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Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John JayThe Federalist Papers
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1787A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Need to Unify the States Under a Single Federal Government
According to the authors, the most essential quality of a functioning sovereign state is its ability to protect itself and its people from foreign invasion and domestic insurrection. To that end, the Articles of Confederation were an abject failure. With the federal government reliant on unenforceable state quotas for revenue, it lacked the financial resources to raise an army and navy for its protection, let alone to pay off its foreign and domestic debts. That credit crunch trickled down to merchants and finally to farmers, who were already in severe debt and were now locked out of the lines of credit on which they traditionally relied. Add to that the government’s inability to pay Revolutionary War veterans for their service, and the US found itself at risk of dissolving into anarchy through insurrections like Shays’ Rebellion—that is, if it wasn’t successfully invaded by the British from the North, the Spanish from the South, or Indigenous peoples from the West.
These were the circumstances under which Hamilton, Madison, and Jay wrote The Federalist Papers. Their solution to the mounting threats facing the Articles of Confederations was to dissolve that loose alliance of 13 sovereign states and to create one unified federal government, to which the states were subordinate. Under the Articles of Confederation, the central government was little more than a treaty organization lacking the power to enforce those agreements, and a war council for a conflict that ended years earlier at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War. Under the Constitution, however, the federal government would be empowered to make, execute, and arbitrate the supreme law of the land in all respects that relate to the preservation of the United States. That includes national security, interstate commerce, and direct taxation of citizens, for the purpose of amassing enough revenue to administer and protect such a vast country.
In support of the premise that a strong national government is necessary for the preservation of a republic, the authors look to ancient Greek, Roman, and Italian republics which, absent strong central governments, dissolved into infighting between factions and separate sovereign states, leading first to anarchy and then to tyranny, as oppressive leaders who betrayed the principles of republican government took advantage of this chaos to amass power. By contrast, under the Constitution each state’s sovereignty is limited by the powers granted to the federal government. In short, any power granted to the federal government by the Constitution will grant it absolute sovereignty in that respect. Meanwhile, one of the biggest objections to the establishment of a sovereign federal government in America is the size of the republic it would establish. Yet in his landmark Federalist No. 10, Madison explains that a large republic like the United States will be less susceptible to the evils of factionalism by virtue of its size.
The Balance Between Federal Power and Personal Liberties
The key dilemma the framers face in establishing a strong federal government is how to do so while remaining true to republican principles and without curtailing personal liberties to an undue degree. Rooted in Enlightenment notions of the social contract, the authors grant that some liberties must always be sacrificed in even the most egalitarian governments. As Jay writes in Federalist No. 2:
Nothing is more certain than the indispensable necessity of government, and it is equally undeniable, that whenever and however it is instituted, the people must cede to it some of their natural rights in order to vest it with requisite powers. (5)
Yet particularly for the citizens living under the Articles of Confederation, who just fought a bloody war to escape an oppressive monarch, the thought a central government with absolute sovereignty caused anxiety, no matter the advantages. Moreover, given the cultural diversity that existed between states—over issues of manufacturing versus agriculture, small state versus large state, and free labor versus slavery—citizens were naturally concerned that their way of life might be threatened by subjugating their state’s power to federal authority.
The framers’ solution to this dilemma is, in short, Federalism: the unique division of federal and state power as outlined in the Constitution. The federal government will be empowered to raise armies, make treaties, tax citizens, set tariffs, and regulate both foreign and interstate commerce, among other powers specifically enumerated in the US Constitution. Meanwhile, states retain a considerable degree of agency over, theoretically at least, everything not specifically enumerated in the US Constitution. This includes setting policies on local commerce, education, and taxation, and administering state and federal elections—although the Constitution allows that the federal government may intervene in the conducting of federal elections under certain circumstances. The idea here is that state administrators, elected or otherwise, will be more sensitive to the needs of the local populations, thus better preserving their personal liberties.
In practice, however, the demarcation of federal and state powers is not so clear-cut. In recent years, this has become apparent with respect to issues like healthcare, which is regulated and administered at both state and federal levels. For example, many states have resisted the expanded Medicaid eligibility under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, a federal law. The nation’s Federalist framework was also tested by the COVID-19 pandemic, during which each state, despite an emergency that affected the entire country’s safety and security, set its own rules pertaining to mask mandates and shutdowns, often with significant variance. In other recent situations, the Federalist framework succeeded in preserving democratic norms, as when states like Georgia resisted federal efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
In a final note, it must be reiterated that while the Constitution was written with personal liberty in mind, that liberty only extended to white men. The document itself enshrines slavery as the law of the land through the three-fifths compromise and the fugitive slave clause, both of which were only nullified after the Civil War and the constitutional amendments which followed.
The Importance of Checks and Balances as a Bulwark Against Ambition and Tyranny
A common thread throughout The Federalist Papers is the authors’ mixed view of the American people and humanity writ large. On one hand, there is a sincere belief—especially in Madison’s essays—in the American people’s capacity to live harmoniously with one another, particularly given their shared sacrifices and the blood they shed in pursuit of their freedoms during the Revolutionary War. Jay even sees the hand of God as having anointing the American people as the sacred keepers of this land, writing, “[I]t appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split” (6).
Yet elsewhere—especially in Hamilton’s essays—humanity is cast as “ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious” (20). So, having established the need for a strong government, and having safeguarded personal liberties against tyranny by leaving certain powers to the states, the next problem concerns how to prevent these inherently “rapacious” individuals from corrupting it.
The authors’ answer is to create a complex set of checks and balances within the Constitution, thus refocusing administrators’ and officials’ unavoidable ambitions against one another. As Madison puts it in Federalist No. 51, in a landmark essay on the topic, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place” (264). The theory of checks and balances is credited both here and elsewhere to Montesquieu’s 1748 treatise The Spirit of the Laws, though they arguably find their most vivid expression in the US Constitution. For example, the legislative branch makes laws, but the President under the executive branch is empowered with a limited veto of those laws which, if invoked, requires a supermajority of both the House and Senate to overcome. In turn, the legislature’s most powerful check on executive power comes in the form of impeachment, even though that is technically a judicial proceeding. Even more than the other two branches, the judiciary’s dominant responsibility is to act as a check on power, reviewing both laws and executive actions to ensure that they do not violate the Constitution.
Although checks and balances are closely related to the concept of separation of powers, the principles are not the same. In fact, the entire mechanism of checks and balances demands a subtle sharing of legislative, executive, and judicial powers across the three branches, as shown for example in the Senate’s power to try and convict the President despite not being a judicial body. The authors insist that this is a necessary feature of good republican government because a total separation of powers would reduce accountability for each branch or even allow two branches to conspire against a third with no recourse.
