The Debate on the Constitution : Federalist and Antifederalist Speeches, Articles and Letters During the Struggle over Ratification, Part Two: January to August 1788 (Library of America)

"The Debate on the Constitution" is a wealth of primary source material for true students of U.S. History. Caveat emptor though. If you fancy yourself an armchair historian because you've read a few of David McCullough's readable histories, then you may find yourself overwhelmed when you try to tackle this collection of circulars, speeches, and articles. To truly appreciate the intellect imbued in many of these passages, one should probably have a background in Hume, Montesquieu, Locke, Blackstone and a host of others. If you read this volume and cannot grasp the beauty of Madison's "The Federalist X" or the sheer logical brilliance of Hamilton's "The Federalist XXXII - XXXIII," then you may need to give yourself a primer on the theoretical underpinnings of colonial history before you digest the rest of this work. What Bailyn does collect here is not to be ignored. There are very few omissions that one should go out and hunt down in order to see the entire effort of controverting the nascent Constitution. If you find yourself siding with George Mason and James Monroe more often than James Wilson and Alexander Hamilton, then it would behoove you to pick up the entire collected works of the anti federalists, but it is not necessary to get a thorough panoramic of the debate. On the negative side (small negative side, mind you), Bailyn uses a format that I have never enjoyed for works of this length: endnotes rather than footnotes. I have studied formative U.S. history for over a decade, and I still needed to read several of the notes. Most readers should read all of the notes. Therein lies the problem. One has to flip 600-700 pages forward and backwards in order to find the relevant notes, and do the same thing again if one wants to read the brief biography of a lesser know writer. Had Bailyn used the footnote format, much of this needless page-turning would have been abrogated. While the format of the notes is a negative, the notes themselves are a big positive, as are the timeline and the biographies. The timeline is an excellent refresher on a number of issues. Mind you, it is not a substitute for actual knowledge of given events, but it does allow the learned reader to refresh a fact or two on a mentioned event. I found it particularly helpful when evaluating the debates in the Pennsylvania Convention. In the entire timeline I was only able to find one issue that I felt serious enough to mention. Bailyn claims on page 1111 that " (the) Peace overture (to France) splits Federalist party into Adams and Hamilton factions" during February of 1799. This is a bit late. The Federalist party was silently split against Adams before he was ever elected and many openly followed Hamilton in his disgust over the Alien and Sedition Acts in the summer of 1798. Overall, this is first rate and should be on the shelf of any actual U.S. Historian. Having a wealth of primary sources collected together is an invaluable resource. The other shoe does have to drop

Unlike the political commentators of the late 20th and early 21st century (watchers of Sunday public affairs programs and AM radio listeners know who they are), the commentators of the 18th century actually had something of substance to say. This was a time when education was rare, but when done was done well. The New American Library does its usual exceptional job in assembling the material in this book including some of the more important selections from the Federalist Papers as well as some of the writings of the anti-Federalists. Here the role of the government and the nature of freedom are really explored. Life was better before politics became about feeling and emotion. Every American should read this book, but only if he wants to really understand the basis of the American experiment.