Julian Sink’s Reviews > The Federalist Papers > Status Update

#5: Jay looks at the union of England and Scotland into the greater nation of Britain as an example. What the anti-federalists seek is the reverse. Jay essentially predicts the civil war by telling that the north would undoubtedly become the most powerful confederacy and duel with the south. America should be a better nation built on the principles of European democracy without being subject to the same pitfalls.

#4: Jay writes that united leadership is stronger than many individual leaders and can more effectively make decisions regarding the safety of the nation through war and peace, while being free of the emotional influences that often plague individual leaders. Essentially, united we stand, divided we fall; Britain’s militia as an example as it is derived from separate nations but managed as a whole.

#3: Jay writes persuasively that a central federal government will provide for better safety and defense of the union than a collection of individual states or confederacies. An independent government makes for fewer wars as it is not wrapped up in the local feuds of states, while garnering greater power and respect from other sovereign nations with whom it has relations.

#2: Jay writes how this nation is a united people of the same language, ethnicity, and ancestry (thus the founding fathers had no notion of what the nation would grow into), a reason the union should not be dissolved into separate confederacies. The wise and learned men of the continental congress should be trusted to establish a new form of government having proved themselves in 1774 while they were still untested.

Hamilton, Madison, and Jay are not just writing in support of the new constitution, they are defending the survival of the Union to citizens who would more readily see the colonies split into separate nations than gathered together under the ratification of a single constitution and a single federal government.