Alexander Hamilton

Published in New York newspapers during 1787 and 1788, the Federalist essays were written at speed under the pen name Publius to answer the Constitution's critics. Hamilton conceived the project, wrote most of the essays on the executive and the judiciary, and recruited Madison and Jay.

Madison's contributions, especially numbers ten and fifty-one, supplied the deepest defense of the extended republic and the separation of powers. The essays failed to carry New York quickly but became the classic commentary on the Constitution, read ever since as both political argument and political theory.

As treasury secretary, Hamilton argued that the federal government should assume the states' Revolutionary War debts, fund them at par, and pay them from a steady revenue. The measure tied the creditors' interest to the survival of the union and established the nation's credit abroad.

He followed it with a Bank of the United States, modeled on the Bank of England, to hold public funds and issue a stable currency. Jefferson and Madison objected that the Constitution did not authorize a bank, and the argument over implied powers became the first great constitutional dispute between the parties.

When Washington asked whether the bank was constitutional, Hamilton answered that the Constitution's power to tax, borrow, and regulate commerce necessarily included the choice of means to do so. A government, he wrote, ought to possess the means of executing its powers.

The doctrine of implied powers, together with the necessary and proper clause, gave Congress room to legislate beyond a literal reading of its enumerated authority. Jefferson's strict construction held that powers not expressly granted were reserved to the states, and the disagreement shaped American constitutional law for two centuries.