Virginia is one of the recurring reference points in The Federalist’s case for a stronger union and a carefully divided government. The essays invoke it as a large state whose interests and political experience test claims about republican scale, fair taxation, military power, legislative dominance, and representation. Its constitutional record serves a double purpose: it demonstrates that formal declarations of principle do not by themselves prevent institutional dependence, while its history of resisting British authority is used to argue that popular liberty can endure elections less frequent than annual ones.

Virginia in the Federal Argument

The argument for enlarging the sphere of republican government treats Virginia as evidence against the assumption that a republic must be confined to a very small territory. In discussing Montesquieu’s preference for compact republics, the essays observe that Virginia, like Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, North Carolina, and Georgia, could not be compared with the small models to which Montesquieu’s description applied. If that description were accepted as a universal rule, the reasoning continues, the states would face an unattractive choice: retreat toward monarchy or divide into numerous small, jealous, and conflicting commonwealths. Virginia therefore figures in a broader claim that union can preserve republican government across a larger territory rather than require its abandonment.

The comparison extends beyond the size of the state. In a discussion of the ancient Greek confederacy associated with the Amphictyonic council, the essays describe sovereign members with equal votes and a council empowered to address common welfare, make war, decide disputes, impose fines, and use the confederacy’s force against disobedient members. The example is offered as a historical analogue to the American Confederation, while the narrative of Greek rivalries and the eventual domination of the confederacy warns that formal equality and common institutions are not enough to secure effective cooperation. Virginia belongs to the contemporary setting against which these historical precedents are made relevant: the question is not simply whether states retain their identities, but whether their common government can act effectively without allowing rivalry to undo the union.

Taxation and Unequal State Capacities

Virginia is used to show why a state’s population or land value cannot serve as a reliable measure of its ability to contribute revenue. The essays compare Virginia with North Carolina, Pennsylvania with Connecticut, and Maryland with New Jersey, arguing that the states’ revenue capacities bear little or no analogy to their relative landholdings or populations. Wealth, in this account, arises from many interacting conditions—including situation, soil, climate, production, government, commerce, arts, and industry—so no single, stable measure can fairly establish what each state can pay.

The argument also illustrates the point at the county level within New York: the active wealth of King’s County, the text says, is much greater in relation to Montgomery County than a comparison based on land value or population would suggest. These examples support a criticism of apportioning contributions by quotas according to a fixed proxy. Applied to Virginia and its neighboring states, the principle would risk converting apparent equality in a simple measure into glaring inequality in actual burdens. The issue is consequently both fiscal and constitutional: a common government needs resources for common purposes, but a rule that ignores materially different capacities can oppress some members while failing to secure an adequate supply.

Militia, Separation of Powers, and Institutional Practice

Virginia appears in a polemic against exaggerated claims about the proposed power to call out the militia. Critics, the essays report, imagined the militia of Virginia being taken five or six hundred miles to suppress resistance in Massachusetts, while the Massachusetts militia would be sent a comparable distance to subdue Virginians. The passage sets this speculative scenario against the practical objection it is meant to expose: a plan that purported to use citizens as instruments of oppression would risk turning them against the rulers who ordered it. Virginia is thus placed in an imagined interstate conflict, but the example is used to challenge alarmist predictions rather than to describe an actual march or deployment.

The state’s constitutional arrangements receive a more sustained examination in the discussion of separated powers. Virginia’s constitution declares the legislative, executive, and judiciary departments separate and distinct, and says that no person should exercise the powers of more than one department at the same time, subject to an exception for justices of county courts who may be eligible to either house of the Assembly. Yet the essays point to practical departures from that language: the legislature appoints the chief magistrate and executive council; it fills the principal executive and judicial offices; two members of the council are displaced every three years at the legislature’s pleasure; and, in one case, the legislative department holds the executive power of pardon. The contrast between declared separation and actual appointment and removal arrangements makes Virginia a case study in how authority can become concentrated without the constitution simply announcing that concentration as its principle.

To substantiate the effects of this arrangement, the essays turn to Thomas Jefferson’s account in Notes on the State of Virginia. Jefferson’s testimony, as quoted in the argument, describes legislative power extending into executive and judicial functions and warns that dependence for office and subsistence leaves the other departments poorly equipped to resist. If the legislature assumes powers belonging elsewhere, proceedings can be put into the form of Assembly acts, making resistance by the other branches difficult. The example is particularly pointed because Virginia’s constitutional language formally opposes intermixture: the problem is not an absence of a written rule, but the weakness of institutional barriers when appointment, tenure, and authority remain dependent on the legislature.

This evidence supports the essays’ wider account of checks and balances. A declaration that departments are separate does not ensure that they can defend their constitutional responsibilities. Each department must possess adequate means and incentives to resist encroachment, while the people remain the primary control on government. Virginia’s experience therefore serves not merely as a criticism of one state constitution, but as a practical argument for auxiliary safeguards within the proposed federal structure.

Elections, Representation, and Political Liberty

Virginia’s colonial experience is used to defend biennial elections for the federal House of Representatives. The essays note that colonial election periods varied from one to seven years and that Virginia, if the account is correct, held septennial elections under its former government. This is not offered as praise of seven-year terms or as proof that infrequent elections are preferable. The point is narrower: Virginia was among the first colonies to resist parliamentary usurpations and the first to adopt independence by public act, despite its comparatively long election interval. The example thus challenges the claim that biennial elections would themselves place liberty in danger.

That argument is qualified by institutional comparisons. The proposed federal legislature, the essays contend, would possess only part of the supreme legislative authority held by the British Parliament or exercised by colonial assemblies. It would also depend on the people and be watched by state legislatures. Because its powers would be more limited and its conduct subject to additional checks, the federal House could have a longer interval between elections without reproducing the risks associated with a legislature that held more comprehensive authority.

Virginia also helps establish why representation cannot be calculated by a simple arithmetic ratio. If its representation were set according to the proportion used in Rhode Island, the essays estimate that the state would have between four and five hundred representatives at the time, and perhaps a thousand twenty or thirty years later. The example is paired with the opposite danger: applying Pennsylvania’s ratio to Delaware would reduce that state’s assembly to seven or eight members. Neither extreme offers a sound general rule. A representative body needs enough members for consultation and discussion and to make improper combinations harder, but not so many that a multitude overwhelms deliberation. Virginia’s scale makes the tension concrete: representation must be adapted to the size of the constituency rather than expanded by mechanically applying the ratio of a much smaller state.

Political History and the Case for Union

The essays’ historical examples place Virginia within an argument against trusting political separation to produce lasting peace. They recount how Pericles’ private resentments and interests helped bring about conflict with neighboring Greek communities and the Peloponnesian War, whose eventual consequence was the ruin of the Athenian commonwealth. They also invoke the broader political observation that neighboring nations tend toward enmity unless a confederate republic both unites them and prevents the jealousies produced by proximity from taking destructive form. These accounts do not identify a specific Virginia conflict; their relevance is comparative. They give the essays a historical vocabulary for warning that neighboring political communities can become rivals even when their separation is imagined as peaceful.

Virginia’s role across these arguments is therefore not that of a single, consistent model. Its size helps challenge restrictive theories of republican government; its unequal fiscal capacity helps discredit quota rules based on population or land; its militia appears in a hypothetical used to rebut predictions of domestic military oppression; its constitution exposes the gap between formal separation and effective independence; and its colonial record supports the case for biennial elections. Taken together, these uses make Virginia a test case for the Federalist method: state institutions and history are examined not as abstract ideals, but as evidence about how political rules operate, where they fail, and what safeguards a wider union requires.