From May 30 to June 1, 2013, the David Library of the American Revolution, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Museum of the American Revolution, and the American Philosophical Society held a major conference, “The American Revolution Reborn,” at Benjamin Franklin Hall in Philadelphia. The conference attracted over 300 attendees and a veritable avalanche of social media coverage and discussion.

The success of the conference was beyond what we as organizers ever imagined. HISTORY came to the conference and produced ten short videos for its Website. The University of Pennsylvania Press and the McNeil Center will publish an anthology of the essays. And, as you are about to read, Common-place is hosting an online symposium on the conference, which includes the essays written by our commentators and new video from HISTORY. Before you get to these essays and videos, however, we would like to take a moment to tell you about the conference’s origins and its innovative design, something that we believe is distilled in the format in which we have decided to present these essays on Common-place.

Left to our own devices, neither one of us would ever have thought of helping to put together these essays or of organizing the conference from which they arise. All we ever meant to do was honor our friendship with Frank Fox.

To galvanize new thinking about the Revolution, we had to have more than just fresh perspectives. We had to have an audience engaged enough to notice them.

Frank came into our lives relatively late in his. He’d been a musician and then, improbably, a publisher of textbooks. Hardly anyone gets rich blowing a horn, and he certainly didn’t. But he had a good career selling books. And after he was done with that journey, he decided to embark on a new one. He would write books of his own. History books.

Frank began with his own family’s past. But his genealogical pursuits soon led him to ask larger questions, questions about Pennsylvania’s past and the country’s founding. Soon, he was writing a brilliantly quirky book, Sweet Land of Liberty, on Northampton County, Pennsylvania, in the years of the American Revolution. Then he set his sights on a more formidable target: the financing of the fighting in revolutionary Pennsylvania more largely. He became so immersed in his projects that he moved from Boston to Philadelphia so he could be closer to the relevant archives and to the community of the McNeil Center.

As Frank plunged into the past, he became more involved in the profession, attending conferences and McNeil Center seminars, even writing pieces for scholarly journals. He was enthralled. And we grew ever more enthralled with him. We prized his comradeship. We thrilled to keep him company as he found a true calling in this third act of his life. But as time wore on, he became more and more aware that the scholarly world was paying less and less attention to the event that fired his passion and consumed his interest, the American Revolution. Convinced that he could not, himself, reverse this drift, he turned to us and offered a challenge: a start-up gift to organize a conference that would re-energize the study of the Revolution. We couldn’t say no to him.

So we set about to create a conference that would renew a field that seemed to have grown stale and, at bottom, tired of itself. For decades, the interpretation of the Revolution had been losing its verve and, worse, its center. Even among the diminishing number who continued to want to work in the era of Independence, many were taking up topics ever further from the political rebellion itself. As we began thinking about the conference, we were clear only that we meant to take up Frank’s challenge to revivify the study of the Revolution.

As good academics, we began by assembling an advisory committee. At that point, one of us was just finishing his Ph.D., the other just turning emeritus. So we sought others from the rest of the career range, to maximize our access to fresh ideas across the scholarly generations. We asked six to join us: Kathleen DuVal, Woody Holton, Benjamin Irvin, Brendan McConville, Andrew O’Shaughnessy, and Rosemarie Zagarri. When we brought them together for the first time, we were relieved to find that they shared not only our conviction that the study of the Revolution had been too long in thrall to concepts and controversies now half a century old but also our hope that together we could design a conference that might create a new paradigm for the field.

We spent the better part of our first meeting with our advisory committee crystallizing four themes upon which to organize the conference. We wanted themes that could at once draw on emergent work in the existing scholarship and spur new approaches. We settled on violence, civil war, power, and religion. Then we put out a call for proposals and waited for those proposals to arrive. When they did, we were surprised to discover that we had remarkably few proposals on religion and several stronger ones that saw the Revolution and its legacies in an international context. We all agreed to abandon the sessions we’d envisioned on religion and to add sessions on global perspectives, though we all continue to believe—and the conversations at the conference supported our belief—that religion and the Revolution is a subject ripe for future study.

As much as we worried over the content of the conference, we worried every bit as much about its form. None of us relished the prospect of another meeting in which one perfectly fine historian after another read one perfectly fine paper after another, leaving scant time for comments and questions from the audience. To galvanize new thinking about the Revolution, we had to have more than just fresh perspectives. We had to have an audience engaged enough to notice them, an audience that was not drifting off as one recitation blurred into another, an audience that actually participated in the production of those fresh perspectives.

It took months to figure out that new format for an academic meeting. Rather than have presenters read or pre-circulate the extended essays that we would later edit for book publication, we would ask them to prepare before the conference a ten-page version of their work that would convey its argument and offer a fair flavor of its evidence. This condensed version would be posted on the conference Website, to be read ahead of time by those attending. All the papers together would require just 140 pages of reading. Presenters could then assume that the audience had done its homework and that they were free to do something other than summarize their longer papers at the conference itself. We could then ask presenters to do whatever they did at the conference in no more than eight minutes. With three or four presentations in each paper session, there would be half an hour of presentations and a full hour for responses from the audience. No one would fall asleep.

Of course, you were not at the conference, and you are not now about to read those conference papers. No matter.

What you are about to read is what followed those paper panels. We decided that each theme should have a commentary session in which leading scholars would respond to the previous session, speak about the theme, or do whatever they thought most urgent to do. This, we hoped, would encourage the type of conversation that might spur even more scholarship. Indeed, these sessions proved dynamic and engaging, as we think you will soon see for yourselves. In preparing them for this special issue of Common-place, we have tried to recapture the spirit of passionate and even unruly exchange which characterized the conference.

The transformative terms of the paper sessions enabled us to reconceive the terms of the commentary sessions too. Just as the new format liberated our paper-presenters to presume on and depart from the papers they had posted on the Website, so it freed our commentators from the obligations of commentary on the papers they had nominally been assigned. Since those papers had already had an hour of audience response, we could invite the commentators—who also had just eight minutes each, so as to leave the preponderance of their sessions for audience response as well—to bypass the papers if they pleased and to offer their own largest thoughts on the theme at hand.

We felt free to allow our commentators such liberties because we’d chosen them for their flair for thinking large thoughts. We encouraged them to take such liberties because, in most cases, we’d chosen them because they hadn’t thought their large thoughts about the Revolution before. They were historians of the era who had never written consequentially about the Revolution itself. Or historians of other periods and places. Or historians of the Revolution who were not American. Or scholars who were not historians. In short, we’d sought voices that hadn’t been heard before, even by the speakers themselves. We wanted analyses that our commentators might be formulating for the first time, because no one had ever asked them what they thought before.

You will see at once that we have not rounded up the usual suspects. Our contributors come from Australia, China, and the U.K., from departments of art history and English as well as history. Very few of them are specialists in the American Revolution. The rest—even the ones among them who are historians based in the United States—are variously historians of England, of American religion, of international labor, and of the environment. You are about to find out what they said and what the audience thought.

We think you will find that they have dazzling and distinctive things to say, things that they have rarely if ever said in public before. They are not at the pinnacles of their professions for nothing. If they do not concur in pointing toward a new paradigm—the fondest of our fantasies when we first conceived the conference—they do diverge in tantalizing ways.

We have also tried to convey the tone and feel of the conference in the way we present these essays to you. We wanted our meeting to be as much about conversation as it was about formal presentations. Digital technology now allows us to give the world a taste of the discussion that coursed through the conference and to engage with it remotely. Thanks to HISTORY, we have video of all the Friday and Saturday sessions. Thanks to Peter Kotowski, a graduate student at Loyola University Chicago, we have identified some of the most probing questions from the audience at the conference and included them as videos in each essay. We invite readers to read the essay, watch the video, and continue the discussion that began in Philadelphia in the open comment sections that follow each video.

We hope you see in this symposium what we do: a beginning of the renewal of the study of the American Revolution. We thank Frank Fox for his vision.

This article originally appeared in issue 14.3 (Spring, 2014).

Michael Zuckerman began teaching history at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965. Although he is now professor of history emeritus, he still teaches courses at Penn.

Patrick Spero is an assistant professor of History and Leadership Studies at Williams College. He co-organized “The American Revolution Reborn” with Michael Zuckerman.

To assess how the Founders’ goal of creating a deliberative democracy has fared in recent years, we need to look in at least two directions: first at the massive postframing changes in both American institutions and our conceptions of rights (especially during the New Deal) and second at recent technological changes that allow information to spread instantly across large distances. In both respects, the nation that the Constitution helped create has changed quite dramatically in the last fifty years.

In some respects, the Framers’ constitution remains alive and well. Understood as an effort to create a deliberative democracy, the constitutional plan has succeeded in many ways. Perhaps above all, the system of checks and balances has ensured a measure of reflection and circumspection in government. Consider, for example, the cumbersome processes for the enactment of legislation, which provide an excellent check on the most ill considered measures. The failure to convict President Clinton, after an unconstitutional impeachment by the House of Representatives, is also a tribute to checks and balances. Or we might also look to the recent debate over measures to combat terrorism. The law eventually enacted by Congress (informally called the Patriot Act) was far more cautious and circumspect than early drafts. The system of checks and balances was the reason. Here too the Constitution’s deliberative mechanisms made things much better than they would otherwise have been. The process of deliberations between Congress and the president, leading to basically fair and even elaborate procedures in military tribunals, provides yet another illustration.

