The Authorship of the Letters from the Federal Farmer

S EARCHING out attributions of authorship for anonymous or pseudonymous pieces of writing is a difficult business, and historians are forever grateful to those who have devoted their energies to the task. It is also a business of great responsibility, for once an attribution of authorship is made it tends to get bound into the literature, taken for granted, passed on, and reinforced by repeated borrowing to the point where the source of the original attribution is long forgotten. Such seems to be the case with the important Antifederalist pamphlets, Observations Leading to a Fair Examination of the System of Government Proposed by the Late Convention ... in a Number of Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republican ([New York], I787), and An Additional Number of Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republican . . . ([New York], I788), generally attributed to Richard Henry Lee. Indeed, from the last quarter of the nineteenth century to the present every historian dealing with the debate over the Constitution, with one conspicuous exception, has unquestioningly ascribed these Federal Farmer pamphlets to Lee, an ascription that the evidence does not seem substantially to support. The two pamphlets were published in New York by Thomas Greenleaf, the first in the fall of I787 and the second in the spring of I788. They were written as a series of letters, the first pamphlet composed of five letters dating from October 8 to October I3, i787, the second running from letters six through eighteen dating from December 25, I787, through January 25, I788. Apparently the first five letters were also published in newspapers, although I have discovered only one newspaper, The County journal and Poughkeepsie Advertiser, that reprinted them.' Since Lee

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