ABSTRACT
Although James Madison wrote the Tenth Federalist in 1787 it was not until 1913, one hundred and twenty five years later, that Charles A. Beard made this particular essay famous for students of the United States Constitution. During the nineteenth century, the Tenth Federalist was generally ignored by commentators, nor is the reason difficult to discover, for it is a truism apparent to everyone who has reflected on American history that every generation sees mirrored in the Constitution its own deepest political interests. Beard's magnification of Madison, however, was essentially a by-product of the strategy in An Economic Interpretation of using the Tenth Federalist as a bomb to shatter the post-Appomattox interpretation of the Constitution. Parrington's discussion of Madison the theorist and author of Federalist 10 in Main Currents in American Thought illustrates the dilemma of a conscientious scholar carrying to a logical conclusion the half-hints, the deliberate ambiguities left unresolved by Beard.
