Book review: The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group
of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government
By Fergus M. Bordewich, Simon &
Schuster, New York, 2016
Alec D. Rogers very capably reviews
this new book at AllThingsLiberty.com. Fergus Bordewich offers a detailed look
at how the leaders of the former American colonies started buckling down to
making a government after the Constitution was ratified in June 1788. It was a
tough job. We’re still hard at work on it in 2016.
Some excerpts from Rogers:
“By necessity, of course, the new
Congress had to deal with virtually every fundamental question of
government. And while the concept of a two house legislature was not as
alien as the Constitution’s article II President, there were many procedural
questions that would need to be settled as the machinery began to
operate. Like President George Washington, its members were aware that
virtually everything they did would set a precedent for the new government.
They also knew that the eyes of the world were upon their republican
experiment…
“Bordewich takes us through the battles
that consumed the first Congress. A new tax system was imperative yet
controversial for its implications for federal-state relations as well as its
distributions of burdens on different sectors of the economy and regions.
The creation of the federal judiciary similarly aroused concerns about an
overbearing, costly federal government. Treasury Secretary Alexander
Hamilton’s plans for a national bank and the structure of the debt consumed
considerable time and raised profound questions regarding federalism and
separation of powers. Even the title by which the President would be
addressed turned into a deep philosophical question about the relationship
between the legislative and executive branches of the federal government and
the nature of the executive in a republic.”
Rogers also notes:
“In
1871, John Adams’s grandson Charles Francis Adams would observe that:
‘We are beginning to forget that the
patriots of former days were men like ourselves, acting and acted upon like the
present race, and we are almost irresistibly led to ascribe to them in our
imaginations certain gigantic proportions and superhuman qualities, without
reflecting that this at once robs their character of consistency and their
virtues of all merit.’”
I’ll add that readers today should keep
in mind that Charles Adams, grandson of the venerable John Adams, forgot to
mention that the Founding Fathers never called themselves “founding fathers,”
and they mostly weren’t buddies, and mostly they were affluent white guys
(mostly lawyers) who were inclined to dabble in politics or who seriously
sought political power.
Human nature doesn’t change in the short
space of 240 years or so.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016
All rights reserved.
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