t article.
he wrote the disputed numbers. I did that but twice (pp. 132, 135) and, if those instances are examined critically, it will be seen that they were perfectly legitimate. All the other parallel passages except one from Madison are from his letters or memoranda written before The Federalist.
The next point that Mr. Ford makes is that Madison's opportunities for remembering the facts about the authorship of the disputed numbers were not as good as Hamilton's. That may be true as he puts the case, but Madison was a methodical man, and he may have kept a list from the begin- ning. However that may be, in the only case that can be tested with absolute certainty, that of the authorship of Nos. 18, 19, and 20, 1 have shown that Madison did remember the facts far more exactly than Hamilton. Mr. Ford offers no instance where it can be proved that Hamilton was more nearly right than Madison.
Mr. Ford next tries to establish the earliest dates of Madi- son's and Hamilton's lists, but his conclusions cannot be ac- cepted. In the first place it is an unsupported conjecture that Madison's list was no older than the date of the copy of The Federalist that he sent to Gideon in 1818, i, e., not ear- lier than 1799. Second, we have Madison's own assertion that his list was an early one, if not substantially a contem- porary one. He wrote Robert Walsh, in 1819, as follows: " If I have any interest in proving the fallibility of Mr. Ham- ilton's memory, or the error of his statement, however occa- sioned, it is not that the authorship in question is of itself a point deserving the solicitude of either of the parties; but because I had, at the request of a confidential friend or two, communicated a list of the numbers in that publication, with the names of the writers annexed, at a time and under cir- cumstances depriving me of a plea for so great a mistake in a slip of memory or attention." (Writings of James Madison, III, 126.) Again, in his letter to Paulding (1831), Madison says that his assignment, " if erroneous, could not be ascribed to a lapse of memory," but to a lack of veracity. He calls it " the distribution communicated by me at an early day to a
