Quentin Taylor: The Mask of Publius: Alexander Hamilton and the Politics of Expediency: "Madison’s and Hamilton’s private views... in places the authors defended positions to which they did not fully adhere...
...In Hamilton’s case, this is a major understatement. And yet a careful reading of his Federalist essays points to something far more complex and nuanced than a simple act of concealing his actual views or putting the best face on a plan he discountenanced. Undoubtedly, there are instances where he did both, but it is far more characteristic of him to engage in something quite different and admittedly ingenious: the creative act of construing the document in such a way as to stretch its meaning to accord more closely with the high-toned plan of government he outlined in the Federal Convention....
Both were disappointed in the document they signed. On the day he did so, Hamilton proclaimed that “no man’s ideas were more remote from the plan than his own were known to be”.... Madison confided to Thomas Jefferson that the plan “will neither effectually answer its national object nor prevent... local mischiefs”.... Yet both would vigorously champion the Constitution in the guise of Publius. Jefferson detected this incongruity when he observed that “in some parts [of The Federalist], it is discoverable that the author means only to say what may best be said in defense of opinions in which he did not concur...”
Hamilton-cum-Publius engaged in a systematic effort to interpret the Constitution in a manner that would (1) give the national government (and particularly the executive) maximum power, flexibility, and “energy”; (2) minimize the power and prestige of the state governments; and (3) vindicate monarchic and centralizing principles within a projected federal republic.... The likelihood that the federal government would be better administered might in time wean them away from such parochialism and help forestall state encroachments on the national authority. This much, at least, he said as Publius (Federalist 27; Hamilton et al. 1961, 172–74). Privately he added that a government headed by Washington (himself a nationalist) and administered by a “wise choice of men” (including himself) would not merely strengthen the central government but allow it to “triumph altogether over the state governments and reduce them to an intire subordination, dividing the larger states into smaller districts”....
Madison was at the peak of his nationalism during the Convention, supporting a plenary grant of power to the central government, a national veto over state laws, and long terms of office for senators and the executive. Jay, who did not attend the Convention, was a prominent nationalist who shared a number of Hamilton’s views, including the desirability of reducing the states to appendages.... This is not to say that Madison and Jay shared Hamilton’s private aims or were part of a coordinated effort to propound the Constitution in a “high-toned” vein. Given their respective views, such a “conspiracy” was hardly necessary.... In carefully demonstrating to readers that the government embodied in the proposed Constitution was both federal and republican in the best sense, Madison provided considerable cover for Hamilton’s more aggressive campaign to instill that government with “energy,” “efficiency,” and “vigor”....
For Hamilton republicanism was not a civic ideology based on popular participation and classical virtue, but simply representation, the rule of law, the protection of property, and freedom from arbitrary government. Nearly everything else was discretionary based on his highly flexible reading of the central government’s powers and the president’s prerogatives. It is notable that in his rejection of a bill of rights, Hamilton identifies the writ of habeas corpus, a ban on ex post facto laws, and a pro- hibition on titles of nobility as “perhaps greater securities to liberty and re- publicanism than any” in the New York Constitution. And of these three provisions, he singles out the prohibition on titles of nobility as “truly . . . the cornerstone of republican government” (Federalist 84; Hamilton et al. 1961, 577). As long as there were no milords in America, it would seem, the United States was a republic...
#shouldread