Yet in other significant ways, our Constitution is not really the Framers’ constitution. They would see huge differences between their handiwork and our institutions and our rights. I don’t mean to refer to the obvious fact that the document has been amended in major ways, beginning, of course, in 1789. The more interesting source of change has been on the interpretive side. The cornerstones of the Constitution include the system of checks and balances, federalism, and individual rights. And none of these is what it originally was. Abraham Lincoln was of course an important “framer,” in the sense that his views about the union, and about slavery, helped to produce large-scale constitutional change. But much has happened in the last hundred years. We might even see Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr., as Framers, insofar as they contributed to significant alterations in our understanding of the founding document.

With respect to federalism, the twentieth century has witnessed a massive increase in the power of the national government, produced above all but not only by the New Deal. I would not describe this shift as unconstitutional, because the text allows for a lot of flexibility. But there is no denying the change. The same is true for checks and balances. In part because of the growing role of the United States in the world, but in part because of the need for strong domestic leadership, the president is far more powerful than he was originally supposed to be. The Framers would have a hard time recognizing the modern presidency, brought about above all by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And we have also seen the rise of administrative agencies, independent and executive, far beyond Hamilton’s wildest dreams. Our rights have changed radically as well, with, for example, much more expansive protections of speech and criminal defendants than John Adams, for one, could ever have anticipated.

In all these respects, the Constitution’s meaning has been altered through the acts not merely of the courts, but of all three branches of government. In 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt contended that the Constitution’s original “political rights proved inadequate,” and he argued that we “have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all.” The second Bill of Rights was said to include (among other things) the right to education, the right to a remunerative job, the right to be free from unfair competition at home or abroad, the right to a decent home, and the right to adequate medical care. The Constitution has not, of course, been amended to include these rights, but Roosevelt did capture a large-scale shift in American government, in which “rights” of this sort have increasingly been the basis of political deliberation. The larger point is that both our institutions and our rights owe a great deal to changes introduced in the relatively recent past, and less than we usually think to the Framers’ own design.

With respect to deliberation and democracy, there is a related point. Despite the expansion of the United States across a vast amount of space throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, technological changes have, in a key sense, made the nation much “smaller” than it was at the founding. The Framers’ conception of the relationship between citizen and government had everything to do with the belief that people would know those in their own states, but have much less contact with (and understanding of) people in other states. The institution of the electoral college cannot be adequately understood unless we keep this point in mind. The Framers believed that citizens would have little knowledge of candidates from other states and would be far more likely to know electors–an odd idea today, to say the least.

Because of the rise of the mass media, including radio and television, and now because of the Internet, processes of political deliberation are radically different from what was anticipated. This has many different consequences. It’s very easy to be in contact, even in regular contact, with people in different states and even different nations. Regional rivalries have hardly disappeared, but people do not consider those far away to be strangers in any sense; and often the grounds of political competition are not regional at all. The Framers’ intense preoccupation with contests among the states is hard for us to understand. New technologies offer new and wonderful opportunities for political deliberation, in ways that the Framers could not possibly have foreseen.

At the same time, new technologies create some new risks, especially if like-minded people engage in deliberation mostly with one another. On the Internet, for example, it is easy to spend most of your time reading material by people who agree with you, and to talk only with those who share your interests and commitments. One of the most striking findings in social psychology is that when like-minded people speak mostly with one another, they tend to go to extremes–to a more extreme point in line with their original tendencies. This means that if people of one ideological stripe congregate together, they might well end up taking an extreme position. This is no truer, of course, now than in the founding era, and the Framers were aware of risks of this sort. But in some ways, new technologies have aggravated the problem, because they make it so easy for people to live in echo chambers of their own devising.

In terms of founding ideals, the resulting picture is mixed. Information is crucial to deliberation, and people are able to have a lot more information from many more places a lot more quickly. But there is fresh reason to pay attention to the Framers’ fear that factions, organized by passion or interest, can overwhelm deliberative processes and obtain ill considered legislation. With new technologies, people are increasingly able to sort themselves into groups of the like-minded, and this can undermine the Constitution’s institutions. Here again a recent example is the unconstitutional impeachment of President Clinton. Another is the use of the Internet to spread hatred, not least the kind of hatred that leads to violence and even terrorism.

In brief, many of the goals of the Constitution have indeed been realized, if we describe those goals as including the achievement of a deliberative democracy. But because of technological change, there are new challenges to both deliberation and democracy, challenges that could not possibly have been anticipated during the founding. And the Constitution’s success owes a great deal to people who did their work long after the Framers did theirs. Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King Jr., among others, are best seen as constitutional Framers. Undoubtedly many more will follow them.

This article originally appeared in issue 2.4 (July, 2002).

Common-place asks Cass R. Sunstein, professor of law at the University of Chicago, occasional adviser to the executive and legislative branches of the United States government, and author of Designing Democracy: What Constitutions Do (New York, 2001) and Republic.com (Princeton, N.J., 2001), what the last two centuries have done to the Founders’ goals of creating a deliberative democracy.

Paul Soifer, Abraham Hoffman, and D. Stephen Voss, CliffsQuickReview: American Government, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001. 180 pp., $9.99. Paul Soifer and Abraham Hoffman, CliffsAP: United States History Preparation Guide, 3d ed., New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000. 294 pp., $16.99. George F. Willison, CliffsNotes on The Federalist, New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1971. 109 pp., $4.95.

If this is Wednesday, it must be the bicentennial or the tercentennial of some sacred event in our national history. Celebration of such anniversaries has become a cottage industry in our country, part of a booming economy in popular history that includes growing attendance at historical museums, mushrooming sales for popular histories, and a craze of historical novels. History has become a major item on the World Wide Web, and movie audiences have gravitated to historical films in record numbers.

Paradoxically all of this comes at a time when, as historian Kenneth Jackson put it in his 2002 Organization of American Historians presidential address, history is “flunking as a profession.” Professor Jackson offers a number of reasons for this somber judgment, all of which seem plausible to me, and recent accusations of plagiarism and fabrication of primary sources against some academic historians have not helped the reputation of the profession as a whole, but the study guides under review here offer another reason why our profession is staggering. Top research scholars have failed, despite repeated and earnest efforts, to convey to the general reader, the secondary school teacher, and students the complexity and irony of American history.

This charge is particularly appropriate for those of us who, like me, teach the U.S. history survey. We salute the achievements of the dead. We summon up the yearning and striving of those whose sacrifices made our nation possible. We analyze the thinking of those who framed the laws by which we govern ourselves. True, we recognize the too often empty rhetoric of equality, the broken promises to many left out of the polity for so long, the way that property seems to trump dignity in so much of our law, and the conflict and competition that undermine community. But our story remains one of the progressive fulfillment of an American dream.

In this task of celebration we are aided by “study guides.” When I was a student in the 1960s, I prepared my own study guides by redacting my reading and class lecture notes, but commercial study guides were already widely available. They still are. Some are free standing, like those prepared by CliffsAP (the newest version of CliffsNotes). Others, termed “student guides,” accompany commercial textbooks in American history.

The study guide, official or unofficial, is the least common denominator and the most common purchase at most of our state colleges and universities. All of our boards of regents demand that degree candidates pass courses in the U.S. Constitution and U.S. history. We historians should not complain about such boilerplate “core” curriculums. The survey course requirement forces us to abandon all pose of elitism, and accept the basic proposition that we and our survey courses are the place where college students will learn about our history. And no matter how well we lecture, how well we relate the past to the present or empower our students to learn for themselves, the study guide and its cousins are going to be there, on the students’ desks and in their book bags. How well do these three study guides introduce the federal Constitution to history students? (The editors of Common-place and the author of this review had hoped to add to it an Idiot’s Guide to the Constitution and a Constitution for Dummies, but neither exists–a striking lacuna in a list of publications that includes all manner of other guides for the uninformed. The oversight may be an accident, or it may be that the Constitution is not for dummies or idiots. Or it may be that the stakes of historicizing the Constitution are higher than the stakes of writing about computer software and foreign languages.)

How we read the historical Constitution influences how we make law. One school of interpretation of the Constitution, sometimes called the originalism or original intent school, argues that we must understand the Constitution in the light of the meaning given to its provisions by their Framers. The academic debate over originalism occurs in the shadow of appellate courthouses, and judges are wont to reach for an original meaning when it corresponds with their opinion. The foremost modern student of the historical Constitution, Jack Rakove, attempts to disarm the originalism issue by distinguishing among original meaning (which be defines as contemporary late eighteenth-century English and American usages), intention (how the Framers meant the terms to function) and understanding (how the terms were read by contemporary and later audiences). Unfortunately, in textbooks, lectures, and study guides, such precision is rarely attempted. It would go over the heads of students and lay readers.

It would not be fair, thus, to hold the authors of study guides to the high standards of historical detail and analytical breadth in a work as brilliant as Rakove’s. What standards ought apply to the study guide, then? Surely clarity, for one, and factual accuracy, for a second. But history is more than one fact after another, and we ought to be able to require the authors of study guides to analyze context. In fact, the study guides pay a good deal of attention to the internal analysis of the Constitution: explaining the division and separation of powers; following the many compromises of the Framers on representation, slavery, the executive; and making intellectual sense of the arguments. Analysis of the external context is much harder but just as necessary. Indeed, the writing of the Constitution and the writing in the Constitution cannot be understood without looking at the political and economic history of the preceding years, and those years are still the subject of serious controversy among historians.

