Madison's Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention, Mary Sarah Bilder, Harvard University Press, 384 pages
James Madison has long been treated as a neutral authority on early American history, a kind of Great Sage of, among other things, the U.S.
There have been numerous books taking as their points of departure various of Madison's accounts of things.
Besides that, virtually all historians treat The Federalist, of which Madison was co-author, as a neutral account of the Articles of Confederation.
Followers of Harry Jaffa have even picked up an idea that Madison tossed off in a private letter to Jefferson 30 years after the fact in support of the idea that the Declaration of Independence somehow underlay the Constitution--even though there is not one word in, say, the three volumes (2,000 pages) of The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution devoted to Virginia showing that anyone ever mentioned that idea in the most pivotal state.
John Samples, the collection's editor and the director of the Cato Institute's Center for Representative Government, introduces us to Madison the advocate of direct democracy.
Tom Palmer presents Madison as a "real" multiculturalist who "openly embraced a pluralistic constitutional order [and] ...
If so, you, too, can summon Madison in defense of your cause.
Those who believe that Native Americans deserve reparations might find solace and encouragement in yet another surprising Madison, who was a staunch defender of Indian rights.
Those who long for a more traditional Madison will not be disappointed.
One might think it would be difficult to exaggerate James Madison's accomplishments.
Yet historians do exaggerate Madison's achievements.
In James Madison: A Life Reconsidered, Cheney repeats the standard view consistently.
Madison's contemporaries considered Benjamin Franklin their country's great intellectual ornament.
Although a slaveholder, and a substantial one, to the end of his days, Madison in Cheney's account was unhappily so.
