In Our Time - The Federalist Papers

Episode Date: November 9, 2023

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay's essays written in 1787/8 in support of the new US Constitution. They published these anonymously in New York as 'Publius' but, when it became known that Hamilton and Madison were the main authors, the essays took on a new significance for all states. As those two men played a major part in drafting the Constitution itself, their essays have since informed debate over what the authors of that Constitution truly intended. To some, the essays have proved to be America’s greatest contribution to political thought.WithFrank Cogliano Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh and Interim Saunders Director of the International Centre for Jefferson Studies at MonticelloKathleen Burk Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary History at University College LondonAndNicholas Guyatt Professor of North American History at the University of CambridgeProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list: Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (Knopf, 2003)Mary Sarah Bilder, Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention (Harvard University Press, 2015)Noah Feldman, The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President (Random House, 2017)Jonathan Gienapp, The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (Harvard University Press, 2018)Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison (eds. George W. Carey and James McClellan), The Federalist: The Gideon Edition (Liberty Fund, 2001)Alison L. LaCroix, The Ideological Origins of American Federalism (Harvard University Press, 2010)James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (Penguin, 1987)Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 (Simon and Schuster, 2010)Michael I. Meyerson, Liberty's Blueprint: How Madison and Hamilton Wrote the Federalist Papers, Defined the Constitution, and Made Democracy Safe for the World (Basic Books, 2008)Jack Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (Knopf, 1996)Jack N. Rakove and Colleen A. Sheehan, The Cambridge Companion to The Federalist (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, in 1787, New Yorkers began to read The Federalist Papers,

a series of 85 anonymous essays in support of the new US Constitution, which needed ratification. It soon became known that Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote these Federalist papers, and since Hamilton and Madison also played a major part in drafting in the Constitution itself, their essays have since informed debate of what the authors of that Constitution truly meant. And to some extent, these essays have proved to be America's greatest contribution to political thought. With me to discuss the Federalist Papers are Frank Cogliano, Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh,

and interim Saunders Director of the International Centre for Jefferson Studies in Monticello. Kathleen Burke, Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary History at University College London. And Nicholas Gaiet, Professor of North American History at the University of Cambridge. Nick Gaiet, in a nutshell, what had just happened in America that we ought to make us want to know about why the Federalist papers were written? It had been a turbulent time. We had had a revolution and we'd also had a revolutionary war during which, the United States had emerged from Britain and from the British Empire. And although that war was won by 1783,

there were still some profound disagreements amongst Americans about exactly what they had created, and in particular about what the new government for the United States should look like. And that debate about the government was really a debate about what kind of nation it was. Was it the United States as a plural entity, so 13 separate states that have formed a kind of confrontation, Federation against Britain, or was it a single nation? A single United States. So we often refer to the United States now in the singular. Was it that or was it the plural vision? So by 1783,

Britain had been defeated, but coming out of the war, there were numerous problems, economic, political and social, which in a way all tracked back to this question of what kind of nation the United States was going to be. And there was a constitution, the draft of a constitution, had gone into effect in 1781, which is known as the Articles and Confederation, and that constitution provided for a form of government, but it was a rather weak form of government. Who signed up to it? Well, all of the 13 states had agreed to the Articles of Confederation, but there are some features in it that you will not recognize if you think about the current US government.

For example, nothing could happen unless all of the states agreed to do something. So you would need all 13 states to be unanimous to make something happen. There was a single house, so there was no president. It was a cumbersome body which lacked even the power to impose taxes. So for all sorts of reasons, the states rather than this Confederation government, this national government, held the power during the 1780s. And a number of powerful figures in the United States wondered if the balance should shift more towards a national or central government, which is where this debate about the Constitution began.

We're talking about these different states. They're not only different. They were often rivals. And they were very greatly different. I mean, some had armies, some didn't. Some had navies, some had didn't. There was a manufacturing area. There was an agricultural area.

There was a fiscal area and so on. So it wasn't as much a model as a very divided entity. Absolutely. There are a number of different levels on which one could think of the states as being either in competition or having rivalries or just natural differences of interest. I mean, one of them, for example, would be those states which had a big port, So places like New York or Boston, if you had a big port, you got the tax revenue that came from the tariffs that you would apply to goods that came in. If you were a potentially large state that didn't have a big port, well, then potentially you were losing out.

So bigger states, smaller states, states that were more enthralled to slavery than other states. All of these states were making in a sense their own policies during this period during the 1780s. And the national government was able to do very little. So you're absolutely right. One vision of how this works out after the American Revolution is the United States becomes a bit like Europe with these clashing states, eventually turning tensions into wars

and dragging the new world into all of the terrible things that had happened in the old world. So that's definitely one scenario that our founders are thinking about in the mid-1780s. Yes. So the will was there? We could get into that. Yeah, I was about to say, I think I was taking before my horse to Macon.

