What purpose was the Federalist Papers trying to achieve?
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There were two factions of the founders, the Federalists and the Antifederalists.
The Federalist Papers were written by, unsurprisingly, the Federalists, and were their arguments about how they believed the country should be run within the confines of the constitution.
The Constitution didn’t automatically become law once it was drafted, the individual states had to ratify it in their state legislatures.
The Federalist Papers are a collection of essays and articles written by the Constitution’s drafters to explain the details and expectations of the new constitution – and hopefully to convince the states to accept it.
The proposed governmental structure was unique in the world at the time, so ratification wasn’t merely a formality. There was a lot of debate about how the balance of power between state and federal would sit, and what rights the individual would have.
The constitution was amended *immediately* after ratification to address some of the objections raised during the discussion.
They served multiple purposes:
* persuading readers to vote for the new constitution
* laying out a more detailed framework for how the new constitution could operate, without that framework becoming legally binding. The Federalist Papers became a strong suggestion for how the new government would operate. Because it wasn’t legally binding, the new government could ignore Madison/Hamilton/Jay where they incorrectly predicted how things could work. For example, the Federalist Papers argues against political parties, but they proved impossible to avoid.
* setting out a new theory on how governments can work. We tend to forget that prior to the Federalist Papers, almost everyone thought that neither a democracy nor a republic could function in a country as large as the US at the time. The founders made an argument that not only could a republic function well, but that republic could have a number of democratic elements such as popularly elected representatives. We’ve been incorporating more democratic elements ever since.
Super brief and simple explanation: To prove that the constitution is good ➡️+ to get states ratify it, so it can become a law.
The Federalist Papers were a bunch of essays intended to convince people to support voting to accept the US Constitution. The type of government that the US Constitution sets up was new and had never been done before, so the people behind it felt it was a good idea to write about their thinking behind it and why they thought it would work.
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