In July 1804, days before his duel with Aaron Burr at Weehawken, Alexander Hamilton left his lawyer a list claiming authorship of dozens of anonymous Federalist essays. The project began in New York in the fall of 1787, when critics writing as Cato and Brutus attacked the new Constitution. Gouverneur Morris declined to help, Hamilton rejected drafts from William Duer, and John Jay fell ill after a handful of essays, leaving Hamilton and James Madison, a Virginian then serving in the Confederation Congress in New York. Writing as Publius, they produced three to four essays a week, with Hamilton covering taxation, the military, the executive and the judiciary and Madison arguing that a large republic dilutes factions.
Hamilton’s essays laid groundwork for judicial review, and his opposition to a bill of rights, on the theory that listing rights would imply power over everything else, was the one argument Publius lost. In 1810 Hamilton’s list credited him with 63 of 85 essays, and in 1818 Madison claimed 29, leaving about a dozen in dispute until a 1964 stylometry study counted filler words such as by, upon and whilst and pointed to Madison. The essays had little effect outside New York, and ten states had ratified before New York voted in late July 1788. Judges began citing them by 1798, and by 2000 the Supreme Court had cited them nearly 300 times.
- Publius honored Publius Valerius Publicola, a founder of the Roman Republic, and Hamilton had used the name before against a politician manipulating flour prices.
- Anonymity kept readers from dismissing the essays as self-serving work by delegates to the secret Philadelphia convention.
- Madison wrote that ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
- Madison used whilst at a high rate, while Hamilton almost always wrote while.
- In 1821 Madison argued that the ratifiers, not the drafters, gave the Constitution its legitimate meaning.
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