One can date the onset of that controversy variously, for the debate over the meaning of the Constitution between its advocates and its critics in 1788 was in a fashion a debate over the history of the American Revolution. For modern scholars, the debate began anew with the publication of Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States in 1913. Beard claimed that the Constitution was the work of creditors and speculators. Although Forrest McDonald among others questioned that interpretation, historians like Merrill Jensen accepted it, and portrayed the Constitution as the capstone of a Thermidorean counterrevolution. The debate is much more sophisticated now, due in large measure to the work of Gordon Wood, and it is old hat to historians, but one can still ask if a study guide can do–or should try to do–justice to the many scholarly perspectives on the context of the Constitutional Convention and its leaders. The answer is that we cannot expect a study guide to do more than barely outline the various positions. From my own experience I can vouch that students both dislike and refuse to remember historiography. They want someone to tell them which of the positions is the soundest (and to be fair that is what the scholars are trying to do as well). It is we teachers who want to muddy the waters.

Soifer and Hoffman’s study guide to United States history is AP-test driven. Its purpose is not to review the material so much as teach the skills necessary to pass the Advanced Placement Examination in United States History. Thus the entirety of the chapter “The Constitution and the Federalists, 1787-1800” is four pages (101-05). Under the heading “things to know” are “the major compromises, representation, slavery, election of the president, the principles embodied in the Constitution . . . Federalists vs. Antifederalists; Amendments to the Constitution.” The key terms section and the “important definitions section” follow the same set of implications. There are those who object, but no one is the loser. The era of the Constitution is one of political and legal achievement, and the two are intertwined. That is, the progress in the law is the result of political empowerment of the people. There is a straight line from the Revolution to the Constitution, suggesting that the latter completes the former. There is no mention of the absence of more than two-thirds of the people from the electorate. There is no mention of the vital importance of the concept of property, indeed the emergence of the concept of private property, that the Constitution (and the Bill of Rights) enshrines. For more on the period the authors send the reader to textbooks, after explaining how they are to be read.

Soifer, Hoffman, and Voss’s American Government devotes an entire chapter to the Constitution. Its central theme is that the Constitution was “a list of Do’s and Don’ts” defining the “contract” between “rulers and ruled.” The Constitution “evolved” (here meaning came into existence rather than altered itself) “to fulfill this desire for a binding contract,” the authors implying that the Constitution was the natural conclusion to the desire for self-government expressed in the Revolution. This is “consensus history” with a vengeance. There’s no room for the dissenters, the marginal, the oppressed. They did not exist. In fact, no one is oppressed by these laws because the only people present are the Framers.

According to the authors, the Constitution differed from the constitutions of other nations “because it was a written code that the government lacked authority to change” (3, italics in original). Perhaps this was the intention of its Framers, but the Constitution has changed as a result of government action: the powers and purview of the federal government expanding into areas of everyday private life in ways unimaginable in 1787; the relationship between the federal government and the states changing dramatically even before the Fourteenth Amendment was conceived; the role of the presidency and the courts growing in proportion as both of these branches of government took upon themselves new functions. What is more, as the Framers well knew, in the years before 1787 there were a number of written codes that preceded governments and limited them. Ancient Greek city-states, ancient Rome, Swiss cantons, Poland, and the Scandinavian countries at one time or another had such codes. They differed from the federal Constitution not in being oral or open-ended, but in having the wrong balance within the branches of government, or the wrong basis for representation, or the wrong kind of executive.

The authors next summarize the historical context of Revolutionary constitutionalism. The Continental Congress “assumed governmental functions . . . without legal authority to do so.” Jefferson based the Declaration of Independence largely on John Locke’s Two Treatises. He needed little help and no other sources of his ideas are mentioned. The state constitutions reflected the idea that “the people were the source of power.” In them, “individual liberties were usually safeguarded” (4). By this time in my course I’ve lectured on slavery, anti-Catholicism, and the legal debilities of women in the early republic. Most of the state constitutions in various ways supported these positions, even when they prefaced themselves with portions from the Declaration of Independence. Even the author of that document did not support laws freeing the slaves, giving full citizenship to Roman Catholics, or enfranchising women. Mentioning all of this may be presentist on my part (although Thomas Paine, Ethan Allen, Benjamin Franklin, Elbridge Gerry, Benjamin Rush, and other revolutionaries spoke of one or more of these reforms at the time), but surely the study guide ought to warn the students that not all the people were “people” under the law. And please, please, spell Shays’s Rebellion correctly; his name was Daniel Shays, not Shay (5).

Slavery finally makes its appearance in a section entitled “Decisions on slavery” near the end of the discussion of the compromises at the Philadelphia convention. “Slaves were a significant percentage of the population of the southern states” is the only demographic or economic depiction of early slavery in the entire book. There is no mention of the many slaves in New York City or Philadelphia at the time of the convention; of the importance of slavery as a system of labor; of the investment that owners had in slave property; or of the threat of South Carolina, whose slave trade was a major industry, and Georgia, whose need for slaves made it the major consumer of the trade, to bolt the convention if some provision were not made for their “peculiar institution.” There is also no mention of the Rendition Clause of the Constitution that “No person, held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due” (U.S. Const. Art. IV, Sec. 2). This provision was the explicit sanction for the Fugitive Slave Laws of 1793 and 1850, and was understood at the time and subsequently to be a major concession to the slave-holding states and the slave owners therein. The controversy over the legality of slave catching in the North was one, if not the principal, cause of the Civil War. Leaving out this provision in particular, and the discussion of slavery and the Constitution as a whole, is a serious charge against the value of this study guide. The students, sadly, will not know how much they have missed.

The next portion of the chapter is devoted to “Key Concepts.” Two of these, “checks and balances” and “federalism,” are not mentioned in the Constitution itself, which raises a number of questions. The word slavery, for example, never appears. The Constitution has in it a number of provisions, like the Three-fifths Clause, the reference to the “migration or immigration of such persons” in Art I, Sec. 9 (the overseas slave-trade provision), and the Rendition Clause, that never mention slavery but clearly reference it. To what extent are other key legal institutions actually extraconstitutional? There is no mention of administration or bureaucracy in the Constitution. How could the new government run without these? Consider political parties. Within a decade of the ratification of the Constitution the two party system had become a hallmark of national politics. Without them, the federal government could not organize itself, but there is no provision for them in the written contract of rulers and ruled drafted in 1787. What about the idea of rights? In the original of the Constitution the word is not used. It first appears in the amendments proposed by James Madison at the first session of the U.S. Congress. If notions of liberty, equality, and freedom were basic to the Revolution, why were they invisible in the language of the Framers at Philadelphia? What might this mean and why would it be important to students?

What it means is that any adequate summary of the Constitution must concern itself with silences and gaps as well as text. The authors had the chance to ask students about these silences in the “critical thinking” section that ends the chapter. Instead, they ask students to make up a new amendment to the Constitution that “establishes a critical ‘right’ not currently protected.” I like this exercise, and will borrow it when I next teach legal history, but wonder if it could have been used to promote historical critical thinking. Perhaps the authors might have asked why the Framers did not voice some of the silences or fill some of the gaps in the letter of the Constitution at the time it was written. One thus comes away from these two study guides with the conclusion that the course of our early constitutionalism was smooth and consensual, a conclusion that fits the celebratory mode of contemporary popular histories.

Willison’s The Federalist is an able exposition of the essays, prefaced by three short biographies, and divided into expository and analytical sections on each of the numbers. Although it is now thirty years old, and its laudatory tone may be read as early 1970s consensus political science in a time when riotous divisiveness seemed everywhere, Willison’s study guide is a model of careful prose and sound judgment. The review questions are thoughtful and probing. Would that all study guides be this literate, balanced, and informative.

But even Willison’s work teeters at the edge of the trap that celebratory history has laid for students and teachers. Such celebrations of events are not intended to offer varying perspectives or controversial interpretations. Instead, the celebrations take the form of rituals to which we all are expected to consent. Despite (or perhaps because of) the controversy over the fashioning of a national curriculum for American history in secondary schools, much of history that we cover in the classroom remains celebratory. There is much to celebrate but the study of American history should be more than mere celebration and our study guides should foster inquiry rather than obeisance.

Further Reading: See Merrill Jensen, The New Nation: A History of the United States During the Confederation, 1781-1789 (New York, 1961); Kenneth Jackson, “The Power of History: The Weakness of a Profession” Journal of American History 88 (March 2002), 1299-1314; Leonard W. Levy, Original Intent and the Framers’ Constitution (New York, 1988); Forrest McDonald, We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution (New York, 1958); Gary Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (New York, 1997); Jack Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York, 1996), chaps. 7-8; Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969) and The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1991).

This article originally appeared in issue 2.4 (July, 2002).

Peter Charles Hoffer is Distinguished Research Professor of History at the University of Georgia and specializes in early American legal history. He is working on a study guide for American History I for the College Network.

It was a frigid cold afternoon in February 1988 when I first took students to participate in the district level competition at Syosset High School, Long Island, New York, of the “We the People” program on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. “Be confident in yourselves,” I told my high schoolers during the long bus ride, as they anticipated stepping on stage to join a simulated congressional hearing. “You can speak eloquently about how the founding of our nation has been an adventure in ideas.” One student, in his youthful enthusiasm, laughed, “This is America, baby. We want to win.” His remark was a reflection of the healthy competitiveness that the program’s course of study promotes. Yet the competitive spirit is grounded in cooperation, for the students have to work together in teams to develop their ideas in depth on a specific topic. “We the People” (formerly known as the Bicentennial Competition on the Constitution) was founded in 1987, chaired by former Chief Justice Warren Burger, and is conducted by the Center for Civic Education. Its premise is that what defines us as a nation is the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights; we are held together by our shared beliefs in the values of liberty, equality, and justice. Students begin a six-month program by studying the text We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution, whose topics include:

• What were the philosophical and historical foundations of the American political system?
• How did the Framers create the Constitution?
• How did the principles and values embodied in the Constitution shape American institutions and practices?
• How have the protections of the Bill of Rights been developed and expanded?
• What rights does the Bill of Rights protect?
• What are the roles of the citizen in American democracy?

