Between the everyday atrocity of slavery and the latest news from the apothecary there appeared on page 2 of that day’s New-York Packet an essay titled THE FEDERALIST No. 1. It had been written, anonymously, by a brash thirty-year-old lawyer named Alexander Hamilton. “You are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America,” he told his readers. But more was at stake, too, he insisted; the wrong decision would result in “the general misfortune of mankind.” The United States, he argued, was an experiment in the science of politics, marking a new era in the
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