fficulties of interpreting the Constitution. When he went back to finish the Notes, he secretly acquired the official journal of the Convention from George Washington and used it. The focus on text in the last weeks of the Notes reflected the politics and concerns of 1789.
Beginning in 1789, Madison began to revise the Notes to convert his diary into a record of debates. Along the way, he converted himself into a different Madison. In the original Notes, Madison was annoyed and frustrated. Slowly by altering a word here, a phrase there, he became a moderate, dispassionate observer and intellectual founder of the Constitution.
Madison understood his revisions as repeated efforts to create a record—his record—of what he saw as significant in the Convention. Yet each revision increased the distance from the summer of 1787. Over the years, words, concepts, compromises shifted focus and took on new political meanings. Motivations were disputed; context lost. The Convention could not see the Constitution until the final days. And from the moment the Constitution became visible, it was contested. The respect owed the framing generation demands appreciation for the political world in which they struggled to stabilize the country. Over the first decade, the Constitution survived and indeed began to become the Constitution.
Madison’s narrative was always that of James Madison, a member. Continuing for a half century after 1787, he struggled to understand what had happened that summer.
The first original sentence read “Monday May 14 was the day fixed for the meeting of the deputies in Convention for revising the federal Constitution.” Madison eventually deleted the word “Constitution” and replaced it with “system of Government.” The revised sentence unambiguously declared the transformation of a federal system of government to a federal Constitution. Over the half century, Madison left one word unchanged. He never altered the word, “revising.” To Madison, revising was an essential element of American constitutionalism.
Mary Sarah Bilder is Professor of Law and the Lee Distinguished Scholar, Boston College Law School, and author of Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention (Harvard University Press, 2015). This op ed was originally published online by the History News Network.