The classroom lessons are supplemented by in-depth study of each of the units. Students are divided into six groups of three or four each (depending on the size of the class). Each of the groups prepares a four-minute opening speech on each of three questions. The opening speeches are presented at a district/regional competition in January; the opening remarks are followed by a six-minute questioning period on the specific topic and the overall knowledge of the course. The students must work cooperatively on developing the opening speeches and answering the follow-up questions. Each unit is judged on the following criteria:

• Understanding
• Constitutional application
• Reasoning
• Supporting evidence
• Responsiveness
• Participation

The class that wins the most points will be eligible to compete at the state level. It sounds complicated but it works extremely well. Let’s follow Unit One from the classroom lesson to the simulated hearing at both the district and state levels. The three questions for preparation in Unit One are:

• How were the Founder’s views about government influenced by both classical republicans and natural rights philosophers?
• What are the fundamental characteristics of a constitutional government?
• What effect did colonial experiences have on the Founder’s views about rights and government?

Classical republicanism is a difficult topic for students to understand and so the classroom lesson focused on the story of Cincinnatus and civic virtue. John Barralet’s engraving, General Washington’s Resignation, was distributed to students and analyzed in connection with the Cincinnatus story.

In class discussion, I asked my students what “the plow awaits the plowman,” meant. Where is George Washington’s hand pointing and why? What is Lady Liberty offering him? How does he respond? How do his actions illustrate the story of Cincinnatus? How are his actions a major tenet of classical republicanism? How does classical republicanism shape contemporary political culture? Many students feel that it is an outdated idea. “It’s positively frightening,” one student remarked, “because one has to sacrifice his rights for the common good. Who can determine the common good? How do we know what it is?” “Perhaps,” said another student, “George Washington was fulfilling his own power struggle and not really sacrificing power for the common good.” Another student disagreed, pointing out that Washington gave up the presidency after two terms. “Who gives up power? He must have been acting on the principles of classical republicanism.” A slightly different debate went on at the congressional hearing where this question was called. The students were asked why classical republicanism held that military service was important and whether they thought military service should be mandatory. Students understood the concept of citizen-soldier because of the classroom discussions and their in-depth study of the situation. However, the unit members disagreed among themselves as to whether military service should be mandatory. One student asserted, “Classical republicanism is not relevant today. Citizen-soldiers preparing to defend their country is an outdated idea. We are at the hands of the politicians who get us into war without our consent and this would encourage them. We have a professional army and that is all that is needed. Besides, technology reduces the need for a required draft as most fighting will not be person-to-person combat.” Another replied, “I think our country is stronger if each person is prepared to defend it and gives up time in their life to answer the call of good citizenship. We have been too focused on our individual rights and we are becoming selfish.” After winning the regional competition, the students confronted still different questions at the state level:

• According to the natural rights philosophers, under what circumstances are people justified in exercising their right of revolution?
• What is the importance of the rule of law in a constitutional government?
• How were governments in colonial America similar to or different from the government in England at the time?

In discussion, students were asked a question following up on the first above: Did southerners misuse the Declaration of Independence when they seceded from the Union? The first student to speak spoke forcefully: “They used it correctly. They felt that their liberty was taken away when a president was elected without their consent. Abraham Lincoln did not get one vote from the South.” A second respondent agreed, “We may not like it, but they used it correctly. They established conventions and asked the people to vote for secession. They felt that their property was going to be taken away. After all, the Republican Party platform was illegal in that it went against a Supreme Court decision.” Finally, a third student countered, “They used it incorrectly. It just goes to show you how a leader can manipulate the mob. Madison wanted a Constitution just to avoid mob manipulation at the local level. These people were not defending equality or liberty but slavery.” I’m proud to report that my class won the New York State championship that year, in 1988. (Indeed, I’m delighted to report that my classes have won the state championship in nine of the thirteen years that I’ve participated in the competition.) The national competition, at which there is a team from every state, follows much the same format. At this competition, held in Washington, D.C., two questions are called in the first two days. The totals of the two-day competition will determine the ten classes nationwide that will compete on the third day for the top three spots nationwide. The judges at the national competition, held in the Senate hearing rooms, are usually very prominent officials–constitutional scholars, law professors, justices, and government officials. Take a look at how the Unit One questions and answers changed during the national competition:

• Rights and republican self-government may be said to be the twin pillars of the American political tradition. These pillars are planted in the soil of our history so firmly and seem to reinforce each other so strongly, that it is hard for us at first to credit any suggestion that there may be some tension or problem in their coexistence. Should these two Rs be considered the twin pillars of our political tradition? Why or why not?
• In his classic study of the influence of the frontier on American history, Frederick Jackson Turner observed that “American democracy was born of no theorist’s dream; it was not carried in the Susan Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth . . . free land and an abundance of natural resources open to a fit people, made the democratic type of society in America.” Do you agree or disagree with Turner’s statement? Explain your position.
• The experience of the American Revolution influenced the constitution making that followed Independence. Which lessons learned from the colonists’ break with Great Britain were positive? Which lessons turned out to have been wrong? Which lessons proved to be temporary? Which have survived to the present day?

The Washington experience is one that my students never forget. They remember the discussions, the opening speeches, the dialogues and the camaraderie as the best experience in high school. They make friends with students from all over the country and they keep in touch. They even meet some of them at their respective colleges. There were other discussions to remember besides the ones surrounding natural rights and classical republicanism. Students debated the constitutionality of Bush v. Gore, the power of the Supreme Court, and whether the Bill of Rights is as Madison said, “merely a parchment barrier.” On that frigid February day in 1988, my elated students won the regional competition. They went on to win the New York State championship and came in third in the United States. However, they achieved more than that. They forged a cooperative spirit in working together to plan ideas, they practiced public speaking, and they became critical thinkers, highly knowledgeable about the foundation of the “idea” that is American democracy. They practiced civic responsibility and they learned the values of good citizenship. They are still friends today and the student who once said, “This is America, baby. We want to win,” will be clerking for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg next year.

This article originally appeared in issue 2.4 (July, 2002).

Gloria Sesso is district director of social studies for the Patchogue Medford School District and was the teacher and coach of the “We the People” class and team at Half Hollow Hills East for thirteen years. Patchogue Medford is currently instituting the “We the People” program in its high school.

It was the financial profiles, of course, that accounted both for the remarkable popularity of Charles Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution and for the bitterest attacks on it. At the center of the book is a seventy-eight-page chapter in which Beard calls the roll of the Constitutional Convention, not simply reporting the delegates’ political views, as other historians had done–and as many still do–but investigating their economic interests.

Beard found what he had expected to find. Almost all of the delegates owned lots of what he called “personalty”–trading stock, money-at-interest, western land held for speculation, and, most importantly, war bonds. He then went on to argue that the state legislatures of the Confederation era (1781-89) posed a threat to personalty. Thus one of the Framers’ chief motives in writing the Constitution was to protect their personalty–to create a national army strong enough to take the Indians’ land away from them, to prevent the states from screening debtors from their creditors’ lawsuits, and to wrest from the state governments the business of collecting–or not collecting–the “Continental” taxes that were needed to pay off the bond speculators.

Beard’s critics asserted that he had failed to demonstrate a correlation between support for the Constitution, on the one hand, and possession of bonds, accounts receivable, western land claims, and other personalty on the other. If such a correlation existed, they asked, why did the opponents of the Constitution also own so much personalty? Indeed, why was it that one of the Philadelphia Convention’s largest creditors, George Mason, and one of its biggest bondholders, Elbridge Gerry, became Anti-Federalists? (Beard anticipated these objections, but his responses to them are not very convincing.)

On the other side, as Beard acknowledges, Madison and Hamilton, two of the Constitution’s most enthusiastic champions, owned almost no personalty. And similar criticisms were lodged against the other correlations Beard attempted in his Economic Interpretation.

So what is left of the Beard thesis? Plenty. As I re-read the book, I was struck by the ironic impression that its most persuasive evidence was the one sort that both its fans and its critics virtually ignored: Beard’s quotations, especially from the Framers. In their speeches in Philadelphia, their private letters (most of which had been published by the time Economic Interpretation was written), and their newspaper essays, the Framers made it abundantly clear that they expected the Constitution to benefit creditors and Americans who had speculated, whether in Indian land or war bonds. To cite only one of Beard’s numerous quotations establishing the Constitution’s popularity among bondholders: even as the Federal Convention sat, a Connecticut writer predicted that its handiwork would win the support of “[t]he public creditor, who, from the deranged state of finances in every state . . . now places all his hopes of justice in an enlightened and stable national government” (53).

From reading either Beard’s critics or his admirers, you might get the impression that the bondholders were the only interest group that appeared in Economic Interpretation. Perhaps Beard’s pioneering work in the Treasury Office’s bond records–he did not visit any archives outside Washington, D.C.–made that inevitable. But Beard’s work in printed primary sources also draws attention to other groups that benefited from the Constitution, especially private creditors.

For instance, early in the Convention’s deliberations, Madison reminded his fellow delegates that the state legislatures’ mistreatment (in his view) of private creditors as well as bondholders had “contributed more to that uneasiness which produced the Convention, and prepared the public mind for a general reform, than those which accrued to our national character and interest from the inadequacy of the Confederation to its immediate objects” (178). After ratification, Hamilton told Washington that Article I, Section 10, which prohibits the states from relieving debtors, “was not one of the least recommendations of that Constitution. The too frequent intermeddlings of the state legislatures in relation to private contracts were extensively felt and seriously lamented” (180). For me, the most impressive quotation in the book is the passage (too long for use here) in which John Marshall says the Constitution was opposed by those who had advocated state laws easing the distress of debtors and taxpayers–and supported by relief’s enemies.

