Memory of the Constitutional Convention and the Madison Papers

The Convention that formed the United States Constitution met in the Philadelphia State House over the summer of 1787—behind closed doors. Americans thus learned the details of the proceedings only gradually, as members of the Convention disclosed their recollections of the event and as accounts of the proceedings fitfully entered public conversation in the decades after 1787. The 1840 publication of the “Madison Papers,” a collection of James Madison’s notes from the Confederation Congress and his journal from the Convention, marks one episode in the unveiling of the Constitutional Convention.

This thesis revisits the impact of the Madison Papers in American cultural memory by situating Madison’s notes within the larger context of contested memories of the Convention in the 1830s and 1840s. Historians’ isolated studies of the Madison Papers within the antislavery movement, while commendable, have obscured our understanding of the publication’s full significance in the antebellum U.S. This thesis historicizes the appearance of Madison’s record from the Convention by juxtaposing his account with the previously published sources from the Convention and by reconsidering antislavery activists’ debates over the Constitution within a broader cultural framework. Newspapers, eulogies, antislavery tracts, contemporary books, and published letters are used to explore Americans’ memory-narrative of the Constitutional Convention around 1840.

Furthermore, this thesis argues that scholars have not sufficiently studied how the Convention, as an event, repeatedly reemerged in cultural memory over the course of the nineteenth century as successive publications shed light on the secret proceedings of the Philadelphia meeting. Consequently, this thesis examines the tension between the transformative influence of the publication of Madison’s record and the previously existing narrative of the Convention. Madison’s notes entered neither at the beginning, nor at the end, but in the middle of an extant memory-driven narrative of the Philadelphia assembly. Reconsidering the impact of this publication illustrates the ways in which undisclosed, private, and secret information, when revealed to the public, has the power to alter political debate, personal opinions, and national memories.