Review by Choice Review
Scholars have felled a great many forests seeking to educate Americans about the constitutionalism of the early republic, but Amar (Yale Univ.) masterfully shows there is much more to learn, especially when a new and generative approach to the subject is brought to bear on it. Amar emphasizes that understanding the US constitutional conversation, as it unfolded between 1760 and 1840, requires focusing on what those actually engaged in that conversation thought, said, and did at the time. (As such, he downplays James Madison's Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787.) Especially engaging is chapter 5, which persuasively reorients the focus of the constitutional convention from Madison et al. to George Washington. To his immense credit, Amar ensures that within the highly readable 800-plus pages, readers never lose sight of his main arguments. This book is the first volume in a planned trilogy, which, as Amar explains in the postscript, will analyze the American constitutional conversation through the beginning of the 21st century. This reviewer cannot wait to read volumes 2 and 3. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Undergraduates through faculty and general audiences. --Helen J. Knowles, SUNY Oswego
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The U.S. collectively talked and wrote its way into being, according to this dazzling constitutional history. Yale law professor Reed (The Law of the Land) surveys America's evolving ideas about government and law via discussions of Paxton's Case, a 1761 Boston legal proceeding about search warrants that challenged parliamentary supremacy and started the colonies' ideological journey to independence; the 1787 Constitution, which knit sovereign states into a nation; and later constitutional crises over slavery. The author frames this history as a series of "conversations" among the founders in formal congresses and informal letter-writing circles, and among ordinary people through newspapers, pamphlets, cartoons, and elections. Against modern historians and legal scholars who condemn the constitutional order as a bulwark of elite dominion, Amar advances a neo-Federalist defense of it as a deeply democratic, if imperfect, blueprint for stable liberty. This is no arid exercise in legal theory: Amar ties searching constitutional analysis into a gripping narrative of war, popular tumults, political intrigue, and even fashion, highlighted by vivid profiles of statesmen. (Washington and Hamilton are the heroes of the story; Jefferson and Madison come away diminished.) The result is a fresh, invigorating take on America's founding that puts epic deliberation at the heart of democracy. Photos. (May)
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Review by Library Journal Review
This first volume of a proposed trilogy about the U.S. Constitution (each book to treat an 80-year span) sweeps forward from 1760 to 1840 in an audacious review of the Constitution's origins, growth, development, and implementation, and the experiences and exchanges that produced its core principles and precedents. Amar (law and political science, Yale Univ.; America's Unwritten Constitution) blends biographical narratives with constitutional analysis to consider the American Revolution, the Confederation years, the Constitutional Convention, and the early national period. He discusses the thinking and interplay of framers George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, and early shapers of constitutional law, including Chief Justice John Marshall and Justice Joseph Story. Amar's multifaceted treatment of the start of the U.S. constitutional project illustrates much about our historical memory and demonstrates that there is far more to the constitution than the document itself; all this complicates its understanding. VERDICT Although sometimes dense in detail, Amar's original work offers general readers an accessible and often entertaining narrative and lessons to glean from the founding document of the United States. The wide range of material covered in the book will give scholars plenty of interpretations to engage with.--Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A page-turning doorstop history of how early American courts and politicians interpreted the Constitution. A Yale professor of law and political science, Amar has written numerous books on constitutional matters. In his latest excellent analysis, the author emphasizes that Americans debated the nature of government for 30 years before the Constitution's approval in 1788, and much of this occurred in courtrooms. Scholars have not ignored this or what followed, but Amar--who points out that most historians lack training in law and most lawyers are not knowledgeable enough about history--delivers a fascinating, often jolting interpretation. Perhaps most ingeniously, he asks, who is "the father of the constitution?" The traditional answer is James Madison, who participated in the major debates, kept the best records, and worked tirelessly for ratification. However, few of his ideas survived the debates, and others were attributed to him in error. Amar leans toward Washington, who "uniquely…got everything he wanted." The Constitution's most "distinctive feature," its "breathtakingly strong chief executive…owed more to Washington alone than to all the other delegates combined." Ranking other Founding Fathers, Amar places Hamilton second. A brilliant legal mind, he converted the Constitution's sketchy articles into the strong executive that Washington envisioned. Adams and Jefferson fare badly. Both were absent from the Philadelphia convention, and Jefferson was never more than lukewarm about the results. Madison also comes up short. His conception of the Constitution never envisioned a powerful executive, and once he saw this happening, he turned against Washington, "partly to save his own political skin back in Virginia, partly because he was a policy lightweight on certain big issues (including banks, trade, and national defense), and partly because he was smitten by Jefferson." Amar gives high marks to Chief Justice John Marshall, but his discussion of Andrew Jackson is unlikely to rescue that president's plummeting reputation. Focusing on the Constitution, he emphasizes Jackson's fierce opposition to the concept of state sovereignty promoted by John C. Calhoun, which permitted nullification and perhaps even secession. Brilliant insights into America's founding document. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