Just in terms of the allocation of real estate, it is quotations, not evidence of property holding, that dominate Beard’s book. Indeed, with the crucial exceptions of chapter 5 and 10 (where Beard examines the economic interests of delegates to both the Constitutional Convention and the state ratifying conventions) and chapter 9 (where Beard makes state-by-state estimates that allow him to say, “[I]t may very well be that a majority of those who voted were against the adoption of the Constitution”), nearly half the book is enclosed in quotation marks. Some quoted passages consume an entire page (251).

Everyone who has ever tried to finish a dissertation will suspect that what caused Beard to fill so many of his pages with long passages from the Framers’ speeches, letters, and essays was simple haste. This suspicion is fostered by the fact that so many of his long quotations return for encores. For instance, Beard used the same six-line statement from James Wilson on both page 183 and page 185. But I think the real reason Beard quoted so heavily is that he hoped to take himself out of the line of fire by letting the Framers speak for themselves. Am I being paranoid when I suspect that it was the very persuasiveness of Beard’s quotations that caused his critics virtually to ignore them and concentrate their fire on his highly vulnerable economic data?

All those quotations convince me that the Framers thought bondholders, land speculators, and private creditors believed they were suffering under the Articles of Confederation–and that a principal aim of the Constitution was to rescue them. Indeed, as Beard points out, John Fiske (who has always been placed at the opposite pole of Constitutional interpretation from Beard) had made essentially the same claim in The Critical Period of American History a quarter century earlier. Similarly, Orin Libby had shown in his 1894 book, A Geographical Distribution of the Vote of the Thirteen States on the Federal Constitution, that the strongholds of Anti-Federalism were the very regions that had backed the sort of debtor and taxpayer relief legislation (such as paper money) that the Constitution banned.

Which, for me, leaves only one question: When the Framers handed this windfall to the owners of personalty, to what extent were they motivated by the fact that they themselves owned so much of it? Beard does say (though not everyone believes him) that his point is not that the fifty-five Federal Convention delegates were only lining their own pockets. Rather, they were looking out for the interests of the personalty-owning class as a whole. (That is an even more damning indictment, if you ask me, just as President Bush’s titillating ties to Enron are actually less troubling than his bias in favor of the entire oil industry.) But that still leaves the problem of the leading Framers (like Hamilton and Madison) who owned little personalty. Were they simply exceptions to the rule?

Beard might have found an answer to that question if he had recalled that bondholders and private creditors were not the only ones who thought the state legislatures had given debtors and taxpayers too easy a time. People with no immediate stake in the contest worried that debt and tax relief had caused “moneyed men” to refuse to lend anything more–either to the government or to individuals. (Yet another group of Americans–arguably the majority–believed the assemblies were too harsh on debtors and taxpayers, but that is another story.)

Beard was certainly correct that bondholders, including those who sat in the Convention, liked the Constitution because it would, for the first time, give the general government the tax revenue it needed to redeem their bonds. But he forgot that this provision was equally popular among nonbondholders who simply wanted to restore the government’s credit rating. And many Americans, especially in states that imposed heavy direct taxes because they lacked ports at which to levy tariffs, correctly predicted that allowing the federal government to collect an impost would reduce its annual demands on farmers and other payers of direct levies. Beard’s insinuation that most middle-income taxpayers opposed the Constitution is simply incorrect. Many of them loved it.

Likewise, Article I, Section 10 won the enthusiastic support of creditors, as Beard showed. Yet it was also popular among people–among them James Madison–who wanted to be able to obtain loans. As Jefferson had told Madison in explaining why he was unable to borrow any money for him in Paris, would-be creditors knew that if they and Madison ever landed in a Virginia court, the judges’ “habitual protection of the debtor would be against” the investors. It was not worth the risk. Thus the fundamental right for which Madison and others were contending as they traveled to Philadelphia was the right to be sued.

Nor was the would-be debtors’ interest in providing encouragement to creditors entirely selfish. Thousands of Americans were convinced that the way to rescue the United States from the postwar recession was to make it a more attractive place in which to invest.

It is remarkable to me that when Beard compiled his list of interest groups pushing for the Constitution, he left out taxpayers in portless states and would-be borrowers like Madison. Is it possible that he omitted them because they did not seem to belong in the sordid company of the holders of personalty?

The biographers tell us Beard, like Marx, rooted for the personalty-holders, who represented the next stage of economic development. But I wonder. If, as historians say, Economic Interpretation reflects a progressive view of history, I think it also breathes the spirit of the Progressive Party that had formed the year before it was published. This was the spirit of the muckrakers and the trust-busters, the men and women who were determined to expose the acts of plunder that had brought the era’s political and industrial leaders to power. And here I am not just reviving the old claim that Beard hoped to undermine popular support for the Supreme Court, which had been overturning progressive legislation. “Science,” that muse Beard constantly invoked, may have taught him to favor economic progress at all cost. Yet I think the tone of the book points in another direction. In a footnote defending Elbridge Gerry, whose enemies attributed his opposition to the Constitution to “bare-faced selfishness,” Beard dryly remarks that greed “was not monopolized by Gerry in the Convention” (98n.).

Beard’s heart, at least, was not with the holder of personalty but with a group that almost never appears in these pages. It was with the farmer, the man who had squatted on land claimed by some Brattle Street speculator . . . or was being sued for debt . . . or had to sell half his livestock to pay taxes earmarked for bond speculators (who nonetheless complained of receiving too little). In short, with the underdog.

Further Reading: See R. Terry Bouton, “‘Tying Up the Revolution’: Money, Power, and the Regulation in Pennsylvania, 1765-1800” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1996) and “A Road Closed: Rural Insurgency in Post-Independence Pennsylvania,” Journal of American History, 87 (December 2000), 855-87; John Fiske, The Critical Period of American History, 1783-1789 (Boston, 1888); Orin Grant Libby, The Geographical Distribution of the Vote of the Thirteen States on the Federal Constitution, 1787-8 (New York, 1894); Gordon S. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969).

This article originally appeared in issue 2.4 (July, 2002).

Woody Holton is an assistant professor at the University of Richmond. His book, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1999), won the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award (New York Sons of the Revolution) and the Merle Curti Social History Award (Organization of American Historians).

From the time the first English colonists settled in the New World, they discussed what kinds of government they would establish and how these governments fit into the complex matrix that was the British Empire. Wary of the violations of rights in Europe, Americans enunciated their rights as Englishmen in scores of documents during the colonial era. Between 1761 and 1776 American colonists took part in an intensive public debate over government. Americans finally decided that their rights, as protected over the years by the British Constitution, could best be preserved outside of the empire.

As Americans declared their independence they simultaneously wrote new state constitutions and drafted and adopted a federal constitution–the Articles of Confederation. Relatively little is known about what took place in Congress and in provincial popular assemblies that wrote these new constitutions. But Americans were proud of their new constitutions, so much so that in 1781 and again in 1786 Congress ordered the publication of an anthology of the state constitutions that also included the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Peace of 1783, and the Articles of Confederation. Copies of this little book circulated throughout the United States and abroad. Americans and Europeans looked upon the United States as a laboratory of constitutional experimentation.

A decade after declaring their independence, a growing number of Americans became dissatisfied with their governments, both state and federal. After repeatedly failing to amend the Articles of Confederation or strengthen Congress with additional powers, a Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787 to amend the Articles. Led by a small group of nationalists, the Convention drafted an entirely new constitution that fundamentally altered the federal-state relationship by drastically increasing the power of the central government, reserving significant local powers for the states, and, at the same time, preserving and maybe even expanding the rights of individuals.

Thirty-six-year-old James Madison felt the need for Virginia–his home state, the Old Dominion–to take the lead in proposing a new constitution; and, for some inexplicable reason, Madison believed that he should be the agent to lead the Virginia delegation. More than any other delegate, Madison prepared himself for the intellectual and political rigors of the convention. He studied the history of ancient confederacies to see why they failed and he examined the vices of the American political system. The lack of information available about the origins of the ancient confederacies convinced Madison to “preserve as far as I could an exact account of what might pass in the Convention” (17). If the convention succeeded in drafting a new constitution and if that proposal were adopted by the American people, Madison felt that his record of what happened in the convention would allow future generations to understand “the objects, the opinions & the reasonings” that gave rise to the new Constitution (17). Madison, like many others of his generation, believed that Americans had the responsibility of constitution making not merely for themselves and their posterity but for all of mankind. His record of the Constitutional Convention would help future historians from all countries understand the philosophical and practical motivations of the delegates.

The Convention chose William Jackson as its secretary. Madison correctly sensed that Jackson would preserve only a skeletal record of the proceedings. Thus, with the tacit approval of the delegates, Madison separated himself from the Virginia delegation and sat instead in “a seat in front of the presiding member, with the other members on my right & left hands. In this favorable position for hearing all that passed, I noted . . . what was read from the Chair or spoken by the members” (17).

Madison was already an accomplished note taker of debates, having practiced and refined his skill in Congress. The scholarly Virginian had a knack for isolating the essentials of the argument while listing the supporting evidence given by each speaker. He explained that he “was not a little aided by practice & by a familiarity with the style and the train of observation & reasoning which characterized the principal speakers” (17-18). He never missed a day of the convention, nor at most “a cassual fraction of an hour in any day, so that I could not have lost a single speech, unless a very short one” (18). He wrote his notes in full words, abbreviations, and symbols known only to him. Later each evening he expanded these rough notes. On occasion speakers gave him written copies of their speeches and, naturally, he had whatever written text he prepared for the more than two hundred times he spoke in the convention. The labor of taking notes, expanding them, and preparing himself as one of the most important participants in the debates, Madison said, nearly killed him.