A little, a little. Kathy, looking outside America, which had been part of the British Empire, what threats did these new free citizens face from European powers after they won the war and set themselves up to be,

well, what exactly? Could I just say a sentence with regard to what Nick said, which is that Hamilton compared the states? Hamilton is one of the writers of the papers. One of the framers of the, I mean, one of the writers of the Federalist papers, and he compared it to medieval Europe, in fact, the states there, which is interesting, since we all know how much fighting there was in medieval Europe.

The external threats came from Spain, France, and Britain mostly. For one thing, the northeastern fisheries, which are a very large source of income, the British and the French refused the Americans' fishing rights, and drying rights. So even if they slipped in some fish, they couldn't dry them on the shore, and they'd spoil before they got back. Britain and France also interfered with the ability of the United States to sail on the open seas. America was not allowed to trade anymore with the West Indies, which had been a major trading partner. They tried to go to China and India. They interfered with that because the great powers had monopolies there. They didn't want broken. Britain also, because in the peace treaty between Britain and the United States after the end of the war,

the Americans promised to reimburse Britain for all the debts that were owed. They didn't do it because the states would not agree to do it. And therefore, Britain kept its forts on the American side of the border. And then Spain, of course, which controlled, well, I don't know, three quarters of the North American continent almost. well, without Canada. Certainly, the important thing is they controlled both banks of the Mississippi River, which meant that Americans out there, farmers, traders, could not sail down the Mississippi. And the Port of New Orleans, even if they could get there,

they had no right any place to deposit their goods. So the Americans were constrained on all sides for all manner of types of work and incidents by the European countries. and so therefore you had a push to somehow, somehow become strong enough to be able to do what you wanted to do without being stopped by imperial powers. You had had a revolution to get out of the clutches of Britain. And there they still were, in certain respects, still in the clutches. In the clutches, yeah. Frank, Frank O'Griana, how did the idea of a new constitution come about?

Who was behind it? it's a massive thing to try to do. It is indeed. Well, declaring independence and most importantly winning independence necessitated writing new constitutions. The previous colonists have been governed. They lived under the British Constitution. One of the things they felt was wrong with the British Constitution

was that it is unwritten, and they sought to remedy that by writing Constitution. So each of the states that Nick alluded to in his opening statement drafted constitutions after independence, there's a great deal of constitutional experimentation that goes on. So this is the crucial backdrop to this. But what happens is, given the problems that Kathy's been talking about, there's a need, at least there's a belief among certain political leaders, that there's a need for political reform. They've been experimenting with constitutions since 1776, and there's a feeling that a new national constitution is needed.

Who's the they? That they are, well, that's a very good question. Some political leaders, not all political leaders. Are they significant political leaders? They are significant political leaders, particularly often people who played leading roles in the War of Independence. So somebody like George Washington, for example, although a Virginian and a Virginia to his core

had been aware that the success of the Patriots, as they were called, in the War of Independence, was a national success, and national cooperation was necessary. And so what we see is a divide within the American political elite between those who have a more national vision and those who are more focused on their states. Yeah. We come to these three men, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay. Can you talk a little about them and then we'll talk about what they did and how they did it?

Sure. So Hamilton and Jay are both New Yorkers. Hamilton, of course, was born in the West Indies, but emigrated to New York as a young man. They were both New Yorkers. They were both lawyers. Hamilton had served with distinction during the War of Independence. I think that experience influences his subsequent support for a strong national government. Madison is a Virginian. Madison was a very prominent lawyer. And Madison had served in Congress.

Madison and Jay had both served in Congress during the early 1780s when Congress was very, very weak and ineffective. So they each are reflecting on their immediate experience when they come to believe that it's necessary to have a stronger government. They're all three very, very intelligent men, and they've given a lot of thought to republics and the history of republicanism and constitutional. They call themselves publicists, don't they? They do. Using the Roman term, we are public-spirited persons. How did they come together?

They came together. So Madison and Hamilton, who subsequently will be pretty antipathetic towards each other, they come together during that the summer of 1787 when the Constitution is drafted. They are both Madison and Hamilton at the Constitutional Convention. Jay is not. but Jay's involvement is particularly arises from the material Kathy's just commented on

he was the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee of Congress during the middle of the 1780s so he's aware of these difficulties. Jay doesn't play that big of a role in the drafting of the Federalist papers. He only writes five of the 85 essays because of illness. So Hamilton and Madison

as I said will subsequently become rivals but at this point come together because they're united in the belief that something needs to be done in a new constitution is necessary and they agree on that. It's terrifically admirably high-minded and determined, isn't it? Nick, you wanted to get in before. Well, I was just going to say that I do not want to seem like the person in the room who is not embracing the high-mindedness interpretation. But there are two things about the Constitution, which are very important to remember. The first

one is that actually the constitutional convention of the summer of 1787 had been proposed to revise the Articles of Confederation, not to create a brand-new constitution. So what you've characterised Melbourne as high-minded, full of integrity, was actually a bit of a bait-and-switch because there was huge surprise when the secret deliberations in Philadelphia eventually produced a brand-new document. The other thing I wanted to mention very briefly is there is one context that we have to reintroduce here in the 1780s, which is that this effusion of constitution-making, which Frank has very aptly described, also contain many experiments in what we might call democracy.

