Resting a stack of books in my lap, I helped him clear a space upon which to write. “And how are you going to make that happen?”
“With a series of essays,” he said, the scratching of his pen competing with the creaking of the boat and the sloshing of the river against the hull. “Anonymous essays. Maybe thirty in all.”
“Thirty?” I wondered how he’d manage such a thing, given the other demands on his time. “So many?”
“There will be other writers, of course. Though our identities must remain secret.”
Not a secret from me, I hoped. “Who will help you?”
“I don’t know yet,” he replied. “I intend to recruit John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, and William Duer.” Jay was an experienced statesman and judge. Morris, a peg-legged bon vivant—the penman of the Constitution. And Duer, a wealthy New York legislator.
“Not Burr?” I asked.
Alexander frowned. “Not Burr. He’s not a man to commit himself to paper, even secretly.” I sensed, even then, there was more to it, but my husband was too caught up in his idea for me to interrupt. “The trick will be to coordinate the essays without anyone catching wind of it. How to make our writing similar enough that no outsider can deduce who wrote what, and no single man can be vilified or lionized for it.”
“Ambitious,” I said. But I didn’t realize how ambitious until we were at home, on solid ground, and I was awakened before dawn by the faint sound of knocking downstairs. Very familiar knocking.
Three quick raps followed by two slow ones.
I sat up in bed to find my husband dressing in the dark. “Is that . . . ?”
“Jemmy Madison,” my husband said, grinning. “He’s hurried back from Philadelphia to join the project.”
I was confused because I thought the project was to be by New Yorkers for New Yorkers. “But he’s a Virginian.”
“Exactly. And we need Virginia to ratify, too,” Hamilton replied, having adjusted the scope of the work by an order of magnitude. But I understood that if he was to build a whole country, he was going to have to persuade a whole country.
By the time I’d dressed and seen the children down to the kitchen for a bleary-eyed breakfast of porridge under Jenny’s watchful eye, I found the two men in the dining room, a stack of books and papers between them. It was a scene I’d witnessed a hundred times. “Does my husband have you skulking about in subterfuge at strange hours of the day and night again, Mr. Madison?”
The pale little man smiled. “I owe no small apology for waking you and your servant, Mrs. Hamilton. But I received a message last night—”
“We think we can deliver four essays a week now, instead of two,” Hamilton interrupted, slapping his hand on the table to punctuate that happy fact before looking squarely at me. “With your help . . .”
They explained that they desired me to act as a sort of courier to collect the essays from the other men’s wives, then deliver them to confidential intermediaries who would pass them to the publisher in secrecy. What thrill I felt to play a part in such a vast conspiracy!
But in the end, it was not so vast. Morris begged off. Duer’s first essay was so disappointing my husband didn’t wish for him to write more. And Jay fell terribly ill in early November after I fetched his fifth essay at a tea party with his wife, Sarah.
That left just two men to write The Federalist.
Alexander Hamilton and James Madison.
And most of it would be accomplished at my dining room table.
Every morning Madison would walk from his boardinghouse on Maiden Lane to take an early breakfast, bouncing my children on his knee as he compared notes with Hamilton over strong coffee to sketch out the new work for the day. Together, they wrote words that became weapons in the fight to create a real union, fired off at a dizzying and stupefying pace to meet their weekly publication deadlines. My husband hunched over a desk scribbling until his shoulders knotted and his lower back throbbed with pain. And many mornings Madison’s small hands literally shook with exhaustion as he tried to revive himself with my coffee after another sleepless night. I’d never before seen men exert themselves to the point of collapse by writing alone. But in those months I witnessed just that. And in every spare moment I could find between housework, prayer, and looking after four unruly children, I read each word they wrote.
If mankind were to agree to no institution of government until every part of it was perfect, society would become a scene of anarchy and the world a desert, my husband wrote.