Madison kept his notes with his papers until he died. He allowed only a handful of individuals to see the manuscript. Sporadically he worked on the notes, especially after 1789 when he copied William Jackson’s manuscript proceedings of the convention, which contained the exact wording of motions and resolutions as well as the votes on these measures. After examining all of the changes, the editors of the modern edition of Madison’s papers maintain that the later additions made by Madison “were motivated by an earnest desire for completeness and accuracy” (Madison Papers, X, 9).

Madison always intended that his notes should be published, but he steadfastly felt that a posthumous publication would best serve the American public. Other accounts of the convention were published for partisan purposes–Luther Martin of Maryland published a lengthy account of the convention during the debate over ratifying the Constitution in 1788. During the presidential campaign of 1808, Edmund Genet (the former Citizen Genet of 1793) aided the candidacy of his father-in-law (Vice President George Clinton) by publishing an adulterated excerpt of Robert Yates’s notes as a short pamphlet. Genet altered Yates’s notes in an attempt to discredit Madison’s presidential candidacy by showing that he had been an ardent nationalist during the convention. Although he publicly criticized the inaccuracy of Yates’s notes, Madison refused to draw upon his own notes in his defense. In 1819, at the order of Congress, the convention’s proceedings were published, followed two years later by the full set of Yates’s altered notes.

On various occasions friends and correspondents encouraged Madison to publish his notes. In opposing Federalist policies in 1799, Vice President Thomas Jefferson urged the publication so “that the constitution will then receive a different explanation. Could those debates be ready to appear critically, their effect would be decisive. I beg of you to turn this subject in your mind. The arguments against it will be personal; those in favor of it moral” (Madison Papers, XVII, 210). Madison responded that the “idea of publishing the Debates of the Convention ought to be well weighed before the expediency of it, in a public as well as personal view be decided on” (Madison Papers, XVII, 219). Federalists, Madison worried, might be able to use some of his notes to their political advantage. To another correspondent, Madison disputed the value of his notes “[a]s a guide in expounding and applying the provisions of the Constitution . . . the legitimate meaning of the Instrument must be derived from the text itself; or if a key is to be sought elsewhere, it must be not in the opinions or intentions of the Body which planned & proposed the Constitution, but in the sense attached to it by the people in their respective State Conventions where it received all the authority which it possesses” (Farrand, IV, 447-48). To another correspondent, Madison warned that in an environment of compromise, some convention delegates suggested exaggerated proposals hoping, by give and take, to achieve more moderate ends (Farrand, IV, 449). A publication after the death of all the Framers “may be most delicate and most useful also . . . As no personal or party views can then be imputed, they will be read with less of personal or party feelings, and consequently, with whatever profit, may be promised by them” (Farrand, IV, 475).

James Madison died on June 26, 1836. In his will leaving his papers to his widow, Madison wrote that “it was not an unreasonable inference that a report of the proceedings and discussions . . . [of the convention] will be particularly gratifying to the people of the United States, and to all who take an interest in the progress of political science and the course of true liberty.” In 1837 Dolley Madison sold her husband’s papers to the Library of Congress and three years later a three-volume edition of his papers was published, more than half of which was made up of his notes of the Constitutional Convention. Since that original publication, numerous editions of his notes have been published. Max Farrand’s 1913 three-volume edition of the Records of the Federal Convention, which included Jackson’s proceedings and the notes of half a dozen of Madison’s colleagues, became the standard source. In 1937, the sesquicentennial of the convention, Yale University Press reprinted Farrand’s three volumes with a fourth volume that included various documents referring to the Constitutional Convention.

By 1965 all of the editions of Madison’s notes were out of print. My predecessor, Leonard Rapport, the first associate editor of the Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, suggested to the director of the Ohio University Press that a new edition of Madison’s notes needed to be published. Adrienne Koch was selected as the editor and in 1966 Ohio University Press published this one-volume edition. W. W. Norton published a one-volume paperback edition of Koch’s work in 1987, the bicentennial of the convention. In the same year, Yale published a new fourth-volume supplement to Farrand edited by James H. Hutson with new documents located since the 1937 edition.

Farrand’s four-volume edition (with the 1987 supplement) is the definitive source for all of the records of the convention, but Koch’s edition has remained the standard one-volume edition of Madison’s notes of the convention. The text and footnotes in the Koch edition are taken from C. C. Tansill’s edition, which was published as a U.S. House of Representatives document in 1927. Koch includes in her edition Madison’s preface written after 1830. Koch also includes two indexes–a serviceable general index and a thorough index of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention.

Given the importance of the Constitution in our lives today, Madison’s notes have become invaluable for an understanding of the original meaning of the Founders. It is remarkable to think that throughout the first fifty years of the republic under the Constitution, no one–not even Chief Justice John Marshall–had access to Madison’s notes.

It would be hard to imagine any other historical work that has been so important as Madison’s notes of the convention. It was a gift–a legacy left by Madison to his country. He could have used it to his or his party’s advantage, but he didn’t. He waited for a posthumous publication to avoid the charge of partisanship that would denigrate the importance of his notes as an impartial record of the convention. In 1823 Madison wrote,

It has been the misfortune of history that a personal knowledge and an impartial judgment of things, can rarely meet in the historian. The best history of our country therefore must be the fruit of contributions bequeathed by co-temporary actors and witnesses, to successors who will make an unbiased use of them. And if the abundance and authenticity of the materials which still exist in the private as well as in public repositories among us should descend to hands capable of doing justice to them, then American History may be expected to contain more truth, and lessons certainly not less valuable, than that of any Country or age whatever” (xxii).

Madison’s notes have given us the raw material from “co-temporary actors and witnesses.” More than any other source, Madison’s notes of the debates have remained for over 160 years the standard authority for what happened in the Constitutional Convention. It has allowed historians to look back at the founding and see the genesis of our Constitution. It was an incredible gift.

Further Reading: See Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven, 1911-); William T. Hutchinson and William M.E. Rachal, eds., The Papers of James Madison, 17 vols. (Chicago, c1962-91); John P. Kaminski, Merrill Jensen, and Gaspare J. Saladino, eds., The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution (Madison, 1976-).

This article originally appeared in issue 2.4 (July, 2002).

John P. Kaminski is the director of the Center for the Study of the American Constitution at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he edits the multivolume Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution.

 Historians have long neglected the Thirteenth Amendment, often rendering it as a postscript to the Emancipation Proclamation and a forerunner to the Fourteenth Amendment. Michael Vorenberg’s Final Freedom will force them to reexamine their assumptions concerning American slavery’s final demise and require them to integrate the Thirteenth Amendment more fully into the broad Civil War narrative. Most importantly, the Thirteenth Amendment marked a turning point regarding Americans’ understanding of their Constitution. It additionally caused them to reconsider freedom’s meaning and played a crucial role in transforming the era’s politics. Emphasizing human contingency, Vorenberg deftly illustrates how unexpected developments marked the incremental steps whereby Abraham Lincoln, Republicans, and War Democrats came to support constitutional emancipation.

Scholars have long recognized that few Northerners went to war in 1861 intending to abolish slavery. Even this minority did not anticipate emancipation by means of a constitutional amendment. Most antebellum Americans–abolitionists included–saw amending the Constitution as an inappropriate avenue for launching social change. They generally envisioned a static Constitution and would have judged any amending efforts as tantamount to admitting “that the American national experiment had failed” (17). This attitude helps explain the lapse between the Twelfth Amendment’s (1804) and the Thirteenth Amendment’s (1865) ratifications, the longest in the nation’s history.

Several forces–the Civil War’s escalating casualties, the growing Northern hostility towards Southern whites, slaves’ fleeing to Union lines, the successes of African American soldiers, and the expected military benefits of emancipation–exacerbated white Northerners’ hostility towards slavery. The burgeoning ranks of antislavery Northerners applauded Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863. Inasmuch as the proclamation abolished slavery only in areas under Confederate control, many expected that congressional action would somehow end slavery by resorting to a constitutional loophole.

Realizing that courts could nullify both antislavery legislation and the Emancipation Proclamation, some War Democrats and Republicans began promoting an antislavery constitutional amendment in late 1863. That Democrats were an impetus behind the amendment is one of the surprises of Vorenberg’s narrative, as their party’s Northern wing had, for decades, been a more probable defender of slavery than their Northern political competitors. Indeed, during the secession winter of 1860-61 Northern Democrats had played a leading role in proposing amendments that constitutionally protected slavery, and that they hoped would undermine secession. Peace Democrats continued to propose similar amendments during the war in hopes of ending the fighting. By late 1863, however, a number of War Democrats recognized that their party’s defense of slavery was becoming politically unwise. An antislavery amendment, on the other hand, made good political sense, as it held the promise of forging a new political coalition. It could appeal to War Democrats who condemned Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation as unconstitutional and whose party had long preferred constitutional change over the broad use of executive or legislative power. Although no radical would resist a measure promoting emancipation, War Democrats and conservative Republicans hoped that an amendment merely abolishing slavery could also undermine radical Republicans’ gestures towards racial equality.