And in particular in the idea that if you allowed that... the people to rule, they would elect representatives who would directly manifest their interests. Now, if you're a wealthy person, and that would certainly apply to Hamilton and certainly to James Madison, that could be very frustrating because one thing that legislators did was they passed debt relief bills. They made it harder for wealthier people to call in their debts. So there was a personal material interest which ran alongside these more high-minded, I don't deny them, but these more high-minded motives for creating the Constitution, which is that it seems. It's a personal, deemed in the 1780s that state constitutions and powerful states produced fairly, should we call it, left-wing economic policy,

which a lot of our founders who are from the more elite part of society were very uncomfortable with. So that's the kind of final context, I think, for thinking about why the constitution was so important to men like Madison and Hamilton. What did they think they were opposing? You mean in terms of the constitutional conversation? Well, I mean, there are two things, right? One of them is just the idea of things falling apart. So Cathy is very aptly summarised all of the challenges about just keeping the United States together. I mean, there are two dimensions to what Cathy said that strike me.

One is that the states themselves could become like medieval Europe. The other is that North America is a gigantic continent which European powers could come and try and grab. People are still worried about Napoleon at the end of the 18th, but beginning of the 19th century, taking over all of the American interior. So there's that anxiety about things falling apart. But then to go back to what Frank said, there is also, I think, a powerful anxiety about concentrated power. So if you think for a moment that the American Revolution was caused by Americans believing that this extremely unaccountable and distant executive figure, the King or Parliament back in London, was telling them what to do, there would be real anxiety about creating a new constitution,

which effectively created a new version of that power on the Eastern Sea Board of the United States. How did they try to prevent that happening? Well, that's a big part of the Constitution. So, I mean, one aspect of it is the idea of checks and balances. Each part of the equation could kind of keep the other in check. But I also wanted to say, and this is crucial for understanding the Federalist Papers, that the other element of control here concerns the relationship between the new national government, the so-called federal government, and the states.

And it's so important to understand that if there's a kind of genius in the Constitution and in the Federalist Papers, it's kind of an ambiguous one. because in a sense it persuades Americans that there is some kind of grey area between things that the states might still be responsible for and things the federal government could be responsible for. And for Madison, this is an incredibly powerful way of saying to his fellow Americans, oh, don't worry too much about the federal government. The states are still sovereign.

We can't even elect a federal government without the states because of things like the electoral college, other elements of the governing system that depend upon the states rather than individual Americans. So there is a real creative ambiguity surrounding the Constitution. which is another reason or another way in which I think it becomes so successful. What they did with the Constitution and the Federalist papers describe, you know, try to sell it, is they created a new state, a new country, and they created a new kind of country.

There is nothing in history or the world that is like what the framers were creating. And the point of the Federalist papers here, and I assume we're going to talk about it later, is the question whether it was important in the ratification. Why New York particularly? Well, because New York had a lot of anti-federalists, those who did not want it, led by the governor. I mean, the great thing, I think, about the framers and about the Federalist papers,

because certainly Madison and Hamilton played a profound role in it, is that they tried to explain what they were trying to do and the point of the Federalist papers was to try to explain, defend, convince people that this was the best outcome that could be imagined by men of intelligence, honesty, and time. Did they meet in rooms, did they all meet, say, we together are going to do this thing and push it through? They must have some time. In fact, Nick, I think, knows what the answer is to that one. I just want to give a tiny bit of context, which is at the end of the Constitutional Convention.

in September of 1787, we have a very strange situation, which is a document emerges into the light of the public, which no one was expecting. Suddenly there's a proposal for a new constitution, not a revised one. And instantly the reaction of Americans is, what the hell is this? And the majority of Americans, when they hear about this, think, my goodness, can we possibly accept this?

There is an argument to be made and to be one. And in terms of men in rooms, what actually happens is that Madison and Hamilton both go back to New York. and New York is the place where the Confederation Congress, in other words, the old government, the existing government is based. And it's the fact that Madison chooses to go back to New York that produces this kind of serendipitous alliance between him and Alexander Hamilton,

who he's known for about five years at that point. And there's the fact they're both in New York that makes them realize, New York is going to be one of the hardest states to persuade to ratify this and one of the most important. It's big, it's commercial. When I mentioned earlier, it gets, gets a lot of its money from taxing trade coming in.

So if there's a new federal government, it might have to give that up. So they're focused on New York as a crucial state in the ratifying process. And in effect, that's why they write the Federalist papers. Let's persuade New Yorkers. The Constitution is not something to be scared of. I'd like to talk for a moment, Frank, about these essays. It seems to be, it's quite wonderful, isn't it?

