American Enterprise Institute

The American Revolution and the Constitution

The Invention of American Constitutionalism Notes

  1. Mary Sarah Bilder, Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention (Harvard University Press, 2015).
  2. Merrill Jensen et al., eds., The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 1976–).
  3. John Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies (Philadelphia, 1774).
  4. Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 1953). This argument was previewed in Edmund S. Morgan, “Colonial Ideas of Parliamentary Power, 1764–1766,” William and Mary Quarterly 5, no. 3 (1948): 311–41, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1923462.
  5. James Otis, Considerations on Behalf of the Colonists: In a Letter to a Noble Lord, 2nd ed. (London, 1765), 6.
  6. British Parliament, “Declaratory Act,” March 18, 1766, Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/declaratory_act_1766.asp.
  7. Oscar Handlin and Mary Handlin, eds., The Popular Sources of Political Authority: Documents on the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966).
  8. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), vi.
  9. I discuss this dual thrust of Bailyn’s argument in Jack N. Rakove, “Ideas, Ideology, and the Anomalous Problem of Revolutionary Causation,” The New England Quarterly 91, no. 1 (2018): 36–56, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26405904.
  10. John Adams, “Thoughts on Government,” in The Founders’ Constitution, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner (University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1:107–10.
  11. Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Nelson, May 16, 1776, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-01-02-0153.
  12. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 132–59.
  13. Jack N. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 76–77.
  14. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, 339–41.
  15. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, 306–43.
  16. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (Library of America, 1984), 245–51.
  17. This is a sustaining theme in the Handlins’ introduction to The Popular Sources of Political Authority. The classic expression of the need for a special convention came from the Concord town meeting of October 21, 1776. See Handlin and Handlin, The Popular Sources of Political Authority, 1–54, 152–53.
  18. James Madison to Caleb Wallace, August 23, 1785, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-08-02-0184. When Madison wrote “administration,” he meant the executive.
  19. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, 363–72. See also Jack N. Rakove, “The Origins of Judicial Review: A Plea for New Contexts,” Stanford Law Review 49, no. 5 (1997): 1051–56, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1229247.
  20. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, 354–63. For a full account of the drafting of the Articles of Confederation, see Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics, 135–81.
  21. Michael J. Klarman, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (Oxford University Press, 2016). For my thoughts on this analysis, see Jack N. Rakove, “The Real Motives Behind the Constitution: The Endless Quest,” Reviews in American History 48, no. 2 (2020): 216–28, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342168434_The_Real_Motives_Behind_the_Constitution_The_Endless_Quest.
  22. Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (Yale University Press, 1937), 3:547.
  23. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics, 297–320. For a more recent survey of these events, see David Head, A Crisis of Peace: George Washington, the Newburgh Conspiracy, and the Fate of the American Revolution (Pegasus Books, 2019). For further thoughts on the Hamilton–Washington relationship, see Jack N. Rakove, Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 396–442.
  24. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics, 297–320.
  25. Jack N. Rakove, A Politician Thinking: The Creative Mind of James Madison (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017), 29–30.
  26. Merrill D. Peterson and Robert C. Vaughan, eds., The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom: Its Evolution and Consequences in American History (Cambridge University Press, 1988), xiii–xiv. For my own thoughts, see Jack N. Rakove, Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience: The Radical Significance of the Free Exercise of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2020), 1–12, 66–100.
  27. James Madison to George Washington, December 9, 1785, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-08-02-0228.
  28. James Madison to James Monroe, March 14, 1786, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-08-02-0265.
  29. James Madison to James Monroe, October 5, 1786, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-09-02-0054.
  30. Federalist, no. 40 (James Madison), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0236.
  31. James Madison, “Notes on Debates,” February 21, 1787, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-09-02-0149.
  32. John Jay to George Washington, January 7, 1787, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-04-02-0427; and Henry Knox to George Washington, January 14, 1787, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-04-02-0444. See Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787–1788 (Simon & Schuster, 2010), 17–25; and Akhil Reed Amar, The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760–1840 (Basic Books, 2021), 202–6.
  33. James Madison, “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” April 1787, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-09-02-0187.
  34. Madison, “Vices of the Political System of the United States.”
  35. James Madison to George Washington, April 16, 1787, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-09-02-0208.
  36. Madison, “Vices of the Political System of the United States.”
  37. Madison, “Vices of the Political System of the United States.”
  38. James Madison, “Notes on the Debates in the Federal Convention, September 15,” Yale Law School, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/debates_915.asp.
  39. Jack N. Rakove, “A Model for Deliberation or Obstruction: Madison’s Thoughts About the Senate,” in What Would Madison Do? The Father of the Constitution Meets Modern American Politics, ed. Benjamin Wittes and Pietro S. Nivola (Brookings Institution Press, 2015), 111–28.
  40. Federalist, no. 62 (James Madison), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-04-02-0212.
  41. Madison, “Vices of the Political System of the United States.”
  42. James Madison to George Washington, April 16, 1787, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-09-02-0208.
  43. Federalist, no. 49 (James Madison), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0270.
  44. Federalist, no. 37 (James Madison), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0227.
  45. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, October 17, 1788, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-11-02-0218.
  46. Madison to Jefferson.
  47. James Madison to Richard Peters, August 19, 1789, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-12-02-0230.