Representative James Ashley’s introduction of an antislavery amendment into the House in December 1863 initially gathered little notice. Lincoln did not publicly support it, and newspapers said little about it then or the following month, when Senator John Henderson, a Missouri Democrat, introduced a similar amendment. The Senate Judiciary Committee, which wrote the version later incorporated into the Constitution, generated no recorded debate on the measure. It was only during the April Senate debate, when Maryland Democrat Reverdy Johnson announced his support, that the national press began to follow the amendment more closely. Public scrutiny increased in June 1864, when the Republican Convention’s platform embraced the amendment, followed by the House of Representatives’ debate and vote on the proposal. When passage failed by only thirteen votes, many political observers expected that the amendment would be the fall campaign’s defining issue.

Unforeseen events dictated another course. The lack of military victories during the summer of 1864 reminded everyone that the Confederacy’s survival diminished the antislavery amendment’s importance. Meanwhile Peace Democrats charged that Lincoln was unnecessarily prolonging the war in order to end slavery. Fearful that emancipation could harm them politically and concerned that they might lose the election, the president and Republicans ceased promoting the amendment. Republican prospects improved only following the September Union victory in Atlanta. Nevertheless, politicians of both parties scarcely broached emancipation during the fall campaign. Democrats emphasized civil liberties violations, conscription, federal interference with states’ rights, and miscegenation, whereas Republicans questioned Peace Democrats’ loyalty.

Despite the fall campaign’s emphasis on other issues, Lincoln informed Congress a month after his reelection that the returns showed a popular mandate for the antislavery amendment. Fresh from electoral victory, Lincoln lobbied to have the amendment pass the House of Representatives. The mood in Congress, however, had changed since the preceding June. Several years of fighting, in particular the blood spilled in 1864, forced Americans to confront the Constitution’s failure to resolve slavery. Consequently, the originalist argument that Congress should not tamper with the Constitution had grown feeble. Lincoln and Congressional Republicans persuaded eight Democrats–some of whom had formerly defended slavery–to switch their votes from the previous June, and convinced Representatives formerly absent to vote yea. The House finally passed the Thirteenth Amendment on January 31, 1865, and transmitted it to the states for their ratification.

Once the Thirteenth Amendment was in the hands of state legislatures, several questions surfaced that Congress had deliberately avoided. Most immediate was the indeterminate number of states needed to ratify the amendment. Because conservative Republicans and War Democrats differed from Radical Republicans over whether seceded states were still technically within the Union, Congress never stated the precise guidelines for ratification before submitting the amendment to the states. Lincoln favored including the Southern states in the ratification process, and Andrew Johnson, who insisted that former Confederate states abolish slavery in their state constitutions as a term of their readmission to the Union, implored them also to ratify the amendment. Georgia’s ratification in December 6, 1865, followed twelve days later by Secretary of State William Seward’s proclamation declaring the amendment adopted, formally ended slavery in the United States and, for practical purposes, terminated the ratification dispute.

More important was the amendment’s second section, which gave to Congress the “power to enforce [the amendment] by appropriate legislation.” Congressional debaters favoring the amendment skirted this section, as they recognized a public discussion of it could expose supporters’ differences regarding the meaning of freedom, racial equality, and citizenship, and might threaten its passage altogether. Expectedly, Democrats and slave-state legislators lambasted this enforcement clause–even more than they did the ending of slavery–claiming that it would expand federal authority and give Congress the power to promote racial equality. Several former Confederate states conditionally ratified the amendment, declaring that the enforcement clause was ineffectual.

Some of the Amendment’s early supporters “believed that ex-slaves should have no positive rights beyond the right not to be owned” (86). Many of these individuals changed their minds, however, when former Confederate states passed the Black Codes in 1865. These codes, which circumscribed African Americans’ rights, caused many Republicans to concede that freedom consisted of more than the absence of bondage. Accordingly they reinterpreted the enforcement clause and now envisioned the Thirteenth Amendment as the foundation for African Americans’ civil rights. When passing the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and renewing the Freedmen’s Bureau Act, Congress claimed as its authority the Thirteenth Amendment’s enforcement clause.

The Thirteenth Amendment’s importance lies not only in its striking the final blow to slavery. It also marked the beginning of Americans using constitutional amendments as instruments of social reform–including reforms not imagined by the Framers. The amendment debate further weakened originalist thinking and forced Americans to confront the Constitution’s imperfections. By illustrating how contingency affected the process of passing and ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment and demonstrating that it “never had a single, fixed meaning” (237), Vorenberg offers a convincing counterpoint to contemporary originalists.

This article originally appeared in issue 2.4 (July, 2002).

John W. Quist is an associate professor of history at Shippensburg University and the author of Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of Antebellum Reform in Alabama and Michigan (Baton Rouge, 1998).

Thanks to the University of Chicago Press and the Liberty Fund, the five stout volumes of Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner’s collection of constitutional source material, The Founders’ Constitution, first published in 1987, are now available in a searchable electronic format, both online and on a CD-ROM. Users will thus be able to decide which of three versions they prefer–the original hard copy (available from the University Press of Chicago or as an inexpensive paperback from the Liberty Fund), the online version, or the disk.

Briefly put, The Founders’ Constitution resembles one of those eighteenth-century compilations that went by the title of The Flowers of [fill in favorite author]. These forerunners of Reader’s Digest condensed books did the work for you by collecting the good bits and leaving out the extraneous or distracting or even unsuitable parts. So, too, The Founders’ Constitution. Kurland and Lerner went through what they saw as the relevant texts (starting with Magna Carta and ending with the decisions of the Marshall Court), found the telling material, and arranged their excerpts according to the constitutional provision on which they threw light. The result was arbitrary but hardly accidental; these were scholars who knew what they thought, and they thought the materials they gathered for their readers would help them learn a good deal about what the Constitution meant to those who framed it. Kurland and Lerner liked the idea of a recoverable original intent; even more, they seem to have liked the idea that the Founders’ intent, once conveniently presented, could be made use of today. Aware that some of their readers might have difficulty swallowing these propositions, they tried in their introduction to overcome potential objections. But in the end, and like many of us, they knew what they liked, and they assumed that what worked for them would work for the rest of us, too.

How good is The Founders’ Constitution at what it claims to do? The answer depends in part on what you choose to look at. In the case of the Second Amendment, to take a subject of more interest today than it was for Kurland and Lerner in the 1980s, the job it does is pretty poor. On this notorious provision of the Bill of Rights we get ten snippets, occupying some six pages and ranging from the 1328 Statute of Northampton to an 1833 Indiana decision. Admittedly, this is two pages more than are devoted to the Third Amendment, but it’s an awful lot less than the twenty-six pages on the Fourth Amendment, or the 166 pages for the First Amendment. And yet in recent months few constitutional topics have been of more interest to early American historians than the Second Amendment. This suggests that there may be something inherently unworkable about Kurland and Lerner’s effort to locate an unchanging constitutional essence that can be tied to carefully chosen texts, the whole packaged as a reliable if not infallible guide to what the Constitution means.

Even Michael Bellesiles’s badly flawed Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (New York, 2000) does a much better job with the Second Amendment than Kurland and Lerner. In fact, as Jack Rakove notes in the January 2002 William and Mary Quarterly, it’s a redeeming feature of Bellesiles’s book that it forces us to think about the sorts of contextualizing material that can help us to understand the Framers. Nothing, I think, could be further from the mental world of The Founders’ Constitution than the notion that social history has a role to play in this process. But perhaps the probate inventories Bellesiles studies really are more helpful than the Statute of Northampton, and maybe, to move closer to the sort of material Kurland and Lerner privilege, all those letters from Washington complaining about the militia he quotes do have something to say about what was in the Founders’ minds. You won’t find this sort of stuff in Kurland and Lerner, though, in part because their principles of selection are conventional, if not downright unimaginative, in part because what they really go in for is proof texts.

When The Founders’ Constitution appeared in 1987, it was possible to overlook some of its more dubious aspects. It was convenient, it was handy, it had a wonderful index that allowed you to look things up very quickly. Of course you might have been advised to check the originals from which Kurland and Lerner drew, just to make sure they hadn’t wrenched their excerpts out of context or because you never know what will happen when you read the complete text instead of a snippet. No question, though, in the age of paper The Founders’ Constitution was a great quick fix.

Things have changed since 1987, and the fact that this review is appearing in an e-journal is indicative of that change. Thus many–not all, but a healthy percentage–of the texts included in The Founders’ Constitution are available in unabridged form on the Yale Law School’s Avalon Project site and that’s only the tip of the cyber iceberg when it comes to materials of constitutional relevance. So unless you find Kurland and Lerner’s choice of what to excerpt particularly appealing and don’t want to be distracted by other possibilities, there’s no real reason to prefer The Founders’ Website to the Avalon Project’s. Moreover, there’s been enormous progress since 1987 with the documentary editions–in particular The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution (Madison, Wi., 1976) and The Documentary History of the First Federal Congress (Baltimore, 1972-)–so that scholars today have at their fingertips far more sources than Kurland and Lerner had in the 1980s. The result, then, is that the issues of access that once made a work like The Founders’ Constitution an attractive proposition even to those who don’t share Kurland and Lerner’s presumptions have largely disappeared, and with them a not inappreciable part of its raison d’être.

Lest I appear ungrateful to the Liberty Fund and the University of Chicago Press, I’ll end by saying that The Founders’ Constitution is not without its uses and that, given the choice of having the compilation or not having it at all, I’d certainly choose to have it. But it’s a work that needs to be used with a fairly robust sense of its limitations, and it should never, ever be a final stopping point in research.

This article originally appeared in issue 2.4 (July, 2002).

Herbert Sloan is professor of history at Barnard College. He is the author of Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (New York and London, 1995), recently republished in paperback by the University Press of Virginia.

