24 August 2018
The federalist papers were some of the most important governmental papers written in the United States, because they were attempting to persuade states to ratify the constitution. Federalist Paper Number 10 was written by Madison, over the course of the essay the main focus is factions. A great example of factions is any high school. Even though no one has made group for kids to be in over the course of time groups inevitably form. Madison talked about this idea in government saying that people will come together and create these factions. According to Madison the one defining factor of a faction is the unequal distribution of property. Since the majority of the people don’t own a lot, a fear madison had is that the poor would rise up and hurt the rich. So here Madison says there are two things that can be done. Either you control the source of faction or control the effect of factions. But the problem according to Madison is that you cannot control the source of factions without hurting freedom and liberties in the process. His idea was controlling the effects of factions using the republic. In the paper there are three main arguments made. The first argument is that a large republic lead to less corruption, because each leader will be held more accountable and there is less chance to fool all of the people using forms of manipulation.The second idea is that a large republic will cause factions to not be as hurtful to a government because it’s harder for a faction to unify when there are so many people involved. The third idea is without a large republic and you won’t have a unified country. In his opinion in a large republic since there are so many voices involved most will be muted and there won’t be a large enough function to pull the country apart.
Federalist Paper number 51 was also written by Madison. A good way to sum up this paper is with a quote straight from it. “If men were Angels, no government would be necessary” – James Madison. The biggest fear the founding fathers had was tyranny. Madison wanted to find a way to prevent tyranny by setting up a certain structure of government. This structure was proposed like this. At a federal level the government has three branches, legislative, executive, and judicial. Every branch has power over the other branch which leads to creating checks and balances. Dividing the powers is what would prevent tyranny. Madison wanted people to stop worrying about losing their liberty because all of this was built in to actually protect them. Once again Madison mentions factions and how a big republic will lead to lots of factions which will prevent tyranny.