Federalist No. 10 - Background

Background

Prior to the Constitution, the thirteen states were bound together by the Articles of Confederation, which was essentially a military alliance between sovereign nations used to fight the Revolutionary War. Congress had no power to tax, and as a result was not paying the debts left over from the Revolution. Madison, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and others feared a break-up of the union and national bankruptcy. Like Washington, Madison felt the revolution had not resolved the social problems that had triggered it, and the excesses ascribed to the King were now coming from the state legislatures. Shays' Rebellion, an armed uprising in Massachusetts in 1786, was therefore but an extreme example of democratic excess in the aftermath of the War.

A national convention was called for May 1787, to revise the Articles of Confederation. Madison believed that the problem was not with the Articles but the state legislatures, and so the solution was not to fix the articles but to restrain the excesses of the states. The principal questions before the convention became whether the states should remain sovereign, whether sovereignty should be transferred to the national government, or whether a settlement should rest somewhere in between. By mid-June it was clear that the convention was drafting a new plan of government around these issues—a constitution. Madison's nationalist position shifted the debate increasingly away from a position of pure state sovereignty, and toward the compromise. In debate on June 26, he said that government ought to "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority" and that unchecked, democratic communities were subject to "the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions".