The Federalist Papers

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.