Madison wrote Federalist no. 54 as a distillation of a basic legal order about race. Altogether, the Federalist Papers are a series of documents, argumentative essays, acts of suasion and assuagement, imagination, reason and passion. No. 54 makes clear that the logic of dominion when it came to Black people and also when it came to Southern gentlemen, implicit but potent, was built into our nation’s founding.
