Federalist No. 66
The Federalist Papers, written by Alexander Hamilton and his colleagues John Jay and James Madison, were written in the late 1780s to argue in favor of the ratification of the United States Constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation, which served as the first form of a Constitution for the newly freed country. The Federalist Papers were directed towards the anti-federalists, those who opposed a stronger general government (especially the New York anti-federalists), both to persuade them and to persuade undecided citizens to ratify the Constitution.The first Federalist Paper was published on October 27, 1787 in the New York Independent Journal. The essays argued that the proposed government would preserve the Union and give power to the federal government to act on the interest of the nation.
The Complete Anti-Federalist
The professor asserts that the name "AntiFederalists" was offensive and was used to color any opponents to a strong central government as unpatriotic, when in fact many Anti-Federalists (the hyphen denotes a different meaning) were patriots of the Revolutionary War against Britain. The Anti-Federalists, Storing reveals, felt that young men like Alexander Hamilton, who was the main author of "The Federalist Papers", were going against the ideals of the Revolution by substituting a potential Monarchy (a president) in place of the individual freedom assured by the Articles of Confederation. The Anti-Federalists demanded and got a promise of a Bill of Rights so that Ratification of the 1787 constitution in 1789 would not be stillborn (a political reality reluctantly recognized by the "father" of the US constitution: James Madison.) These collections are their unabridged arguments against a strong central government. Storing infers that there may be more pamphlets and writings in existence, but these were the only ones after nearly two decades of trying that he was able to tease out of private collections and the US government.