THE AUTHORSHIP OF THE FEDERALIST 127
annual elections are arguments advanced by Madison in the Convention in favor of triennial elections. Hamilton partici- pated in the discussion, June 21 (p. 217). Like Madison, he favored triennial elections. Of the five points that he made in his speech, not one is mentioned in No. 53. If Ham- ilton wrote No. 53 he did not repeat a single one of five argu- ments which seemed good to him six months before, but devoted himself to an elaboration of the points made by Madison. It may be remarked in addition that one of the so- called Hamilton lists, that of Chancellor Kent, attributes No. 53 to Madison.
Number 54.
As additional bits of external evidence, not recorded by previous writers, it may be remarked that Madison in a letter, in 1819, casually referred to No. 54 as expressing his views, thus implying that he wrote it;^ and that in the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829 he publicly asserted his authorship of the number. ^
Again, it is to be noted that Hamilton, in the Benson list and in the list copied at his own request by J. C. Hamilton, did not claim No. 54 for himself, but assigned it to Jay.^
1 " For the grounds on which three-fifths of the slaves were admitted into ratio of representation, I will, with your permission, save trouble by referring to No. 54 of The Federalist." Letter to Robert Walsh, Nov. 27, 1819. Writings, IV, 154.
2 " Mr. Madison then rose and said that, although he was not desirous to take part in this discussion, yet under all the circumstances he was, perhaps, called on to state, that the paper in question was not written by Mr. Hamilton, or Mr. Jay, but by the third person connected with that work." Debates of the Virginia State Convention, 1829-30, 188.
^ J. C. Hamilton's edition, xcvii. In the 1810 edition, the first in which the authorship of the individual numbers was indicated, the Benson list is followed, except in the one particular, that No. 54 was assigned to Hamilton and not to Jay. No. 64, also, is assigned to Hamilton. As the assignments in this edi- tion were from a private memorandum in his own [i. e., Hamilton's] handwriting, Mr. Lodge conjectured that possibly there might have been still another list " of which nothing is now known." This conjecture is established by the statement of Mr. Charles Fenton Mercer in the Virginia Convention of 1829 in regard to the authorship of No. 54. Mr. Mercer said : " This volume, the third of an edition of Hamilton's works, the editor of which, he supposed, had obtained his
