Bancroft

I can't really say why I'm developing this web page. I wasn't fascinated with the US Constitution when I was a kid; I generally hated history classes of any kind; avoided reading anything that looked like a book or novel on history; and rarely got into any debates on politics of any kind. I was a teenager in the late '60s and just missed being drafted in the Vietnam war by an act of Congress that put it on hold, so you might imagine things would be different with me. I mean, college students were shot and killed; race riots were taking place in schools around the country; the police shot Fred Hampton while he was asleep and then murdered him with two point-blank shots to his head when it looked like he might still live; and it was a time of serious political havoc. But I was a science geek and, worse, lived in Oregon where it was easy to ignore such tensions. And so I did.

So why have I grown to enjoy reading about the details of the formation of the US Constitution? I'm not sure. Partly, it's from seeing how rapidly wealth is being (re-)aggregated over my adult lifetime, I suppose. Partly, it's been how the US has been making poor choices in how it behaves internationally -- and brought to a fine point with this last administration of GW Bush. Partly, it's been my own confusions over the relationship and roles of state coercion and governance. And partly, it's been that as I read more and see more of the details they discussed back then, the more I simply have been interested in reading still more. Perhaps it's this last point that has kept me going, in fact.

My First Impression

My first impressions of the more prominent activists debating and forming and finally advocating the United States Constitution until it passed were that they were almost godlike. At least, that's how those adults around me made it seem. They had fantastic vision, superior intellects, and there were lots of them working together for a glorious and common cause without an ounce of dishonesty amongst them. They only wanted what was best for everyone in everything they said and did. We were downright lucky that such an unusual collection of brilliant men had arrived at the same place and at the same time and with similar interests to found our country.

This was probably all my childish mind could gather and was a good enough fairy tale to satisfy me for quite some time -- to be brutally honest, probably well into my 20's. I just wasn't curious enough to look any deeper until then. And even if I were, I really didn't care enough about human motivations and how people interacted to care about looking much deeper even if I had suspected there was more under the surface.

But then I started having some fundamental debates about the meaning of government, the exercise of coercive and even lethal force in implementing the will of a majority on others, the management of scarce resources, private property ownership, democracy, and so on. All with another student I knew while attending university. We started with a universe of one person who supposedly had all earthly resources entirely at their sole disposal and proceeded to two people and so on, trying to arrive at meaning by debating things each step of the way. This process put the ideas on a theoretical context and took it out of the crazy, far-too-complex reality I lived in and about which I little cared. And it allowed me to examine things more dispassionately and cleanly and made it closer to what science had then meant to me. So I enjoyed those debates.

Now

Today, the polarization of politics in the United States makes all these questions more poignant and I've grown more interested in reading about times and concerns and ongoing debates surrounding that special point in US history. It's my own investigation of what motivated that confluence to see what parallels can be drawn today and what concerns then are no longer quite such serious concerns today.

Where will this lead me? I've no real idea. But I have started purchasing various books and I'm especially proud of two such sets.

One is a two-volume, five-book set by George Bancroft, copyrighted in 1882, called "History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States of America." It's actually referenced in some United States Supreme Court decisions and comprises the work of most of a lifetime of interest in this subject by the author. The author personally visited and thoroughly read through many of the letters exchanged by the principles at the time and it's an excellent reference. I've taken the liberty to begin transcribing this document and you can start reading the results here, to the left.

The next is a 3-volume set (later extended) that had only 7,000 copies (I have one of them, now) printed by the United States by order of a Senate resolution on January 24th, 1901, with the House concurring on February 9th, 1901. The volumes are titled, "Documentary History of the Constitution of the United States of America." In the first volume alone, it provides the proceedings of the Annapolis Convention; the proceedings of the Continental Congress; the credentials of the delegates to the Federal Convention; the proceedings of the Federal Convention (including detailed, daily records of the voting history for each colony/state) and more. I read these now, starting from first page to last. Incredible!

I have much more on my shelves, of course. Modern perspectives written by constitutional scholars and Supreme Court Justices; university textbooks on US history; and so on. But the above I cherish more because they provide much fuller detail so that I don't have to take the word of others about what was meant or said. I can read it for myself.

Feel free to email me.

Last updated: Thursday, July 14, 2005 14:24