The Federalist Papers Read Online Free PDF

imaginable aspect of constitutional controversy, whether near or far in the distant future, was raised and answered. It is hard to find a serious governmental problem in the history of the United States that is not first mentioned here.
    John Jay wrote just five of The Federalist essays, but his role in the collaboration was more significant than mere numbers suggest. Forty-one years old in 1787, Jay was a better-known and more polished politician and diplomat than either Hamilton at thirty-two or Madison at thirty-six. No doubt Hamilton asked him to join the enterprise because of Jay’s greater reputation and ideological compatibility as another conservative New York lawyer who favored the new Constitution. Jay had been active in the defense of New York during the Revolution and in writing the first New York state constitution. He had been instrumental in getting George Washington to attend the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and he already had served effectively as chief justice of New York, president of the Continental Congress, ambassador to Spain, and one of the three peace commissioners to negotiate and sign the Treaty of Paris ending the war with England in 1783. Jay also had worked hard and long as the permanent foreign secretary of the United States while other positions rotated under the Articles of Confederation. This experience gave him greater knowledge than others in diagnosing the weaknesses of the Confederation as well as unique credibility in public debates on the subject.
    The major contribution of Jay came early in the collaboration. He wrote Essays Nos. 2, 3, 4, and 5 of The Federalist before bowing out because of illness, and then, much later, Essay No. 64. His first four offerings dealt mostly with the dangers of foreign influence and the need for a stronger union to cope with them; his last essay explained the Senate’s role in the treaty-making power. But if workmanlike on the facts, Jay’s essays accomplished something far more important for the overall tone and direction of the collaboration. Alexander Hamilton had been mired in petty squabbles over the new Constitution even as a delegate at the Convention. Immediately after, he became the instigator in vitriolic newspaper exchanges with the opposition, and it showed in his own first essay introducing the collaboration. Deeply embroiled, Hamilton couldn’t help himself even though he realized that a higher register was called for in The Federalist. “Federalist No. 1” would devote whole paragraphs to the ”obvious interest,“ perverted ambition,” and “preconceived jealousies and fears” of the ”classes” of men who opposed the Constitution. It called for objectivity but compulsively returned again and again to enemies guided by ”ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives, not more laudable than these” (p. 10). It was not a tactic that could hope to win friends and influence people to accept the new Constitution.
    Jay would quell these tendencies of party spirit with a more inclusive reading of the problem in ratification. In “Federalist No. 2” he welcomed all parties into the new union through “sedate and candid conversation.” Instead of acrimony, a new aesthetics of ratification and goodwill through “isible union” dominated Jay’s contributions. Citizens, in Jay’s view, would stop arguing to the extent that they saw their interest clearly. In ”Federalist No. 64,” he would write: ”In proportion as the United States assume a national form, and a national character, so will the good of the whole be more and more an object of attention” (p. 360). The opposition was not perverted by ambition so much as it was sadly mistaken. In Enlightenment terms, the problem of those who opposed the Constitution was ignorance and a simple lack of education. Jay urged everyone to learn to belong together instead of standing apart.
    Here, as well, was the adroit creation by Publius