The framers were mortal rather than divine beings and the Constitution is a work in progress rather than holy writ.
I always marvel at the conservative penchant for treating the Federalist Papers as definitive of a collective mindset on the part of the framers. The fact is that the papers are a propaganda series that was designed to sell the Constitution to the New York electorate during the campaign for ratification. They had little impact on the national debate at that time since they were not distributed in an organized manner outside of New York state. Indeed it isn't clear what influence they had, if any, on the debate in that state.
The legend of the Federalist Papers as constitutional oracle grew up in the years subsequent to ratifcation. This despite their clear non-statutory, personal character. James Madison, the likely author of Federalist #10 among others, decried any attempt to transform the papers into authoritative constitutional documents, denying that they were anything more than fodder for the public debate reflecting the views of their authors.
Nevertheless "conservatives" love nothing more than citing the papers for their advocacy of republican virtue in contrast to the mobocracy of democracy. Ostensible advocates of bi-partisanship like to cull
criticisms of factionalism and the spirit of party from the papers in order to give their own positions a reflected lustre.
Such folks seldom reference the fact that the papers were initially composed in opposition to the Bill of Rights and that Madison only reversed himself on this point because it became apparent that the states wouldn't ratify the Constitution without one. Is the Bill of Rights any less constitutional for being forced on the framers?
Likewise in the case of factionalism, Madison soon abandoned this position by making common cause with Thomas Jefferson's Democratic Republicans against Hamilton's Federalists. That the two main authors of the Federalist Papers should find themselves in such bitter political opposition over the meaning and character of constitutional Government hardly supports the near mystical unanimity of the framers intent of which the Federalist Papers are supposedly illustrative.
The reality is that the Constitution is a political and legal document hamered out by a committee with more than its share of Lawyers and conflicting interests. As would be expected of such a document, it is an amalgam of compromise and ambiguity. No where more so than on the question of slavery, a legal term which doesn't appear in the original document even as it outlines how those "bound to service" are to be counted for purposes of legislative representation. This bit of lawyerly hedging eventually led to a bitter, bloody civil war, suggesting that compromise isn't always an unalloyed good.
To end I'll return to Madison's own view that the papers emphatically did not supply "the key" to either the constitution or the collective thought of the framers. Madison believed that debate on constitutional questions ought to be based on the text alone. As a lawyer he likely believed that debating textual meaning would provide sufficient scope for any political dispute. If he proved wrong in this it simply affirms that the framers were mortal rather than divine beings and that the Constitution is a work in progress rather than holy writ.