Credit: From the office of the Delaware Gazette, Wilmington, by W. C. Smyth, 1797.
After Pennsylvania and Delaware ratified the federal Constitution, John Dickinson wrote an anonymous series of essays, published in April 1788, to create a groundswell of support for ratification in the other states. Not as famous today as the Federalist Papers, the Fabius essays received high praise from George Washington, who wrote to a friend that "Fabius, whoever he is, appears to be master of his subject; he treats it with dignity, and at the same time expresses himself in such manner as to render it intelligible to every capacity."
