Mary Sarah Bilder. Madison’s Hand

It has been a long time since historians and legal scholars referred to James Madison as “the father of the Constitution” without the distancing quotation marks. Yet they continue to place him at the center of the thoughts and action in the summer of 1787. One reason is that Madison has long been viewed as the most prepared and creative delegate at the Constitutional Convention. Another is that his Notes on the Debates in the Federal Convention provide the most accessible information about how, when, and why the Constitution reads as it does. The two reasons, Mary Sarah Bilder argues in Madison’s Hand, her fascinating analysis of how Madison wrote his Notes, are intertwined. Madison appears as the central figure of the Convention, she argues, because he made himself the protagonist of his Notes and kept revising them long after the delegates returned home. Through painstaking textual analysis, leavened with judicious but at times speculative interpretation, Bilder demonstrates that the Notes were the partial, cryptic, expunged, and sometimes misleading texts (plural) of a political actor, not an objective account of the making of the Constitution. Should we therefore reevaluate Madison’s contribution to American constitutionalism? In A Politician Thinking, Jack N. Rakove thinks not—not, at least, if we understand Madison as he was: an original thinker with respect to human psychology and politics, as well as a savvy eighteenth-century politician. In this conceptual sequel to Rakove’s Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (1996), the author layers new richness onto his unparalleled analysis of the man he calls a “constitutional engineer” (xii). That term exemplifies Rakove’s argument that his subject’s mind could perfectly balance political theory and political practice, and that Madison was unafraid to revise his ideas in light of experience. The Madison emerging from these two books is politically astute and creative, but he is not the abstract theorist that Charles A. Beard, Robert A. Dahl, and countless other scholars have perceived for the past century. Nor does their Madison leave the Convention claiming paternity for the document. Much of the Notes, Bilder observes in a chapter title, was “An Account of Failed Strategies.” Rakove similarly concludes that Madison “left Philadelphia disillusioned” (43). But Madison’s engagement with the Constitution, and the Notes, did not end that summer. These books therefore offer new ways to understand the Virginian’s shifting constitutional interpretations after 1787—what Gordon S. Wood has called the “James Madison Problem” (Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different [2006]). The riddle of his inconsistency, they suggest, can be solved.

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