11 the New York state legislature assembled, and Hamilton, who was a candidate for membership of Congress, was involved in a political campaign akin to the modern senatorial election. These joint occupations necessarily made such drafts upon his time that he could not continue The Federalist, and that there should be no break in it Madison assumed the entire task of carrying it on. The term of the court ended on January 25, and on February 22 Hamilton was elected to the Continental Congress. We therefore have the choice of inferring that Hamilton at once resumed his work[1] on The Federalist or else that he resumed it when Madison went south.[2]
Turning from these extraneous facts to those which can be drawn from the essays themselves, the first point deserving consideration relates to a condition implied by joint authorship. A moment's thought will suggest that a work produced in this manner must force upon each writer a little difficulty in maintaining in a nominally consecutive work an appearance of homogeneity. Where an essay was to follow one written by the same author sequence was possible, but when it was to succeed one he had not written or read, the task was not easy. Necessarily then, one would expect a certain disjointedness of connection, and this is the very thing discovered on examining the points where a new writer assumed the pen. Thus No. 10, by Madison, is an essay on faction, yet though the preceding letter was on the same subject, it
- ↑ No. 48 was published on February 2: Madison began his southern journey on March 4.
- ↑ A very valuable piece of evidence on this question of authorship has been buried from sight by the mistakes of Hamilton's two editors in labeling a paper printed in both editions as a "Brief of Argument on the Constitution of the United States," though the manuscript of the paper bore no heading whatsoever. Study of it should have clearly indicated that it is a preliminary outline of The Federalist from the point that Hamilton was interrupted in his composition by his legal and political occupations, and it was presumably drawn up as a guide for Madison in his continuance of the task, See post.