“If you knew what you were getting into, would you do it again?” That question was recently posed to me by one of the producers of the PBS series Colonial House, after I had just completed more than a year as a lead consultant for the show. A follow-up to such popular shows as Frontier House and Manor House, the series is an effort to blend reality television with history. A group of modern day “colonists” spent four months of 2003 experiencing the life of settlers in 1628 Maine. The colonists undertook a crash course in seventeenth-century living, were provided with historically accurate food, clothing, shelter, and other necessities, and had to carve out a colony on the harsh and unforgiving shores of a new land. They were filmed regularly, and the result was an eight-hour series that premiered May 17.

Some historians might view the muck of a recreated 1628 village as a long way from the ivory tower—and a still longer way from the real 1628—and thus steer well clear of such a project. I must admit I had a few doubts when PBS first approached me. After all, Frontier House had occasionally threatened to turn into Survivor meets Little House on the Prairie. Still, I was struck by the incredible power of this popular series. I was amazed by my young daughters’ fascination with the show—and their willingness to watch it again and again. Despite its flaws, people talked about Frontier House—including many folks who never showed much interest in history before.

So, it seemed worth the risk, as Colonial House was a rare opportunity to present early American history to a large audience. Most history on television focuses on the recent past, where photographs, film clips, and other visual materials are readily available. All too often, the History Channel becomes the World War II Channel. Finally, early America was getting the attention it deserved and I could be a part of it. The alternative was to stay on the sidelines, and my family was already heartily sick of hearing my complaints about bad history on television. 

Occasionally I did question my decision to get involved. My responsibilities on the show were wide ranging and often time consuming. Drawing on court records, legal codes, letters, account books, and many other primary sources from England and America, I put together the historical background for the colony including its charter, the governor’s commission, even the historical backgrounds for individual colonists. The production team studied these materials and also placed the documents in the hands of our colonists to help order their society. I helped train the “settlers,” and was one of the on-camera experts who assessed their relative success in establishing a community and making a profit for their sponsoring company in England. I weighed in on numerous historical questions ranging from, What was a beaver pelt worth in 1628? to Would the colonists have exported blueberries? 

I quickly realized that much more so than my other public-history projects, Colonial House had to weave historical accuracy with modern-day reality. Unlike a museum exhibit, talking-head documentaries, or even Plimoth Plantation where the staff goes home at night, these twenty-first-century colonists were really living living history, and bringing their modern worldviews and expectations with them. The series also had to pay close attention to what the production team called “the televisual moment”: a compelling, brief, and visually interesting scene that told a story. And not least, we had to work within the confines of close deadlines and tight budgets. Thus Colonial House was a constant balancing act between the ideal and the practical, between the televisual story, the sound bite, and the historical record. Clearly, this leads to some unique problems and opportunities for the historian.

Thanks to the talented staff of Plimoth Plantation, most aspects of the material world of 1628 could be reproduced. However, there were practical limits to the project. For example, a real colony in 1628 would most likely have been an armed camp, complete with a night watch, a hastily constructed palisade, and a military leader such as John Smith or Miles Standish. Unfortunately, safety precautions and modern-day laws preempted any efforts to arm our colonists with clumsy matchlock muskets, leading to the wholesale elimination of an important aspect of a colony’s first months. It is probably just as well, or we might have accidentally lost a colonist or two. Still, a little martial drill with some unloaded firearms and the construction of a section of palisade might have at least given the flavor of this experience. 

Furs, fish, and lumber were even more plentiful than weapons in 1628 Maine, so planters had lots of goods to export. Our settlers faced a different reality—a twenty-first century world of scarcity. Their colony was a blueberry barren, with no hardwood, and little in the way of game or fur bearers. The Maine fishing banks are now so depleted that many fishermen are going bankrupt, so how could our colonists succeed? 

Despite these material constraints, it was much more difficult to recreate the mental world of 1628. The long history of mistreatment of Native peoples made it tough for our colonists and their modern-day Native American visitors to portray first encounters and the subsequent fur trade. Likewise, how do you deal with the complexities of slavery and race relations in 1628 with the hindsight of 2003? How can you enforce seventeenth-century religion and morality on people with a diverse, and often secular modern worldview? Especially when there is no available means of punishment other than public humiliation—something that only works if the offender and the public agree that the transgression merits shame. Such issues meant that the twenty-first century kept rearing its ugly head into the series.

So, was Colonial House perfect? Reality never is, and reality television is no different. I had an excellent relationship with the production team, professionals who were genuinely concerned with historical accuracy. However, if I had been the producer rather than a consultant, I would have changed a number of things. First, the show needed far more historical explanation right up front to set the stage and explain the limitations of the series. For example, I would have more clearly laid out how the show portrayed race in 1628. Some viewers who knew that Africans had not migrated to northern New England this early were puzzled to see apparent free blacks in our colony. No, there were no Africans or Chinese (or Italians for that matter) in 1628 New England, but Americans with these and other proud heritages are an important part of the 2003 effort to recreate a founding moment of our American nation. 

It is difficult to explain complex ideas like joint stock companies and seventeenth-century Protestantism in televised sound bites, but a stronger effort was needed. The differences between Puritanism and Anglicanism—differences for which people in the era Colonial House portrayed fought and died—were never really discussed on screen. I fear many viewers will equate the governor’s enforcement of the Sabbath with Puritanism, without realizing that this was the norm in the Protestant world of 1628, and that our colony was actually loyal to the Church of England.

would have avoided the twenty-first century as much as possible. The narrator acknowledges that people in 1628 did not celebrate birthdays, so why include the birthday party and other clearly modern moments? When I did enter 2003, it would have been to discuss the historical research that shaped the colony. Plimoth Planation deserves far more credit than it got for the hundreds of hours its staff put in, making sure the architecture and material culture were as accurate as possible. Perhaps it is the deluded historian in me, but I think people would have been fascinated by how the colony was put together. I even suggested to PBS that an episode of Novacould be dedicated to Colonial House as experimental archaeology. PBS passed on the idea, though it may still occur informally. Plimoth Plantation staff have already begun asking the former colonists why they chose to carry out activities in certain ways. Thankfully, the show frequently cites its companion Website, where viewers can learn the details of some of these unexplored issues, and get behind-the-scenes information and curriculum materials from consultants and the production team. 

Despite the limitations, I remain convinced that “reality history” is a potentially powerful way to introduce the past to a wide audience comprised largely of people who have no desire to read lengthy academic books on early America. I would like to think that Colonial House at least gave us a different view of the remote past than the stereotypical textbook treatment we remember from high school. Some K-12 teachers and college professors have already told me they plan to use the show in the classroom. With any luck, it may also stimulate people to go to Plimoth and other living-history museums, where they can get a more detailed and nuanced view of early American life. I also hope Colonial House showed how important and relevant our past can be when we try to sort out complex modern-day issues like race, gender, and religion. 

So would I do it again? Absolutely. I have spent my career as a historian and archaeologist trying to understand what life was like for the inhabitants of early New England. Last fall I had the opportunity to walk into a version of that past, and to share that experience with a few million students of history. Flaws and all, it was the opportunity of a lifetime.

This article originally appeared in issue 4.4 (July, 2004).

Emerson “Tad” Baker is chair of the history department at Salem State College. His current book project is Lithobolia, or the Stone-Throwing Devil of New England. Details on his archaeological excavations on early Maine sites can be found here.

There is little doubt that “race” is the American issue, the one that saturates the nation’s past and continues to bedevil its present. It is this fact, of course, that has helped to give studies of slavery their edge, that has contributed to making the historiography of slavery so conflicted but also so impressive. Part of the reason why courses about slavery and African American culture are so popular in institutions outside the United States, and why so many non-American scholars specialize in black history, is that “race” provides a quick way into America’s soft moral underbelly, laying bare in the starkest of fashions American sanctimony. 

Writing about slavery presents special problems–how can a writer deal with something so all-encompassingly evil ?–and the usual difficulties associated with attempting to recover the past of people who, in the main, did not leave written records. For the most part, historians–perhaps still sheltering under lingering tatters of “scientific objectivity”–have dealt with the latter problem rather better than with the former. Generally, scholars have ignored or glancingly touched on issues such as the immorality of slavery or the ethics of slave life; indeed, probably the best recent treatment of slavery in these terms is Toni Morrison’s Beloved (New York, 1987).

“Writing about slavery presents special problems–how can a writer deal with something so all-encompassingly evil?”

The writers contributing to this roundtable were asked to use their particular expertise to ponder the dilemmas of how slavery may be represented. Hardly surprisingly, given the variety of backgrounds and interests of those involved, the resulting brief essays are quite disparate in their focus. A. J. Verdelle, a novelist, explores the contested terrain that authors mine to build tales of American slavery–the narrow discursive ground between what she calls “stories overdone” and “tragedies understated.” Karen Sutton, a historical interpreter at Colonial Williamsburg, meditates on the challenge of remaining “truthful but tasteful” when presenting the uncomfortable history of slavery to tourists. Historian David Blight, too, is concerned with the issue of how slavery is represented to the public, discussing both feature films and, from his experience as an adviser, historical documentaries. The last pair of essays take a different tack, pointing to facets that are mostly absent from our understanding of the slave past. Alex Bontemps considers the very few visual representations of American slavery and, in an attempt to correct history’s deafness, Graham White and I suggest ways in which we might access slavery’s hitherto largely soundless world. For all their eclecticism, however, the essays demonstrate the continuing ability of the history of slavery to engage and deeply challenge those scholars and writers who feel impelled to take it up.

This article originally appeared in issue 1.4 (July, 2001).