They write a massive essays. They attack with essays. 180,000 words, Melvin. So I think in order to understand the essays, we have to understand the context of these ratifying conventions. Yeah. So, as you mentioned, Nick rightly described the constitutional convention as an exercise, a bait-and-switch exercise, and that's true. So the people who frame this constitution proposed to replace the Articles of Confederation with something entirely new. So this could be seen as a, well, frankly, a counter-revolutionary act, except what they stipulate is the constitutioning should be submitted to all,

states for consideration, and that special ratifying conventions should be held in each of the states, and that those, when nine of those conventions, two-thirds of 13, endorse the Constitution, it will be adopted. And so it's in that context that these essays are important. And they draft these essays with an eye towards persuading New York, and we've already talked about why New York is important, but also demonstrating to the country why this Constitution is important. And why why people should support it. And the ratifying conventions are important, I think, well, for a number of reasons. They give democratic legitimacy to this entire process. I don't want to overstate how democratic it was. However, one estimate, and I think this is a little generous,

is that approximately 100,000 people, men participated in either voting for people to attend the ratifying conventions, attending the ratifying conventions, or writing essays that appear, because there are hundreds of essays. The Federalist papers are only, a sample of hundreds of essays that were published in that period of 1787 and 88 to discuss and debate the Constitution. They're the most famous, and we'll probably talk about why, I hope, but they're originally intended as, if you will, op-ed pieces directed at the voters of New York. Why are they famous, Nick?

Well, I think a lot of their fame comes from the fact that they're written by people who had seats at the table. So if we think about the fact that here is a work of political theory written not by people in a study, with all due respect to people who are in studies, I spend a lot of my time in a study, I guess, but actually by people who were out there on the front lines of politics, that became crucial to their kind of long-term importance.

So it's not really until the 1790s when the word gets out more widely that the authors are Jay, Hamilton and Madison, and maybe we can talk later about some of the confusions that can occur when people don't know which essay is by whom. But I think that's one reason for their kind of enduring.

importance. But it's also true that despite the fact that now, I think very few Americans would ever want to sit down and read all 180,000 words, certainly not at once, there is a very strong sense that some of the essential problems of American Republican democracy, and I use those words carefully, Republican democracy are bashed out, they're discussed, they're worked through, almost in real time in these essays, which our three writers are writing astonishing speed. I mean, they're writing these things in what? Once every three days, literally writing them while the printer is waiting to have them set and put out. So there's this sense of something happening in this kind of white heat of speed and urgency. But it's ironic because

the reputation of the Federalist Papers now is that they're these kind of tablets that have been taken down from Mount Sinai. So there's this interesting sense in which they've become sacred, but at the time they were very expedient, very fast, very speedily produced. Well, just to give the listeners one example, what about number 10? But So Federalist 10 is kind of If you kick up with that Then the other's joining.

Sure, sure. It's kind of a classic. I'm going to try and sound like a nerd here. Federalist 10 is probably the most important and significant in my view of all of the Federalist papers. That doesn't make you a nerd. That makes you somebody who knows it they're talking about.

I'm a friend here. This is a very nerd-friendly space. So Federalist 10 is the essay in which Madison attempts to describe what he means by a Republican democracy. And Madison begins by saying that democracy is a fine thing, but it very often produces bad outcomes. It produces outcomes which are conditioned by passions and by interests.

And he also says that even when you don't have democracy kind of working its kind of evil work, you have factionalism. And faction is a term that he uses to describe any particular interest that he thinks is opposed to the common good. Now, traditionally, in Republican theory, which one can trace back all the way to the classical period, there is a tendency to assume that a republic can only function when it is a direct democracy. So in other words, when all of its citizens manifest their commitment to public virtue through actively participating in making decisions, and that in term means a republic has to be small. And this is the thing that he takes from Montesquieu, Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws from 1748, Montesquieu's admiration for the British Constitution, but for a kind of balanced republic, would have to be manifested in a small space.

And Madison says, in Federalist 10, that's all wrong, that actually it sighs an extent that can help you make a successful and durable republic. And his argument is that that's because if you have a bigger republic, faction will not be able to creep up in different parts of the United States and dominate. the whole, can't they? Modusque also said that you could not have a republic in a place as big as the United States. You know, different climates, different products, different ideas, different interests, and so forth. It would not work. And therefore, the idea of small and homogenous was the important thing. People who knew each other, who were part of the people, those who were involved in government,

would be a mirror to the people from which they came. was important. And interestingly there, they all disliked Pennsylvania because they had immigration. So homogeneity meant control. With regard to, if I can just follow on there, with regard to Federalist 10, what's very interesting is the Federalist Papers are premised on a really interesting and modern notion of human nature. So going back to classical Republican, the classical Republican thought, of course is premised on the assumption, and this is why republics, republics have to be small, that citizens will be virtuous and they'll act and they will have civic virtue. In number 10, but throughout the papers, but particularly in number 10, there's an assumption that,

no, no, no, human beings will act in their own interest, but if we have a not, competing diverse interests will actually make republicanism possible. So it's premised on what we might consider a more modern notion of human nature, I think, and Madison's making the case in in 10, that, you know, don't worry, a big republic is actually better because competing interests are more likely to kind of obviate each other and cancel each other out, and we won't have corruption that way. And we're not going to be dependent on virtuous human beings because we know human beings aren't very virtuous.

