It may be said, of course, that he intended in that list to write
64, but as a matter of fact he did not assign 54 to himself,
and whether he intended to write 64 is open to most serious
doubt. In the last number of the Camillus papers, 1794,^ he
quotes from Nos. 42 and 64 of The Federalist and appends
this note : " It is generally understood that two persons were
concerned in the writing of these papers, who, from having
been members of the Convention, had a good opportunity of
knowing its views — and were under no temptation at that
time in this particular to misrepresent them." If Hamilton,
in 1794, remembered that Jay ^ wrote No. 64, this note was
highly disingenuous ; but there is no reason to suspect Hamil-
ton of such disingenuousness. Therefore in 1794 Hamilton
attributed 64 either to himself or to Madison.^ That he
attributed it to himself is made practically certain by his not
attributing it to Madison in the Benson list. It seems fair to
conclude, therefore, that in attributing 54 to Jay in that list
and the list copied by J. C. Hamilton, Hamilton did not
make a mere clerical error, but consciously disclaimed writ-
ing 54.
This number consists of a defence of the compromise over the question whether slaves were population or property, by which it was settled that three-fifths of the slaves should be enumerated in determining the representative population. For rhetorical purposes the argument is put in the mouth of a Southerner. That the writer was familiar with the discus- sion in the Convention seems almost certain from the turn he gives to his argument, but Hamilton was absent from the Convention during the repeated discussions of this compro- mise, while Madison was there and participated in them.
For example, Mr. Patterson of New Jersey, in the Con- key to the names of the authors of Publius from a manuscript of Mr. Hamilton which he saw many years ago, in the possession of the late Richard Stockton, an eminent statesman of New Jersey." Virginia Debates, 1829-30, 188.
1 Works, Y, 320-21.
2 Jay was not a member of the Convention.
8 That Hamilton did at one time attribute No. 64 to himself seems clear from the 1810 edition.
