When the U.S. Constitution was ratified June 21, 1788, the two men most responsible for its success were Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, who, along with John Jay, wrote The Federalist Papers.
Four years later, they had markedly different approaches to interpreting the document they helped create.
Hamilton, perhaps because he wanted a national bank that wasn’t mentioned in the Constitution along with an active central government, came to interpret the Constitution as being open-ended: If something isn’t prohibited by the document, it is allowed — or as he and his Federalist friends might have put it, implied.