But it's very important to remember that when we now think of a country as a democracy, we assume that that's a good thing, where we have whole, you know, sheaves of things written about how wonderful it is to democratize the world. For Madison, that would not be the case. Federalist 10 is so important because it's where the kind of secret source lives

that explains what Republican democracy is. So just to remind you that in the early United States, the federal constitution, the people voted for the House of Representatives. Senators were appointed by state legislatures. So actually the senators were not voted for by the people. And of course, the president came from the electoral college. So for two of those three branches of government,

you had a filtering process precisely to stop the people from choosing directly. And that's even before we get into the idea of the states, which have all kinds of powers in the system too. So I think it's fascinating to think of Republican democracy as not being the same thing as democracy as you'd understand it today. There's these 13 states waiting to be persuaded through essays. So how did they get them together? They didn't just send out newspapers and hope for the best?

Well, there's an active campaign on behalf of the people who support the Constitution who call themselves federalists to promote this. And so they move very quickly in states where they have a lot of, lot of support. So Pennsylvania votes in December of 1787 right away. They delay and they try to persuade the public through essays like the ones collected in the Federalist in the newspapers in states where there's more opposition. And Kathy was talking about the opposition in New York a few minutes ago. And so it's a coordinated campaign on behalf of the advocates,

the support of the Constitution and the Federalist essays, the Federalist Papers, as we now know them, are part of that. So they're published in the newspapers and they're meant to influence the voters at these conventions. And they won. They did. But I mean, to get back to New York for a moment, it's fascinating to think that these Federalist essays have published from October of 1787 to April of 1788.

But then when there's actually a vote for the ratifying convention, this is the sole purpose of the Federalist Papers to persuade people in New York actually to vote in favor of sending supporters of the Constitution to the New York State ratifying convention. What actually happens is there's a huge defeat. It's 19 to 44 in favor of the opponents of the Constitution. So there isn't actually much evidence that the Federalist papers in New York

did the job they were supposed to do. How do you think they'd go through, can they? They had a common enemy. They were pretty sure if they, I mean, people knew that if there was not a central government with some powers, the country could fragment. External powers were nibbling all around the edges, forming little sorts of alliances

with people inside the various states who didn't like how these things were going. I think one thing is that we forget, get is that even the so-called common people admired the so-called elite. There was a lot of aristocratic versus democratic boundaries and feelings and fights amongst all this. But what the anti-federalists didn't realize, and I think the Federalist papers had a part to play in this is that people, you know, moderate and small farmers and small lawyers and so forth, didn't like lawlessness

didn't like no security any more than anyone else that it wasn't just men who had the money and the land and so forth it was also a lot of small people there is one anecdote

in a book that when they were discussing this in a room and one man stood up I mean it was being led by an anti-federalist we don't like this

we can't let it get through and he stood up and he said well I actually am a small farmer, as you all know me. I have read some of the essays and heard about the others. And when we had our last was Shays uprising in the Ottoman winter of 1786, someone came up and stuck as bayonet next to my stomach.

I don't like the insecurity, and therefore I will vote for it. Frank, let's talk about the influence that the Federalist Papers had on the ratification of the new constitution. Well, at one level, they had relatively little impact because New York doesn't ratify the Constitution. It's the last state to ratify. It ratifies in July of 1788. It's the 11th state. So the Constitution has already been adopted. Two states, Rhode Island and North Carolina didn't ratify in the first instance. And so we could say, well, they didn't matter. On the other hand, once the Constitution takes effect, that Constitution making an experimentation continues for the next several years under the new government, particularly with the ratification of the Bill of Rights, the adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1791. And the Federalist papers are incredibly important because the U.S. Constitution is relatively short. It's 4,500 words.

The Federalist papers are 180,000 word commentary on those 4,500 words, and they profoundly influence. the way the framers of the new government think about the constitution and interpret the constitution and they've been kind of embraced by jurists in particular ever since and they get cited all the time by the Supreme Court. So these essays that were written in the heat of a political debate have assumed a sort of significance that's quite profound. Would you want to take that? I think Frank's absolutely right. I mean, if we think about the battle to try to ratify the constitution as the war, you can.

argue that the Federalist papers didn't actually have too much to do with winning the war, but they did help to win the peace because in that period in the 1790s, Americans have very fiercely divided over whether they can sustain this new government. And the Federalist papers become a source of stability, they become a source of argument for many people who are part of this new kind of political practice in the early Republic. And as we go further still into the 19th and the 20th century, as Frank suggests, they've really become a kind of window into the minds of the two founders in particular who wrote most of them, which is Madison and Hamilton. But I did want to say this. In 1788, the Massachusetts historian Merci Otis Warren famously called the Constitution a heterogeneous phantom.

