The Lives of the Constitution

Ten Exceptional Minds that Shaped America's Supreme Law

Joseph Tartakovsky

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781594039867
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

In a fascinating blend of biography and history, Joseph Tartakovsky tells the epic and unexpected story of our Constitution through the eyes of ten extraordinary individuals—some renowned, like Alexander Hamilton and Woodrow Wilson, and some forgotten, like James Wilson and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.Tartakovsky brings to life their struggles over our supreme law from its origins in revolutionary America to the era of Obama and Trump. Sweeping from settings as diverse as Gold Rush California to the halls of Congress, and crowded with a vivid Dickensian cast, Tartakovsky shows how America's unique constitutional culture grapples with questions like democracy, racial and sexual equality, free speech, economic liberty, and the role of government.Joining the ranks of other great American storytellers, Tartakovsky chronicles how Daniel Webster sought to avert the Civil War; how Alexis de Tocqueville misunderstood America; how Robert Jackson balanced liberty and order in the battle against Nazism and Communism; and how Antonin Scalia died warning Americans about the ever-growing reach of the Supreme Court.From the 1787 Philadelphia Convention to the clash over gay marriage, this is a grand tour through two centuries of constitutional history as never told before, and an education in the principles that sustain America in the most astonishing experiment in government ever undertaken.

NOTES

OVERTURE

ix “days of Noah”: Thomas Paine, Writings of Thomas Paine (1894), ed. Moncure Daniel Conway, Vol. 1, 118–19.

xi “one clear intent”: Clinton Rossiter, 1787: The Grand Convention (1966), 334.

xiii “It is not to be wondered”: James Madison to Reynolds Chapman, Jan. 6, 1831, Founders Online, National Archives. See also James Madison to Thomas Ritchie, Sept. 15, 1821, Founders Online, National Archives (publication of his convention notes should be “delayed till the Constitution should be well settled by practice”); James Madison to Charles J. Ingersoll, Jun. 25, 1831, Founders Online, National Archives (explaining that he signed bill creating Second Bank of the United States in 1817 despite earlier certainty as to its unconstitutionality because it is destabilizing and willful to push prior opinions in the face of a national “common understanding,” a “construction reduced to practice, during a reasonable period of time,” a “uniform sanction of successive Legislative bodies, through a period of years and under the varied ascendancy of parties,” “deliberate & reiterated precedents,” “execution throughout a period of 20 years with annual legislative recognitions,” and the “entire acquiescence of all the local authorities,” which together create a rule of constitutional interpretation like those that bind judges); James Madison to William C. Rives, Oct. 21, 1833, Founders Online, National Archives (explaining that he reversed his position on the constitutionality of the Bank of the United States “on the ground of the authoritative and multiplied sanctions given to it, amounting he conceived, to an evidence of the judgment and will of the nation . . . [and] that such a sanction ought to overrule the abstract and private opinions of individuals”).

xiv “many defining elements”: See, e.g., Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, The Federalist (1788) 45 (“no apprehensions are entertained” of commerce power), 78 (courts have “neither force nor will” and suffer from a “natural feebleness”).

xiv “easier to alarm”: William R. Davie to James Iredell, Jan. 22, 1788, Life and Correspondence of James Iredell (1863), ed. Griffith J. McRee, Vol. II, 217.

CHAPTER ONE — ALEXANDER HAMILTON

A War Ends and a Constitution Begins

3 “half-million souls”: Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789 (1982), 563–64.

3 “nearly half the state’s population”: Alexander Hamilton to Robert Morris, Aug. 13, 1782, The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, Vol. 3, 1782–1786, ed. Harold C. Syrett. Columbia University Press (1962), 132–43 [hereinafter AH Papers, various years]; Alexander Clarence Flick, Loyalism in New York During the American Revolution (1901), 182 & n.2.

3 “robbing, exiling”: Flick 162–68; Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (2011), 64–65.

3 “saw their homes burned”: Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (2004), 76; E. Wilder Spaulding, New York in the Critical Period, 1783–1789 (1932), 116–17; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (1999), 252–55.

4 “duly enacted laws”: Spaulding 119–28.

4 “A statute from 1784”: “An Act for the immediate Sale of certain forfeited Estates,” Apr. 6, 1784, in Laws of the Legislature of the State of New York in Force Against the Loyalists, and Affecting the Trade of Great Britain and British Merchants, and Others Having Property in that State (1786), 41–42; see also “An Act for the Speedy Sale of the confiscated and forfeited Estates within this State, and for other Purposes therein mentioned,” May 12, 1784, id. at 43–86; Flick 152–58.

4 “Philipsburg Manor”: Middlekauff 568.

4 “disenfranchised most Tories”: “An Act to preserve the Freedom and Independence of this State,” May 12, 1784, in Laws of the Legislature of the State of New...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Overture: The Constitution’s Third Century
• Builders 1765–1804
• Interlude from Abroad 1835–1888
• Dreamers 1885–1931
• Restorers 1934–2016
• Finale: The Experiment Endures
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index