Writing more bluntly in the National Intelligencer was “Publius,” which may have been Madison himself. (In 1787 and 1788, along with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, he had employed this nom de plume while writing for The Federalist.) “Must war be prepared for?” asked Publius. “Congress alone can decide the question.” The writer insisted that he was a “friend of peace…but would blush to discourage a war in a pre-eminently just cause….If we do strike, let us strike where we can be felt.”
