The AHA Society is hosting a series of events today and tomorrow throughout the city to celebrate Hamilton’s birthday. As part of those events, I’m giving a talk on the Croswell case and Hamilton’s role in the evolution of freedom of press in the early American Republic.  If you’re in town, come check it out today at 2:30 PM in Federal Hall (26 Wall Street) in Lower Manhattan.

Link to information on all the events: https://www.smore.com/jddf-happy-birthday-hamilton-2014

TALK: ALEXANDER HAMILTON AND THE EVOLUTION OF FREE SPEECH IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC: FROM ZENGER TO CROSWELL

WHEN: FRIDAY, JAN. 10TH, 2:30PM

WHERE: 26 WALL STREET, NEW YORK, NY

Today, September 17, 2013, marks the 226th anniversary of the signing of the United States Constitution.  Given the endurance of the Constitution over the past 226 years, it is easy to see the acceptance of the Constitution almost as an inevitable part of American history.  However, the period leading up to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and the two years before ratification in 1789 were marked by turbulence and the clash of opinions over fundamental views of the American future.  Hamilton was instrumental in tipping the scale to push forward the Constitution.

Hamilton’s Impressions as to the New Constitution, written at some point in September 1787, highlights the uncertainty that pervaded the Republic during the two-year period before the states ratified the Constitution:

“The new Constitution has in favor of its success these circumstances: A very great weight of influence of the persons who framed it, particularly in the universal popularity of General Washington. The good-will of the commercial interest throughout the States, which will give all its efforts to the establishment of a government capable of regulating, protecting, and extending the commerce of the Union. The good-will of most men of property in the several States, who wish a government of the Union able to protect them against domestic violence, and the depredations which the democratic spirit is apt to make on property, and who are besides anxious for the respectability of the nation. The hopes of the creditors of the United States, that a general government possessing the means of doing it, will pay the debt of the Union. A strong belief in the people at large of the insufficiency of the present Confederation to preserve the existence of the Union, and of the necessity of the Union to their safety and prosperity; of course, a strong desire of a change, and a predisposition to receive well the propositions of the convention.

Against its success is to be put the dissent of two of three important men1 in the convention, who will think their characters pledged to defeat the plan; the influence of many inconsiderable men in possession of considerable offices under the State governments, who will fear a diminution of their consequence, power, and emolument, by the establishment of the general government, and who can hope for nothing there; the influence of some considerable men2 in office, possessed of talents and popularity, who, partly from the same motives, and partly from a desire of playing a part in a convulsion for their own aggrandizement, will oppose the quiet adoption of the new government (some considerable men out of office, from motives of ambition, may be disposed to act the same part). Add to these causes the disinclination of the people to taxes, and of course to a strong government; the opposition of all men much in debt, who will not wish to see a government established, one object of which is to restrain the means of cheating creditors; the democratical jealousy of the people, which may be alarmed at the appearance of institutions that may seem calculated to place the power of the community in few hands, and to raise a few individuals to stations of great pre-eminence; and the influence of some foreign powers, who, from different motives, will not wish to see an energetic government established throughout the States.

In this view of the subject it is difficult to form any judgment whether the plan will be adopted or rejected. It must be essentially matter of conjecture. The present appearances and all other circumstances considered, the probability seems to be on the side of its adoption.

But the causes operating against its adoption are powerful, and there will be nothing astonishing in the contrary.

If it do not finally obtain, it is probable the discussion of the question will beget such struggles, animosities, and heats in the community, that this circumstance, conspiring with the real necessity of an essential change in our present situation, will produce civil war. Should this happen, whatever parties prevail, it is probable governments very different from the present in their principles will be established. A dismemberment of the Union, and monarchies in different portions of it, may be expected. It may, however, happen that no civil war will take place, but several republican confederacies be established between different combinations of the particular States.

A reunion with Great Britain, from universal disgust at a state of commotion, is not impossible, though not much to be feared. The most plausible shape of such a business would be the establishment of a son of the present monarch in the supreme government of this country, with a family compact.

If the government be adopted it is probable General Washington will be the President of the United States. This will ensure a wise choice of men to administer the government, and a good administration. A good administration will conciliate the confidence and affection of the people, and perhaps enable the government to acquire more consistency than the proposed constitution seems to promise for so great a country. It may then triumph altogether over the State governments, and reduce them to an entire subordination, dividing the larger States into smaller districts. The organs of the general government may also acquire additional strength.

