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“Motives at Philadelphia”: A Comment on Slonim

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Gordon S. Wood
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Extract

I am grateful to the editor of Law and History Review for the opportunity to respond to Professor Shlomo Slonim's article criticizing my interpretation of the formation of the Constitution. I know Professor Slonim personally from a visit I made over a decade ago to Hebrew University where he was a very gracious host. I know too that he is an earnest and meticulous scholar of the United States Constitution who has spent a great deal of energy refuting Charles Beard. So in this brief response I wish to treat his criticism with respect while at the same time I hope to show where I believe he is wrong or has misunderstood and misinterpreted me.

Type
Forum: Comment
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , Fall 1998 , pp. 553 - 562
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 1998

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References

1. Wood, Gordon S., The Making of the Constitution (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 1987), 9–10Google Scholar. I take Slonim's questioning of the amount of my “evidentiary material” (529, 534, 548) to be particularly unfair. Most commentators have accused me of having too much material. I tended to cite quotations only and could have easily piled up citations about the Federalists’ concerns for the future of republicanism in the states. But such citations would not by themselves prove my point; that point is proven by the overall context of my argument, which includes my earlier discussion of the state constitutions and the importance of the states to Americans in 1776. Slonim ignores this kind of context.

2. Rakove, Jack N., Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 46–50Google Scholar; Hobson, Charles F., “The Negative on State Laws: James Madison, the Constitution, and the Crisis of Republican Government,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 36 (1979): 220–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Hobson, “The Negative on State Laws,” 221. Slonim seems to be straining when he explains why Madison devoted so much of his memorandum to internal state affairs by saying that “the first eight vices were deemed so patently fatal to the system as not to require much elaboration” (537-38, n. 40).

4. According to the most astute student of Madison's thinking, Jack N. Rakove, Madison's “agenda for the Federal Convention was not addressed to the woes of the Union alone, but to the underlying vices of the Republic.” Rakove, Original Meanings, 55-56.

5. Hobson, “Negative on State Laws,” 228.

6. Farrand, Max, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937), 1:315–16.Google Scholar

7. Rakove, Jack N., The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretative History of the Continental Congress (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 394Google Scholar.

8. Ibid., 390.

9. Storing, Herbert J., ed., The Complete Anti-Federalist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 1:51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. The Federalist, Nos. 57, 51.