political philosophy concerned with natural law, the origin and nature of the state, or the best form of government in the abstract. Although it is timeless in the sense that it rests on fixed principles and enduring truths concerning such matters as the threat to liberty that is created by a consolidated government, The Federalist is a commentary on the American Constitution, a collection of essays on the theory of American government that is in many respects inapplicable to other political systems. A reading of The Federalist is not likely to improve one’s understanding of foreign governments or explain why the American constitutional system is any better than another form of government.
Moreover, the essays of Publius are only one of many original sources on the thinking of those who participated in the formation and adoption of the Constitution. There are the debates in the Philadelphia Convention, dutifully recorded by James Madison and other delegates;46 the voluminous debates in the State ratifying conventions;47 and the various essays, newspaper accounts, and correspondence of other participants who took a stand on the new Constitution.48 And if we include the first ten amendments, or the Bill of Rights, as they came to be known, as part of the original constitutional edifice, then to get the full picture we must consult yet another source—the debates of the First Congress, which drafted and proposed the Bill of Rights in 1789.49 And to these sources should be added those not so directly related to the drafting and ratification of the Constitution. Among these would be the State constitutions previously discussed;50 the practices, institutions, and ordering documents of Anglo-Americans during the colonial period;51 many political writings and sermons of earlier periods, particularly those dealing with the legitimate functions and ends of government; the character, rights and duties of the English people, and their relation as British citizens to the sovereign; as well as the dangers to be avoided in constructing governments.52 This is only to say that the thoughts and actions of the Founders cannot be fully appreciated without a knowledge of the political tradition of prerevolutionary America. The essays of Publius, in other words, should be read in conjunction with other founding documents and are by no means the only source of knowledge available to us for an understanding of the Framers’ thoughts and intentions.
During the first half-century of the American republic, however, The Federalist was clearly the most significant, if not the only meaningful, resource for understanding the intent of the Framers other than the words of the Constitution itself. The Journal of the Convention, which contains no speeches or debates and records only the Secretary’s minutes and tables giving the votes by State on the questions presented, was not published until 1819.53 Not until 1830, when Jonathan Elliot collected and published the debates in several of the State ratifying conventions, did Americans have easy access to the deliberations of the “other” founders who participated at the ratification stage in the making of the Constitution. No less important, it was 1840 before James Madison’s extensive Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention were finally published.54
It is noteworthy that the availability of these and other original sources after the 1840s failed to dislodge The Federalist as the favorite and most frequently cited guide to the theory of the Constitution and the substantive meaning of its provisions, or to discredit in any way the reliability or accuracy of Publius’s representations. It is true, of course, that The Federalist is polemical. It is forthrightly a campaign tract intended to persuade the electorate to support the Constitution. As such it occasionally exaggerates the perceived strengths of the Constitution and downplays or ignores its weaknesses. But this bias hardly detracts from its great merit as a faithful expositor of the meaning of the Constitution from the perspective of those who made it.
Immediately recognized as authoritative, The Federalist became a classic even before it was completed. The first thirty-six essays were published in New York by J. McLean & Company in a bound volume on March 22, 1788. The remainder appeared in a second volume on May 28. In 1792 a French edition, which appeared in Paris, became the first to reveal the true identity of the authors. Since then The Federalist has been translated into more than twenty foreign languages, and nearly a hundred editions and reprintings of it in English have appeared over the past two hundred years.
Between 1788 and 1818 the McLean edition was reprinted on four occasions, the first being a 1799 edition published by John Tiebout in New York. The popularity of The Federalist encouraged a New York printer named George F. Hopkins to undertake a new edition in 1802. Hamilton reluctantly agreed to this on condition that he be permitted to make modest revisions and corrections, but he rejected Hopkins’s suggestion that the names of the real authors appear at the head of each essay, preferring to maintain their anonymity. Inasmuch as the authorship of the essays had been generally known for years anyway, Hamilton’s unwillingness to take credit for his contributions is rather puzzling. Douglass Adair, the distinguished American historian who closely studied the disputed authorship of certain Federalist essays, has argued persuasively that Hamilton’s “strange reluctance” to publicize the identity of the authors can probably be attributed to the fact that “some of his essays written in 1787–1788 did not square with certain constitutional theories he had come to espouse publicly after 1790.”55
What distinguished Hopkins’s 1802 edition from earlier publications of The Federalist was the addition of an appendix containing three documents. The first two—the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution—were intended to facilitate a reading of The Federalist in that they are the texts upon which The Federalist is a commentary. But the third addition, which consisted of seven essays by “Pacificus,” served a different purpose: to enlarge upon or even change the substantive meaning of those essays in The Federalist dealing with the executive power.
“The Letters of Pacificus,” as they were titled when they first appeared in New York newspapers, grew out of a dispute in 1793 between Federalists and Republicans concerning President Washington’s authority to issue a Declaration of Impartiality in the war between England and France. Writing as Pacificus, Alexander Hamilton defended the Declaration against the charge that the President had exceeded his powers. At the urging of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison argued in favor of a narrow interpretation of the President’s power to declare the neutrality of the United States and, in the name of “Helvidius,” produced five essays contending that only Congress had the authority to determine whether the United States was at war or peace.
The “Letters of Pacificus” and “Letters of Helvidius” offer one of the most enlightening discussions of executive power in American political history. They have long been regarded as important commentaries on the President’s war and diplomatic powers—commentaries, it should again be noted, that are not entirely consistent with the teachings of Publius. Much to the dismay of Madison, however, the 1802 edition included only the “Letters of Pacificus.” This was also true of the 1810 edition, again published in New York, which became the first American edition to identify the authors. This particular edition proved to be most unsatisfactory, because it was published not as a separate work but as the second and third volumes of the collected Works of Hamilton.
The great turning point in the publishing history of The Federalist was the appearance of the Jacob Gideon edition in 1818. Printed in Washington, D.C., with the cooperation of Madison, this edition was the first to give Madison’s account of the disputed authorship of certain essays. The Gideon edition also corrected another deficiency: “Former editions,” explained the publisher, “had the advantage of a revisal from Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Jay, but the numbers written by Mr. Madison still remained in the state in which they originally issued from the press and contained many inaccuracies.” These problems had been resolved, however, because this new edition was produced from Madison’s personal copy, “with corrections of the papers, of which he is the author, in his own hand.”
Gideon boasted that, because of these changes, his version was now the “standard edition,” and indeed it was in many ways a marked improvement over the McLean edition. Besides being the first to include Madison’s side of the story on the question of authorship, the Gideon edition was also the first to print the final corrections of all three authors.56 And it was the first to include the essays of both Pacificus and Helvidius, as well as the Articles and the Constitution,