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opportunity. He had been one of the prime architects of the Constitutional Convention, personally drafting the resolution in 1786 that called for it to meet in Philadelphia and enlarge the powers of the Confederation. No one was better suited to write a commentary on the new Constitution.
    Here, in effect, is another answer to the power and achievement of The Federalist. Among the founding generation there were three persons of unambiguous genius. The rest were figures who fortuitously prepared for the unexpected roles that they had to play and then played them well. Genius, in these terms, refers to individuals who, given half a chance, would rise to prominence in any context through foresight, ability, and unusual qualities. The first two intellects of note were, of course, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. The third was Alexander Hamilton, and he had the farthest to climb, beginning as he did in the lowest level of society and coming from a disdained minor province beyond the thirteen colonies. Of illegitimate birth, Hamilton began in an unsupportive, dysfunctional, and contentious family in Nevis, in the British West Indies. He was on his own at the age of twelve, largely self-taught, and rose entirely through his own prowess and energy. No one at any point needed a second glance to see the brilliance in this outgoing, often argumentative youth; those with whom he worked learned that he could make the most of any opportunity.
    Hamilton’s talents describe only part of him, but they are worth summarizing in thinking about The Federalist. He wrote with amazing rapidity and with one of the neatest and most stylish hands of the age. Even today an observer can read one of Hamilton’s now withered letters while standing some distance away from them. These were distinct advantages in the haphazard and often desperate needs of eighteenth-century newspaper publication. Hamilton was always available with something written that was more than sensible and easily set into print. Only such a man could have sustained the pace that occasionally required two and three long newspaper essays a week from Publius. Hamilton saw the nature of problems just as clearly and quickly as he wrote about them and seems to never have been without an answer to them. Ambitious to a fault, he knew how to make others around him better than they were—not least, George Washington, whom he served as aide-de-camp in the Revolutionary Army from 1777 to 1781. Just twenty-two, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel at the time and already a recognized pamphleteer in the propaganda wars of the Revolution, Hamilton would prove of inestimable value throughout Washington’s career as an organizer, strategist, and writer. No one found or articulated the root of a matter more rapidly than Hamilton. Typically, he would demand and receive an examination and then gain admission to the New York Bar in 1782 after just three months of legal study and immediately take his place as one of its most brilliant members.
    There is, however, something more difficult to grasp in the brilliance of Hamilton, and it explains the first virtue of The Federalist . As his foresight over the need for a constitutional convention implies, Hamilton possessed a singular knack for rearranging the different pieces of a dilemma into a farsighted solution. One can see it in his Revolutionary War letters over key issues of military strategy. It appears again when, as the country’s first secretary of the Treasury, he organized the economy and national bank. His Report on Manufactures in 1791 would be uniquely prescient in mapping the relations of government to economic growth and private capital. In virtually every debate of note, Hamilton possessed a better grasp of the economic and social variables at work in America than others. Call it a scrutiny that led to comprehensiveness of view. Hamilton would use it to his advantage in the collaboration of The Federalist by making sure that every