12/24/10
America's Great Argument: The Edge-of-Your Seat Story of How We Ratified the Constitution Gordon S. Wood
Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787 - 1788 By Pauline Maier
(Simon & Schuster, 589 pp., $30)
At the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison, one of the greatest editorial projects in American history has been under way for nearly thirty-five years. Since 1976, the successive editors of the Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution have published twenty-three volumes, and there are at least eight more to come. These volumes contain every scrap of evidence the editors have been able to find relating to the debates over the ratification of the Constitution in 1787 - 1788. These editors, beginning with Merrill Jensen and continuing at present with John P. Kaminski, Gaspare J. Saladino, and others, have put together one of the greatest collections of debates over the basic issues of politics and constitutionalism that the Western world possesses. The political debates in fifth-century Athens or seventeenth-century England may have been richer and more wide-ranging, but we will never know, because the records of those earlier disputations are either lost or fragmentary. They are certainly not as complete as the records we have for the ratification of the Constitution. Rarely will we find a more profound or more comprehensive discussion of the problems of power, liberty, representation, federalism, rights, and all the other aspects of politics than we have in these volumes. This record is not only a national treasure, it is a world treasure.
Pauline Maier, in her magisterial book on ratification, knows only too well the value of this documentary trove. She knows that she could not have written such a complete and colorful account of the process of ratifying the Constitution without the help of what she calls this “landmark editorial project.” Moreover, she points out that the documentary collection “lays the foundation for something of a revolution in our understanding of the ratification of the Constitution.” Unlike the other modern editions of the papers of the founding fathers—Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and so on—which deal almost exclusively with the world of elites, the ratification documents tell as well “the grass-roots story of the people and the Constitution.” The records reveal the thoughts and words not only of leaders such as Hamilton and Madison, but also of lesser-known figures such as William Findley of Pennsylvania and Melancton Smith of New York. And more: they preserve also the voices of backbenchers such as Samuel Thompson of Maine and John Dawson of Virginia, of whom few historians have ever heard.
