Today’s issue of The Wall Street Journal includes a review of Madison’s Hand by Mary Sarah Bilder. The burden of Ms. Bilder’s book, if I may summarize my takeaway from the review by Robert K. Landers, is that Madison’s notes in their final published form are a reconstruction far more than a transcript.Madison, after all, was a participant in the discussions, and could hardly have taken down notes with a quill pen while thinking on his feet. She contrasts the style of Madison’s notes of given speeches with those of other contemporaneous note-takers, and holds that others’ versions “depicted speeches in the unpolished way that people actually talk.” Whereas Madison’s final notes impose a more reasonable, measured tone and also a retrospective narrative.
According to this gloss on Madison, Madison himself went to the convention more inclined to agree with Hamilton’s desire for a diminution of the states. Madison wrote his notes with Jefferson as his imaginary audience, and Jefferson was alarmed at ‘monarchist” tendencies in Hamilton. Madison came to Jefferson’s opinion, and subsequently slanted his notes of his own comments - and slanted the Federalist Papers - more towards states' rights than his earlier actual notes of his own opinions would indicate.
Certainly sounds plausible, and I thought of you immediately upon reading the review.
As for the tone of the notes, I have also noticed certain things that lend it to being an after-narrative as opposed to a straight up transcript, and that's just working with what's online. She was working with the actually pages he wrote.
That being said, every single one of my volunteers(as well as myself) are constantly surprised at how often in the notes there is something that is a topic for debate, and it's almost like a direct pull out of the news or something that was in the news a few weeks/months ago. A current problem, etc, relating to the Constitution and how it is being disregarded.
We have all been told for a very long time that the "Founders could not have foreseen (fill in the blank)", yeah, they did. They did foresee it, It's all in the notes. Even if this is a reconstruction and not transcript, I find it difficult to believe that the whole thing would be a fabrication of Madison. Maybe one day the historians will "make progress" toward proclaiming that, but we aren't there yet.
I don't know how big of an impact this set of recordings will have once it is complete and can be downloaded in total, that's not for me project and make a decision on that basis. I just know that people need to hear this outside of the historical establishment's filters, and no matter where I go and the people I meet and discuss this with, I've not met one person who has read these notes. It's a very difficult read, I don't blame them. There's so much good stuff in this set of notes, it can only help our position to be more easily learned.
I did look into the WSJ book review you mentioned, here, and also this, and have been left with a takeaway that borders on suspicion. After, I looked her up as well as the judge she clerked for, there's probably not enough information for a definitive conclusion but my suspicion still remains. The thought did occur to me that her book did not meet/has not met the same reception as Cruz's Princeton "Clipping the Wings of Angels".
That aside, more than anything I hope that this project, once finalized, is both a wakeup call to any interested parties and even viewed as a shot across the bow to the historical establishment. We take our constitution seriously, and we're done with them distorting the record. Moreover, I hope it leads to someone doing this again who has greater resources. Anybody who reviews the Yale Avalon notes and compares that to what I have put together will notice the striking consistency to the fidelity of what Madison actually wrote, at least, as Yale has it transcribed anyways. That's what I can do, and will do.
I've had many restless nights thinking about what I could have done with this project, if only I had the resources of an institution at my disposal, and didn't have to be distracted with simply living life as it happens. 50+ dedicated people, who did solely nothing but this, with a sound studio and multiple microphones of excessively high quality, professional voices, etc. That's much more likely to happen after I am finished.