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This article attempts to elucidate what the Federalists meant by ‘the national government’ and, by extension, the nationalism when they wrote The Federalist Papers by focusing on Alexander Hamilton’s and James Madison’s writings. This article finds that what the two Founding Fathers meant was neither ethnic nationalism nor civic nationalism as we know them from Kohn’s conceptualization of two versions of nationalism. Among other things, Hamilton and Madison’s case for the national government and the national unity was rather for creating a kind of national identity of the American people toward the newly created federal government, which should supercede the local loyalties Americans long had held after the independence. Seen in this light, the nationalism of the two Federalists was advocated in order to make room for the federal government to directly influence the American citizens individually and as a whole without the interference of the state government.
