
Founding Fathers


Federal Farmer: Representation Isn’t Sufficient
When it was ratified, the U.S. Constitution set a cap on the number of representatives at no more than one per 30,000 persons. In his seventh letter dated Dec. 31, 1787, the Federal Farmer argues that this constituted too few representatives to accurately reflect the...
Liberty, Power, Precedent and the People
While most people have never heard his name today, Founding Father John Dickinson was famous at the time of the Revolution. In 1767, he authored the 12 “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania” in response to the hated Townshend Acts. These essays quickly became the...
Federal Farmer: Amendments are Essential and Necessary
In his sixth letter dated Dec. 25, 1787, the Federal Farmer wrote of the “essential and necessary” inclusion of meaningful amendments to the Constitution prior to its ratification. Though some federalists like James Madison would later support proposed amendments at...
The ideas that formed the Constitution, the pioneers: Socrates, Xenophon, Plato
This is the fourth in a series of essays on the ideas behind the Constitution. You can find the first two essays here, here, and here As explained in the second installment, 18th-century schoolboys were not expected to be as proficient in Greek as in Latin. However,...