The Federalist Papers
The Federalist (later known as The Federalist Papers) is a collection of 85 articles and essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay under the pseudonym "Publius" to promote the ratification of the United States Constitution. The first 77 of these essays were published serially in the "Independent Journal", the "New York Packet", and "The Daily Advertiser" between October 1787 and April 1788. A two-volume compilation of these 77 essays and eight others was published as The Federalist: A Collection of Essays, Written in Favour of the New Constitution, as Agreed upon by the Federal Convention, September 17, 1787 by publishing firm J. & A. McLean in March and May 1788. The collection was commonly known as "The Federalist" until the name "The Federalist Papers" emerged in the 20th century.
History of American newspapers
Partisan bitterness increased during the last decade of the century as the First Party System took shape. The parties needed newspapers to communicate with their voters. New England papers were generally Federalist; in Pennsylvania there was a balance; in the West and South the Republican press predominated. Though the Federalists were vigorously supported by such able papers as Russell's "Columbian Centinel" in Boston, Isaiah Thomas's "Massachusetts Spy", "The Connecticut Courant", and, after 1793, Noah Webster's daily "Minerva" (soon renamed "Commercial Advertiser") in New York, the "Gazette of the United States", which in 1790 followed Congress and the capital to Philadelphia, was at the center of conflict, "a paper of pure Toryism", as Thomas Jefferson said, "disseminating the doctrines of monarchy, aristocracy, and the exclusion of the people." To offset the influence of this, Jefferson and Madison induced Philip Freneau, who had been editing "The Daily Advertiser" in New York, to set up a "half weekly", to "go through the states and furnish a Whig [Republican] vehicle of intelligence." Freneau's "National Gazette", which first appeared 31 October 1791, soon became the most outspoken critic of the administration of Adams, Hamilton, and Washington, and an ardent advocate of the French Revolution. Fenno and Freneau, in the "Gazette of the United States" and the "National Gazette", at once came to grips, and the campaign of personal and party abuse in partisan news reports, in virulent editorials, in poems and skits of every kind, was echoed from one end of the country to the other. The "National Gazette" closed in 1793 due to circulation problems and the political backlash against Jefferson and Madison's financial involvement in founding the paper.