And what she meant by that was it was such a slippery and hard to understand thing. It was actually quite hard to oppose because when you tried to oppose it, someone said, oh no, it doesn't do that. doesn't take away power from states, it gives the states lots of powers. In some respect, the Federalist papers, for all of their 180,000 words, are also a heterogeneous phantom. You had people arguing over exactly what they meant, and also exactly who wrote which paper, certainly through the first half of the 19th century, and in some ways that argument's still going on today. So to come back to ambiguity, that is a key feature, and maybe a necessary one. Maybe it had to be ambiguous to get people in the end on board with what the Constitution was.

It did have profound influence in five continents. In fact, from until about 1850, it made a big impact in Latin America and Europe in particular. Latin America is like the idea of how do you create a republic over a continent. How do you help to control provincial factions? So in that sense, it was very influential and it was read in Europe as well, just as Tocqueville's Democracy in America, the first political science book, one might say, about the United States. This actually came to an end about 1850, which is not surprising, because, of course, the civil war was creeping up. And so it looked as though what the papers had to say was no longer particularly relevant.

And, of course, I agree with everything Nick and Frank have said about the current influence. I mean, it's more thought of as the main American political theory classic, and that's the case. They are a sort of cornerstone, aren't they? Well, I think a story that might be instructive that's very brief is in 1791, in the first House of Representatives, there is a debate between Madison supporters and Hamilton supporters about creating a national bank, which is something that the Constitution doesn't really talk about. But there's one paper in a Federalist paper, is Federalist 44. which discusses what becomes known as the doctrine of implied powers.

And to put it briefly, it means if the government needs to do something to achieve an end in the Constitution, it should be able to do that. You have one person who is a supporter of Alexander Hamilton saying, absolutely Federalist 44 allows this. You have another person who is a supporter of James Madison, who are fractured by this point saying, oh, no, no, it doesn't allow you to do this. In fact, it wasn't by Hamilton at all. It was by James Madison.

And James Madison was in the room in the House of Representatives. presumably with his poker face on, because actually the argument that was being made from Federalist 44 was one that was then inconvenient to him because he actually wanted to have a rather smaller government than the one Alexander Hamilton wanted. So there's this fabulous kind of like moment of, again, total ambiguity and uncertainty, which in a sense reflects the fact that these Federalist papers could be made to mean different things, depending on your political persuasion. Are we always going to be faced with ambiguity? Can we just do the level? So, I mean, these people wanted a national government.

You want to the stronger government. So let's agree on that for a second. And you could say Madison Hamilton, it's basically Madison is land and Hamilton is money. So one could imagine a stronger government that's very much congruent with the interests of land, if you have a lot, if you're agrarian, if you're rural, and another vision of a national government that's about money. It's about commerce. It's about development.

So in a sense, those two visions of government are still about a national government. They definitely want something that's not just 13 states. And the achievement of that national government is clearly an enormous achievement in terms of 18th history. So this is not to be sniffed at at all, but it's fascinating to me that once you agree on the fact you need a stronger government, then Madison and Hamilton can absolutely be at daggers drawn, as they were just a few years after writing this. And they even decided that they would create new political parties. That's one of the things Madison does in the 1790s creates a party. This is the guy that said faction could kill a republic. It's now saying, oh yeah,

I'm going to have a new party. So it's fascinating to think that in a way they have to diverge from each other in the 1790s to contain their different visions of a national government. And I would say number 10 anticipate some of that, although Madison didn't know what would go the way it would. I just want to say a word for a couple of others in case listeners want to read. 39 is very good on republics and the history of republics and how they develop. 51 is great for the separation of powers and trying to understand how that works in the US Constitution. And 78, if people make it that far, is very good on the judiciary. A classic.

I'm also like the idea of what happened to the Senate. Madison wanted to be based on population. Others, such as one of the other framers, wanted it based on not on population, but on equality, each state being equal. And one of the concerns of Jay was the Senate was supposed to be involved with foreign policy, and you needed men who were essentially intellectual, rich, and had a lot of time because foreign affairs needed great attention, especially in terms of having to create them from the beginning.

So I don't want lost in this particular discussion the fact that one of the major impotuses was the fear of what was threatening outside the borders. You could cope inside the borders If push came to shove, you could cope, you've done it before But you couldn't cope with external And therefore you have to create a government that can do so Can have an army in a navy? Exactly, and ability to tax to pay for it. Yes.

It takes a little while to get a big navy And the army is also not supposed to be big And certainly before the end of the 19th century, the ideal is to keep both those things small. So the story of a big standing army and a big navy is very much more a much later 19th and 20th century story, precisely because, as Kathy suggests, if you're running a government at this moment in world history, when you have a big army in a navy, you have

to tax to pay for it. Taxes tend to be oppressive, and there's a cycle by which then you need a bigger army in a navy. On the other hand, you know, as you point out in, well, in mid-19th century, when Britain and America, when James Polk, President James Polk, was essentially threatening that he was going to invade Canada and force Britain to give up all. all claim over the Oregon Territory, he was only able to get 493 soldiers up there. That was all that was available. Can you just tell the listeners slightly more detail, how influential these papers have been over the last 100, 150 years?

