The Real Motives Behind the Constitution: The Endless Quest

Abstract

The Real Motives Behind the Constitution: The Endless Quest Jack N. Rakove (bio) Jeff Broadwater, Jefferson, Madison, and the Making of the Constitution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Xiv + 274 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. Michael J. Klarman, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Xiii + 865 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. Of the making of many books about the Constitution, there is no end. But contrary to the wisdom of Qohelet (the Hebrew writer better known from the Septuagint as Ecclesiastes), when we discuss the Constitution—its creation, history, and interpretation—we reject the proposition that “much chatter is a weariness of the flesh”.1 In these two quite different books, Jeff Broadwater and Michael J. Klarman carry us back to the origins of the Constitution. Broadwater offers a quasi-biopic approach focusing on the famous friendship of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, arguably the most celebrated personal alliance in American political history. His book can be read as one more riff of Founders’ chic, a genre that Joseph Ellis (a great narrator though less reliable analyst) has most profitably exploited. Klarman manifestly does not worship with that cult. The Framers’ Coup is a far more ambitious work. It presents a comprehensive, thoroughly researched (by a platoon of twenty-four law students and two staff assistants) history of the adoption of the Constitution, from the “critical years” of the mid-1780s through the ratification of the first ten amendments, later known as the Bill of Rights, in 1791. Klarman’s conception of a “coup”—a point to be discussed in some detail later—hardly accords with the heroic account of the Framing/Founding that still dominates the conventional narrative. Equally noteworthy, Klarman casts himself as a latter-day Beardian, a neo-neo-Progressive historian who emphasizes the play of interests far more than the articulation of ideas. Sharing the advocatory voice of legal scholarship, Klarman wants to disabuse his readers of any un-critical loyalty—or ingrained “veneration,” to evoke a venerable moral from Madison’s Federalist 49—to the Constitution itself. [End Page 216] In nearly every conventional story of the adoption of the Constitution, Madison still stands primus inter pares. Neither Broadwater nor Klarman disputes that judgment. However one assesses Madison’s victories and defeats at the 1787 convention, no one contributed more to the task of fashioning a strategy of constitutional reform, or did more to set the Convention’s agenda, via his seminal memorandum on the “Vices of the Political System of the U. States” or through the Virginia Plan that launched the business. Equally important, Madison’s twenty-nine contributions to The Federalist, especially the celebrated Tenth and Fifty-first essays, provide the foundation for the prevailing belief that the United States still inhabits a “Madisonian constitution.” True, some efforts have been made to dislodge Madison’s authority. In her great book on ratification, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787–1788 (2010), the late Pauline Maier made a bold move by making George Washington the pivotal figure. She offered a view, not from Madison’s study at Montpelier, with its vista of the Blue Ridge, but from Washington’s verandah at Mount Vernon, rising high above the Potomac. In A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (2003), Max Edling provides a predominantly Hamiltonian account that privileges the needs of national security and the experiences of the Continental Army. William Ewald’s projected biography of James Wilson is expected to make a bold claim for the greater influence of the Scottish immigrant to Pennsylvania.2 But at least since Charles Beard first emphasized Federalist 10 in An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913), Madison has been our preeminent authority. Because Jefferson’s role in the adoption of the Constitution is more modest, Broadwater takes a certain risk in his dual-biographic venture. We can speculate whether the Constitution would have looked different had Jefferson and John Adams attended the Federal Convention, rather than fulfilling their respective diplomatic missions in Paris and London respectively. But we recall Jefferson first and foremost...