THE FEDERALIST

Summary A new union would increase governmental revenues and facilitate their collection. The development of commerce would make it easier not only to pay taxes, but to collect them. The greater part of national revenues should come from the imposition of customs duties and various excises, which would be “imperceptible […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Section II: Advantages of Union: Federalist No. 12 (Hamilton)

Summary Repeating himself somewhat, Hamilton declared that a closer union would greatly benefit American commerce. The growth of the nation’s trade and shipping had already led European maritime powers to think of clipping “the wings by which we might soar to a dangerous greatness.” Essential to the growth of American […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Section II: Advantages of Union: Federalist No. 11 (Hamilton)

Summary This essay, the first of Madison’s contributions to the series, was a rather long development of the theme that a well-constructed union would break and control the violence of faction, a “dangerous vice” in popular governments. As defined by Madison, a faction was a number of citizens, whether a […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Section II: Advantages of Union: Federalist No. 10 (James Madison)

Summary This section, consisting of six papers (Chapters 9–14), discusses the advantage of union in general, and not the advantages of a particular form of union as set forth in the proposed constitution. A firm union acts to prevent domestic faction and insurrection. A reading of the histories of the […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Section II: Advantages of Union: Federalist No. 9 (Hamilton)

Summary If accepted as an “established truth” that war between separate parts was probable if the Union were dismembered, such wars between the states would occasion much greater distress than in countries that maintained regular standing armies. Such armies, though dangerous to liberty and economy, had the advantage of rendering […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Section I: General Introduction: Federalist No. 8 (Hamilton)

Summary Other dangers would face a dismembered America. Territorial disputes, for one thing. Such disputes had always been “one of the most fertile sources of hostility among nations” and existed in the United States along its westward-moving frontier. There had been, and still were, “discordant and undecided claims” by various […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Section I: General Introduction: Federalist No. 7 (Hamilton)

Summary Turning from foreign dangers to a disunited America, this essay took up dangers of a “still more alarming kind, those [that would] in all probability flow from dissentions between the States themselves, and from domestic factions and convulsions.” In spite of all historical experience to the contrary, there were […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Section I: General Introduction: Federalist No. 6 (Hamilton)

Summary This essay opened with quotations from a letter by Queen Anne in 1706 when the union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland was under consideration. In her letter to the Scotch Parliament the Queen stressed that if the two kingdoms were “joined in affection and free from all […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Section I: General Introduction: Federalist No. 5 (Jay)

Summary There were other possible causes of war, Jay went on: “With France and with Britain we are rivals in the fisheries; . . . With them and most other European nations, we are rivals in navigation and the carrying trade; . . . In the trade to China and […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Section I: General Introduction: Federalist No. 4 (Jay)

Summary All wise and free people directed their attention to “providing for their safety.” Was cause of war as “likely to be given by United America, as by disunited America?” Noting that some American states bordered on British and Spanish territories, Jay remarked that the borderers, “under the impulse of […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Section I: General Introduction: Federalist No. 3 (Jay)