Madison. The authorship of eleven essays was long disputed between Hamilton and Madison; modern statistical scholarship attributes them to Madison, the attribution used throughout this library. Each essay page records its own attribution and the journal and date of its first publication.

Read in sequence or read by theme, the Federalist is the founding conversation at its most candid: not a monument, but a working argument among people who did not entirely agree, made in public, while the question was still open.