Notes on the State of the Constitution

Abstract

Notes on the State of the Constitution Jonathan Gienapp Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention. By Mary Sarah Bilder. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015. 368 pages. Cloth. No source has proved more important to scholarly understanding of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 than the Notes that James Madison kept as a delegate.1 Indeed, few if any sources in American history have been more extensively utilized. And yet, for all the ink spilled over the convention, Madison, and early American constitutionalism, no prior study has investigated the history of this single indispensable source. At last, Mary Sarah Bilder’s Bancroft-winning book, Madison’s Hand, fills this gaping void. In a monumental work of scholarship that will profoundly change how historians, political scientists, constitutional lawyers, jurists, and engaged citizens understand the creation of the U.S. Constitution, Bilder painstakingly reconstructs the history of Madison’s Notes. In so doing, she transforms the established understanding of them and, in turn, the Constitution. She also offers a powerful reminder of the importance of thinking carefully about the materiality of historical documents in an age of ever-proliferating volumes of printed and digitized primary sources. Since the delegates to the Philadelphia Convention famously agreed to conduct their proceedings in secret, little eyewitness testimony survives. Official journals were kept by the convention’s appointed secretary, William Jackson, but these records have long been subject to scholarly ridicule, often quite unfairly, for doing only what would have been expected (recording official motions, procedures, and vote tallies) rather than what subsequent scholars would have preferred (providing a transcript of the debates).2 Additionally, like Madison, more than ten other delegates kept [End Page 145] personal notes. But no one else’s are anywhere near as detailed or exhaustive as Madison’s, which cover every day of the convention. Without Madison’s Notes, it would be impossible to track the dynamics of the convention’s debates or to meaningfully understand why the Constitution took its ultimate shape. Madison has long been christened the “father of the Constitution,” not only because he so forcefully shaped the convention but also because he preserved the events in Philadelphia for posterity, thus ensuring that the origins of the new nation would not be, as he later put it, “buried in silence or veiled in fable.”3 Historians, often inclined to see a kindred spirit at work, have readily embraced the portrait of Madison that he himself cultivated, as a historically conscious archival steward.4 Such blithe confidence in Madison’s Notes is especially problematic given one crucial detail: he revised them, first during the convention itself and then sporadically over the course of the next decade. That the Notes were modified has long been acknowledged, but little has been known about the extent, timing, character, or importance of these revisions. Indeed, since virtually all previous scholars have approached the Notes instrumentally—using them to narrate the convention and explain the political and theoretical debates that it occasioned, rather than considering them as an object of historical analysis themselves—knowledge of the revisions has done little to dampen confidence, perhaps even blind faith, in the Notes as a more or less reliable transcript of the convention’s proceedings. Breaking with this long tradition, Bilder has produced the definitive study of this foundational historical source by writing, as she puts it, a “biography of the Notes” (1). And in finally making the Notes the protagonist of the story, she compellingly shows both that Madison’s Notes were revised far more extensively than has been realized and why the magnitude of his revisions are so important. Written in clear, crisp prose, Madison’s Hand charts the making and remaking of Madison’s Notes chronologically. The book begins by recounting the years prior to the convention when Madison acquired the habit of keeping a legislative diary during his stint in the Confederation Congress. At a time when legislative sessions were closed and their debates were not published, such diaries served as “political intelligence” (23), to enable participants to advance their own political aims and to communicate events to confidantes not in attendance. When Madison continued this tradition at the 1787...