The Constitutional Convention of 1787: A Reference Guide by Stuart Leibiger (review)

In 2021, Constitutional interpretation has been ubiquitous, what with 60+ post-election lawsuits, an insurrection, and hundreds of voting bills before state legislatures. How could a reference work on the Constitutional Convention in a formulaic “Guides to Historic Events in America” series match that interpretive energy? Stuart Leibiger achieves it by humanizing the framers and their founding document. His book has the expected reference pieces: timeline and overview up front with biographical snippets and primary sources in back. In between, however, this is no bold-faced-terms guide to acing a multiple-choice test. Instead, Leibiger tells the story of the Convention as, well, an actual story. His narrative is full of developed characters, vivid personalities, and intractable conflicts, serving to remind students and professors alike just how contingent the whole enterprise was.

Leibiger’s convention is lively and human. As in his Founding Friendship: George Washington, James Madison, and the Creation of the American Republic (Charlottesville, VA, 1999), Leibiger here relishes personal relationships. The demigods regularly return to earth, and they do so often in their own words, august and snide alike. High-minded political debate did not preclude Washington, for instance, from finding Gouverneur Morris’s womanizing “disgusting” (47) or the delegates at large from groaning whenever Luther Martin stood to speak. Leibiger, without missing an iota of policy debate, also tackles financial hardship, petty squabbles, and smallpox fears along the way.

Students will find plenty of surprises to talk about. Alexander Hamilton aficionados might shudder to learn of his “spotty attendance” (187) and that, before disappearing, he “stunned the convention” with praise for the British government and the hope that Americans would soon recognize “the shortcomings of republicanism” and “the benefits of monarchy” (95). His poor attendance, at least, was hardly unique. New Hampshire went unrepresented for some time, Leibiger tells us, because their legislature would not foot the travel bill; private wealth eventually stepped in. Other delegates got bored or embittered; some shuttled between Philadelphia and the Confederation Congress in New York. We hear also of administrative incompetence, post-Convention forgery, and an attempt to gerrymander James Madison out of a career. By making the experience more human—and more political—in such specific ways, the volume establishes a more human and political document for the classroom.

Leibiger investigates the delegates’ political reasoning with remarkable depth and breadth. For someone looking to unearth the past in the present, it takes little work to translate the delegates’ words into those of our own news cycle. Anger over states’ rights blocking popular majorities is palpable when Leibiger quotes James Wilson asking, “Is [the constitution] for men, or for the imaginary beings called States?” (104). Voting rules, supermajorities, Supreme Court term limits, and immigration all make appearances. Leibiger’s account of Madison, in a last-gasp committee meeting, scribbling into being the (already unpopular) electoral college on spare parchment should produce lively discussion in our age of electoral college skepticism.

This is not to suggest Leibiger treats the men, the debates, or the document flippantly. The framers clearly have his respect. If anything, he treats the proceedings too solemnly at times. For example, the epigraph and preface make much of the contemporaneous hope that the great men of the convention would frame a “system to last for ages” befitting an “eternal republic” (xvii). Similarly, Chapter 1 opens triumphantly with unquestioned references to British “tyranny” and “oppression” (1, 2, 7, 9) and matter-of-fact pronouncements on how the state constitutions “overreacted” in the legislative direction (9). Near the end, despite having outlined some suspect politicking in Federalist ratification efforts, he declares The Federalist “like an automobile owner’s manual” that Supreme Court justices consult (209–210). The winners may have seen it all that way, and some justices may, too, but many have not, then or now, and that includes many historians. Few historians get a chance to...