Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788

Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788. By Pauline Maier. (New York: Simon 8c Schuster, 2010. Pp. 590. Cloth, $30.00.)

Reviewed by Terry Bouton

In Ratification, Pauline Maier writes to address a surprising gap in Revolutionary-era scholarship: how the various states ratified the federal Constitution. Given the historical significance of ratification, Maier laments, we still do not know much about how the process of ratification unfolded. Maier's focus, however, is not really on process. Instead, she presents ideas and rhetoric. Her book is successful in reporting the arguments for and against the Constitution in newspapers and at the state ratification conventions. Those who want to understand the stakes involved in the ratification process, how the Federalists managed to get the Constitution ratified, and why the "Antifederalists" lost will need to look elsewhere. This is a book about what some (usually elite) people said and how they said it, not process or meaning.

Maier bases her book almost entirely on the magnificent volumes in the Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution. This collection is the real star of the book, along with its primary editor John P. Kaminski, who has assembled such a comprehensive and wonderfully edited compilation.

Maier's strength is in using those volumes to show how the arguments in the ratification debates unfolded over time. Presenting the ratification arguments is nothing new. Maier's contribution is in showing how rhetoric repeated and changed as state after state debated the Constitution. The most interesting part is how delegates and writers in different states recycled the same basic points, but often refined them based on what seemed effective (or ineffective) in prior states and how they repackaged arguments for audiences in their own states. To this end, the...