If this should not be the case in the course of a few years, it is probable that the contests about the boundaries of power between the particular governments and the general government, and the momentum of the larger States in such contests, will produce a dissolution of the Union. This, after all, seems to be the most likely result.

But it is almost arrogance in so complicated a subject, depending so entirely on the incalculable fluctuations of the human passions, to attempt even a conjecture about the event.

It will be eight or nine months before any certain judgment can be formed respecting the adoption of the plan.”

Even after the Constitution was signed, Hamilton faced a maddeningly uncertain two-year period that saw him turn to negotiations, persuasion, and sheer charisma to convince the states that ratification was in their best interests.  Ultimately, the signing of the Constitution was merely the first step to a long ratification process.  Hamilton was instrumental in every stage of the Constitution, from conception to ratification.

(Apologies for the infrequency of recent posts.  I’ve been working on a new Hamilton project…more details to follow soon).

Researchers at the University of Adelaide in Southern Australia recently published an article in PLOS ONE (an awesome open access, peer-reviewed science journal)  entitled Automated Authorship Attribution Using Advanced Signal Classification Techniques.  The research team worked for over 10 years on developing an automatic authorship detection system that would determine authorship based on commonly used words.

Here’s the abstract from the fascinating article:

In this paper, we develop two automated authorship attribution schemes, one based on Multiple Discriminant Analysis (MDA) and the other based on a Support Vector Machine (SVM). The classification features we exploit are based on word frequencies in the text. We adopt an approach of preprocessing each text by stripping it of all characters except a-z and space. This is in order to increase the portability of the software to different types of texts. We test the methodology on a corpus of undisputed English texts, and use leave-one-out cross validation to demonstrate classification accuracies in excess of 90%. We further test our methods on theFederalist Papers, which have a partly disputed authorship and a fair degree of scholarly consensus. And finally, we apply our methodology to the question of the authorship of theLetter to the Hebrews by comparing it against a number of original Greek texts of known authorship. These tests identify where some of the limitations lie, motivating a number of open questions for future work. An open source implementation of our methodology is freely available for use at https://github.com/matthewberryman/autho​r-detection.

In order to test their research, the team first applied it to English texts with known authors, and found an accuracy rate of over 90%.  Then, they applied it to the twelve disputed essays in the Federalist Papers:

The Federalist Papers are a series of 85 political essays published under the name ‘Publius’ in 1788. At first, the real author(s) were a guarded secret, but scholars now accept that Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay are the authors. After a while Hamilton and then Madison provided their own lists declaring the authorship [31], [32]. The difference between these two lists is that there are 12 essays that both Madison and Hamilton claimed individually for themselves. So 73 texts might be considered to have known author(s) while 12 are of disputed authorship. These 12 disputed authorship texts are essay numbers 49–58, 62 and 63. An early study carried out by Mosteller and Wallace (1964) concluded that all of the disputed essays were written by Madison, with the possible exception that essay number 55 might be written by Hamilton [10], [33]. Not all researchers agree with this conclusion. Some scholars also suggest that essay number 64, which is normally attributed to Jay, is written by Madison[31], so we also consider essay number 64 as a disputed text. In total, this gives us 13 disputed essays and 72 undisputed essays. Amongst the undisputed texts, 51 essays are written by Hamilton, 14 essays are written by Madison, and 4 essays are written by Jay. Three essays (numbers 18, 19, and 20) are products of collaboration between Hamilton and Madison[34], [35].

The texts are obtained from the Project Gutenberg Archives [28]. We put aside the three essays with collaborative authorship and take the remaining 69 essays as the training dataset. The same function word list (see Table 4) is used for our MDA and SVM classifiers. Because there are three authors, MDA produces two discriminant functions, that are shown in Figure 4. For the Federalist Papers of undisputed authorship, the LOO-CV accuracy is 97.1%, close to the LOO-CV accuracy for the SVM, 95.6%. In both methods the number of function words required to achieve the highest accuracy is 75 words.

The program found that “there is a relatively high likelihood that Essay 62 was written by Madison.”  However, it was not certain about the authorship of several of the other disputed essays.  A possible reason for this is that these essays were “the products of a greater degree of collaboration between the authors, and this remains an open question for future investigation.”

Read the complete article here, and a summary here.