Monday was the 223rd anniversary of the publication of James Madison’s
Federalist #10, perhaps his most important contribution to the
Federalist Papers.
My friends at What Would the Founders Think? link to an interesting and brief discussion at Today’s History Lesson of the background of the Federalist Papers and the importance of Federalist #10.
In the weeks following the Philadelphia Convention, James Madison (like
Hamilton) looked around and saw newspapers churning out
anti-Constitutional articles one after another. Some of Madison?s
comrades, from his very own state of Virginia, were pushing hard
against ratification. Men like George Mason and Patrick Henry, good
men to be sure, saw the Constitution not as a natural fix to the
weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation, but as a direct threat to
the freedom of every American….
…We read The Federalist Papers now and are impressed with their
thoroughness and scope. But we overlook the fact that these three men
rarely had time for editing and word-smithing. Madison reported that
the time crunch was such that the documents barely had time to be
reread by the author himself, to say nothing of passing them between
the men.
