Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention

Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention by Mary Sarah Bilder is a study of James Madison’s Notes on the 1787 Constitutional Convention, long treated as the definitive account of the Constitution’s creation. It won the Bancroft Prize. This reprint edition was published by Harvard University Press in 2017 as a 384-page paperback.

Combining digital tools with traditional textual analysis, Bilder shows that Madison revised his Notes far more extensively than scholars had realized. Begun as a near-daily diary and left unfinished, the Notes were taken up again years later, largely with Thomas Jefferson in mind, and Madison’s portrayals of figures such as Alexander Hamilton and Charles Pinckney shifted through rounds of revision before the Notes were published in 1840.