I spent the summer at the University of Cambridge, researching something that seems to be pretty rare in the field of history: an unexamined aspect of the American Founding.
Sure, there are plenty of parts of the late 18th century that it would seem we miss: class history, racial history, gender history, and many others. In fact, though the field could always do more, historians have already waded cautiously into these waters: slave narratives have become more validated as substantive sources, and work on early American white supremacy and early women’s movements is actually getting quite popular.
As for class history, Charles Beard said that the founding fathers were greedy bastards before any of us were born, and Richard Hofstadter, member of the Communist Party and Mr. Rogers look-alike, tied Populism to Progressivism to the New Deal generations ago. I’m not really talking about severely underserved aspects of history; I’m talking about something we mostly missed.
In my case, it was a shipment of two crates books sent in 1785 from Thomas Jefferson, then the American minister in Paris, to James Madison, at home in Virginia and preparing to attend the Constitutional Convention. Both men stood on the precipice of history, and they knew it: their letters were sometimes in code and almost always extravagantly long.
They also always talked about books. Jefferson had promised Madison that he would buy books for him in Paris, the city famous for its subversive bookstalls and thriving intellectual life. Madison thanked him, asking very specifically for books that would “throw light on the general Constitution and droit public [public law] of the several confederacies which had existed… The operations of our own must render all lights of consequence.”
Madison walked through the graveyards of all the federal republics-governments made up of smaller governments-that had existed before. My research is to trace the effects of these dusty constitutions on our own.
The ancient Lycian League, in modern-day Turkey, assigned votes to each of its cities based on population. The Helvetic confederacy was too intolerant of religious difference. In the Belgic Confederacy, any one province couldn’t sign a treaty without the consent of all the others.
The stories of these governments past stayed with Madison, an avid reader who could even be called the first American political scientist. He wrote a constitution in their memory, amplifying some legacies of the past and striking out their mistakes. He studied deliberately, and, especially in the Federalist Papers, revealed just how strongly he believed in his research.
Last year, in an Intellectual History course, I wrote a term paper on the so-called “great books” movement of the early 20th century: in America, that was when we started reading the “classic” books like never before; the time when “best books of the year/decade/century/all time” lists got going. It got me thinking about books and the place they play in our history: could we create a list of books to narrate the American story?
Well, Madison’s receipt of 200 books seems like a great start. If all goes well, my work from this summer will translate to a much more substantive investigation. Maybe, after a lot more reading, we can say for sure that we’ve found the syllabus that created the United States: two crates of books and their journey into the Constitution.
photo credit: Flickr user Jackie Kever