As the American experiment seems to be failing in the mid-19th century, they seem a bit less persuasive, but they're very, very powerful in terms of their influence on American judicial thought. jurists, especially in the 20th sanctuary, as the concept of originalism, the desire to get back to what the framers of the Constitution originally thought. The

federalist papers have been incredibly important in Supreme Court decisions and lower court decisions as well. But what's interesting is they're cited with some frequency in the early 19th century and then it drops off quite a bit and then they make a comeback in the middle of the 20th

sanctuary and in the second half of the 20th century where there are a lot of Supreme Court decisions that cite the Federalist papers explicitly. There's a 1995 decision, and both Scalia on one side and one of the liberal justices and the other both cited the Federalist papers in support of their own positions. There's your ambiguity, I think. Yeah, I think that generally jurists tend to be more interested

in those essays that are written about the law. So in a sense, historians love things like Federalist 10. It's not one of the top 10 most cited Federalist papers in legal decisions in the 20th century, it's nowhere near, because people are interested in 78, or they're interested in these questions of judicial review. And it is really important to note that the Supreme Court as the arbiter of whether a law is actually congruent

with the US Constitution. That's not actually in the Constitution. It is in Federalist 78. So actually you could see Hamilton in that Federalist paper casting a vision that goes beyond the Constitution for an incredibly important principle in American political life. which is judicial review. And all of the hullaboo in the last 50, more than 50 years

about Supreme Court decisions comes back to Federalist 78 and that question that the Supreme Court should be able to declare a law unconstitutional and astonishing power and one that isn't actually in the Constitution. Finally, just around the table, it's been called America's greatest contribution to political thought. Do you agree with that, Frank? Yeah, I think I do.

I think I do. I can't think of a competing text that would supersede it in terms of its influence. Yeah, I think that's probably correct. Yeah, and absolutely, in terms of the fact that the people who devised, shared, refine these ideas were also political practitioner. That sense of proximity to actually creating these things rather than just thinking about them. It's one of the reasons this is such a durable piece of political literature.

And also, of course, because the way they were written. I mean, Madison set. out Federalist 10 as a lawyer's brief almost. But they're elegantly written, elegantly argued. You don't get an emotional charge in the way that might put some people off. So they're profoundly important as political theory. I mean, it's the only work by Americans on America that can have any claim to that position. And the fact that none of us could think of an alternative, I think, sums that up. But if I could just add, there is, it does have a contemporary resonance. We will all be pleased to know because those of you who went to see the musical Hamilton

might remember in one of the songs called Non-Stop that Hamilton, his song, his rap, includes the purposes and the authorship of the Federalist Papers. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you. Kathy Burke, Nick Gaiet, and Frank Gugliano, and our serial engineer, Donald MacDonald. Next week, all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. It's Julian of Norwich, medieval mystic. Thank you for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did we not put in the programme you wished we had put in the programme? We talk about that, and I'll say as little as I can, and starting with Cathy. Your hand shot up, Cathy. Well, one thing is the programme. which is part external and part internal

that was briefly alluded to in our discussion is the fact that the states were at war with each other in many respects. Boats of one state fired on boats of another state, they had tariffs against each other, it was difficult for the laws of one state to be agreed to the laws of the next state. So not only did you have abused, and terrible difficulties within a state,

you've got the external difficulties, which are very commanding, I think, but the states themselves not only were different sovereignties, in many respects they hated each other. There was no sense of a fellowship. It was Confederacy, but it wasn't really a nation, I don't think, not yet.

And that's what the framers, supported by the Federalist Papers, did. They created a nation, where one actually, hadn't existed before. I just wanted to talk briefly about slavery and Native Americans who are two. Do you want to do one of those and onto the other one? Yeah, I'd be happy to.

Well, let me talk about Native Americans. The thing about Federalist 10, which is so fascinating, is that in effect, the fuel for Madison's vision of Republican democracy is land. It's about the United States getting as big as it could possibly get. And in some respects, that's a revolutionary principle, as I mentioned in the show. But actually, what Madison doesn't do at any. point is refer to the fact that the land that he is planning to take and that the United States will take is actually already settled by indigenous people. And actually very few discussions of

the Federalist acknowledge the fact that that idea, which Madison and Jefferson are later going to call the Empire of Liberty, an extended republic that could go across the continent, actually relies on a massive dispossession of native people. And I don't pretend to solve that as a moral problem, but I do want to suggest that it's actually embedded or encoded in the very idea of the American Republic, that notion of a republic, as it were, for white people, but a kind of empire for indigenous people. Kathy made the point in the episode about external threats to the new republic.

