The very existence of The Federalist is due to the roiling dissents that greeted the Constitution in the weeks following its publication. By late September 1787, informed Americans knew that three prominent members of the Philadelphia Convention – Elbridge Gerry, George Mason, and Edmund Randolph – had refused to sign the document and that they would likely make the reasons for their opposition public. The fiery “Centinel” began publishing essays in the Philadelphia Independent Gazetteer on October 5. Two weeks later, the articulate defender of the middle class, “Brutus,” started a series of essays in the New York Journal arguing the Constitution threatened self-government. This is close to the date that Alexander Hamilton wrote Federalist 1. Critics of the Constitution appeared in nearly every state. James Madison worried in a November 18 letter to George Washington that initial enthusiasm about the Constitution in Virginia had starkly subsided, “giving place to a spirit of criticism”. Madison’s first contribution to the collaboration, the now-famous Federalist 10, appeared in print only four days later.