Federalist No. 54

Federalist No. 54

James Madison, author of Federalist No. 54
Author	James Madison
Original title	The Apportionment of Members Among the States
Language	English
Series	The Federalist
Publisher	New York Packet
Publication date	February 12, 1788
Publication place	United States
Media type	Newspaper
Preceded by	Federalist No. 53
Followed by	Federalist No. 55

Federalist Paper No. 54 is an essay by James Madison, the fifty-fourth of The Federalist Papers. It was first published by The New York Packet on February 12, 1788 under the pseudonym Publius, the name under which all The Federalist papers were published.

Titled, "The Apportionment of Members Among the States", the paper discusses how seats in the United States House of Representatives are apportioned among the states and compares the distinct reasons for apportionment for taxes and for people. Madison proposes that the "opposite interests" of states to both increase their population counts for purposes of representation and to decrease the counts for purposes of taxation would lead them to contribute to an accurate census.

The primary concern of the paper regards the inclusion of slaves in the proposed apportionment. Madison states that slaves are property as well as people and therefore require some degree of representation, which in the Constitution was to be three out of every five slaves, or 3⁄5 of the total number of slaves in a state. Madison thereby defends the Three-fifths Compromise that was adopted by the Constitutional Convention but which remained controversial and a source of friction between the states and political parties (it was annulled by the Fourteenth Amendment).^[1]

Federalist No. 54 was erroneously attributed to John Jay in Alexander Hamilton's enumeration of the authors of the various Federalist Papers. Madison was Hamilton's major collaborator, writing 29 of the papers, although Madison himself asserted that he had written more. A known error in Hamilton's list, that he incorrectly ascribed No. 54 to John Jay when in fact Jay wrote No. 64, provides evidence for Madison's claim. Nearly all of the statistical studies show that the disputed papers were written by Madison, including No. 54.