 third part of their strategy would be to replace the slave labor with immigrant labor, such as Protestant Germans. A good historian will include information like this in a biography of Madison or Jefferson because to hide the flaws of these men would be to create an inaccurate historical picture of their lives and character. I also learned something interesting about George Washington from Professor Kaminski's lecture. George Washington was the only founding father to free all his slaves. He freed some of them while he was alive and freed the rest of them in his will. However, he couldn't actually free all his slaves because his slaves and his wife Martha's slaves had intermarried. So in his will, Washington (who believed he would die before Martha) declared that after she died, all his slaves would be freed. The slaves knew about this and hence, their freedom depended on Martha's death. Professor Kaminski said that "she knew it too" -- that the slaves were eagerly looking forward to her death. So Martha Washington freed all the slaves in 1801 (while she was still alive). There is also a record of her writing "I am working to prepare the children to be independent." In other words, she was having the children learn a trade so that when freed, they would be able to earn a living. Another interesting thing I learned was some additional examples of how the meaning of our language has changed since 1787. For example, when Jefferson writes in the Declaration of Independence, "To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world," he had a different understanding of the word "candid." Today, when someone says "can I be candid with you," they mean, "let me be perfectly clear but really what I want to do is give you my very biased and honest opinion of what I think." In 1776, "candid" meant "a blank slate." So a "candid world" would not have made any predetermined judgment on what to think. Jefferson wanted "the facts" to be presented to a world that had not yet passed judgment -- to an unbiased world. Hence, the word "candid" has almost flipped meanings over time. Two examples that Professor Kaminski gave were for the words "pathetic" and "nervous." Back in the 1700s, when someone said "His words were pathetic," they didn't mean "weak" they mean pathetic as in "pathos" - "full of emotion and poignancy." Likewise, if someone said he gave a "nervous speech," they meant he gave a "powerful" speech. In other words -- he "had nerves." Hence, a historian also has to be conscious of the changing meaning of language when reading primary source documents. James Madison gave us a great gift when he took detailed notes of everything that was said at the Constitutional Convention. He wrote these notes for posterity. During his study of ancient constitutions in preparation for the Constitutional Convention, he was often frustrated by the lack of historical documentation of the creation of these ancient documents and governments. Madison did not want historians of the future to have this same problem. He knew what he was doing and he understood the significance and implications of the discussions surrounding the creation of our Constitution. Professor Kaminski argued, however, that you shouldn't use the arguments
in the Constitutional Convention to determine the meaning of the
different articles and clauses in the Constitution. The reason for this
is that sometimes, delegates gave exaggerated proposals of what they wanted because they knew they were going to have to give up something to compromise. So what they said may not have actually been what they wanted. Secondly, many delegates changed their minds of the course of the months of the Constitutional Convention, so you can't look at any one thing they said to determine original meaning or intention. So to find the true original meaning, it would be better to look at the ratification debates. Furthermore, the Constitution we have today is not entirely the same as the one Madison originally designed. "He's not the father of what we got," Professor Kaminski explained, but he did take the