The Federalist Papers And Federalism

The Federalist Papers and Federalism

The Federalist Papers were mostly the product of two young men:
Alexander Hamilton of New York, age 32, and James Madison of Virginia, age 36.
Both men sometimes wrote four papers in a single week. An older scholar, John
Jay, later named as first chief justice of the Supreme Court, wrote five of the
papers. Hamilton, who had been an aide to Washington during the Revolution,
asked Madison and Jay to help him in this project. Their purpose was to
persuade the New York convention to ratify the just-drafted Constitution. They
would separately write a series of letters to New York newspapers, under the
pseudonym, "Publius." In the letters they would explain and defend the
Constitution.
Hamilton started the idea and outlined the sequence of topics to be
discussed, and addressed most of them in fifty-one of the letters. Madison's
Twenty-nine letters have proved to be the most memorable in their balance and
ideas of governmental power. It is not clear whether The Federalist Papers,
written between October 1787 and May 1788 had any effect on New York's and
Virginia's ratification of the Constitution.
Encyclopedia Britannica defines Federalism as, "A mode of political
organization that unites independent states within a larger political framework
while still allowing each state to maintain it's own political integrity" (712).
Having just won a revolution against an oppressive monarchy, the American
colonists were in w...

The Federalist Papers And Federalism

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