The most successful threat or the most potent threat was actually indigenous peoples, because in terms of during the Washington administration, it's not the British who fight the United States, it's not the Spanish, it's not the French, it's native peoples in Ohio. that successfully destroy the American army. And so this is important.

And with regard to slavery, that cuts a number of ways. As we know at the Constitutional Convention, they made a number of compromises over slavery that helped perpetuate the institution. But also, there was a belief, particularly among the states of the lower Souths. We're talking about Georgia and South Carolina in particular, that they needed the union and this new stronger government

to help protect them because they were concerned, especially South Carolina, about the danger. Again, we're talking about threats that enslaved people posed to enslavers in South Carolina. And it's interesting that one of the Federalist papers in which slavery is mentioned is actually written by Madison. It didn't have to be a big deal for New York because most New Yorkers would have been broadly sympathetic to abolition.

But definitely it's Madison who says, slavery is a terrible thing in the long run. Otherwise, the papers don't allude to the fact that all of these compromises with the big slave owners in the South have already been embedded in the Constitution. So a bit like Native Americans, it's not there on the surface, but it's absolutely integral to the constitution underneath.

It's assumed. And in some of the discussions, in fact, there are murmurings about secession already. Because of the, I mean, if we want fault lines, the north-south fault line is probably the most important. Could I ask my colleagues a question, see what they think, about one of the discussion points about whether you think the Federalist Papers are important or not.

I mean, I think they are based on anecdotes, like the one I retailed about the farmer in the West, in Western Massachusetts. But others say that they weren't important because no one knew anything about them. We can then say on the other side, the ones who needed to know who were going to vote knew about them. But it does, what do you think about the actual influence amongst all peoples of the Federalist papers at that time? Well, this is a point I meant to make during the episode. I'm sorry, I didn't. The New York papers in which these appeared had a circulation of 600. And that counts for mass media then.

The reason the Federalist papers, though, leap out among all these hundreds of essays that were written is they were bound together and published as a single volume, well, two volumes actually. in March and May of 1788, which meant they were accessible in circulation. But I agree with you, Kathy. One has to be a little bit skeptical. This is an age before mass media and a mass press. I mean, one thing we haven't mentioned, in fact, is there were also anti-federalist papers. Well, there is a school of thought that says that John Jay's 19-page pamphlet, rather than 600-page collection of essays, published in April of 1780A in support of the Constitution.

actually did far more to rally people to vote for supporters the Constitution and a ratifying convention than the Federalist papers. It was short. It was direct. It was colloquial. Did I mention it was short? That was an extremely important part of its appeal, which again would be ironic. I think short term, less important, medium to long term, the Federalist papers really do matter. When Cathy made the point that most Americans would have heard of them, I couldn't help but think of Mark Twain's definition of a classic,

which is to say a book everyone's heard of, but nobody's really. read. That might be its status today. But I still would like to know about the anti-federalist papers. Did they have any impact at all? Sure, but the problem the anti-federalists had was a political one anyway. Their name, they're against it, and they're not

coherent and organized. The federalist papers are a coherent entity. There is no single, we have ex post facto publications collections of the anti-federalist papers, but there is no such thing at the time as the anti-federalist papers. There are just lots of essays against the

And of course that was a coup by the federalist because a federalist before then was someone who believed in a federal system, not a central system. One of the great PR coups was for the federalists to grab that name and turn it around and make it as the unifying call. It's hard to separate the federalist from the political achievement of the Constitution. And I mean, listeners to the program may kind of have gotten the Constitution and the federalists all kind of jumbled up because, I mean, that's, that's not. makes sense, right? I mean, it's because the people that wrote the Constitution or helped

write it also wrote the Federalist, especially James Madison. So there's a sense in which it's very hard to judge the papers without also judging the Constitution. And measured just in terms of the length of time it's been in operation, measured by the kind of suppleness of the machinery that was created, its ability to withstand all kinds of pressures, even the Civil War. It's hard not on some level to see the American Constitution as an extraordinary document. Now, I mentioned earlier, slavery, Native Americans, those are extremely important things to put on the other side of the ledger, but I think it's still impossible to deny the significance of the achievement of the Constitution

and this expression of wisdom surrounding what it really meant in the Federalist Papers. Well, on that note, we end. Thank you very, very much. Thank you. Here comes our boss, Simon. Would anyone like tea or coffee or any other traded commodities? You're getting your excuses in earlier. A coffee would be nice. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson.

Hello, it's a mole. And I'm Nick, and we're launching the Today podcast from Radio 4. Come with then. What is it, Nick? Well, every week, we're going to take a big subject we want to spend more time on, because I don't know about you. When I present the Today program, I'm always thinking of things, I wish I'd asked, I wish I'd heard. And this is going to give us the time to do that,

to get more analysis, more insight, sometimes more gossip. Same goes for me. I'm looking forward to you. to this. Episodes will drop every Thursday. It's called the Today Podcast, and you can listen now on BBC Sounds.