The Federalist #1 is reproduced in on of the plates in Chernow’s Hamilton. So, what’s up with the s that looks like an f?
A quick soundbite from Oxford Dictionaries: Tells us that it “fell out of fashion with printers rather suddenly in about 1780.” Weird! Okay, so it doesn’t appear to be that simple upon reading other sources.
The Wikipedia entry starts off with the wonderful examples of “ſinfulneſs” for “sinfulness” and “ſucceſsful/ſucceſſful” for “successful”. There is quite a bit more history across borders and continents, of course, but from a social science perspective it is interesting that the printers were first to drop it, while it took longer to disappear from manuscripts.
An in-depth entry explaining long-s and short-s differences appears at Straight Dope: Why did 18th-century writers use F inftead of S?
So, we also have Unicode to help print it today: not f, but ſ. (So the total above should have printed the word as inſtead.)
There’s an extremely in-depth discussion, including English, French, Italian, text examples, and quantitative ngram data, too, at Babel Stone: The Rules for Long S.
The font that WordPress appears to be using has a ‘look’ to that character that doesn’t seem right (missing the ‘nubbin’ to the left), but putting those other fonts versions in this post would require figuring out fonts in WordPress. So, no.
Getting that character in text form was inspired by the Wikipedia page, after which I found this video/description which led to this table. That’s some interesting WordPress (the Omega key in the visual editor) and html entities. Ah, the comments reminded me that I have a powerful machine at my fingertips—literally—MacOS. Just search in the menu bar’s Character Viewer for long s, or for the unicode key from the Wikipedia page. Done! (And belatedly realizing that I could have copied it straight from the Wikipedia quote above. Ah, well; learned something in the process.)