C-SPAN Book TV today played an extended interview with Mary Sarah Bilder about her book on James Madison’s notes on the constitutional convention. Madison revised his notes to share with Jefferson, who had not been present during the convention. Chernow, in his biography of Hamilton, reports how Jefferson criticized Hamilton for aristocratic tendencies. What is most surprising about Bilder’s comments is that Madison had made comments at the convention similar to Hamilton’s discussing whether there might be merits to monarchy. But in his revision of the notes, he deleted those comments before passing the notes to Jefferson, presumably as part of his desire to ally himself more closely with Jefferson and to join in Jefferson’s vilification of Hamilton.
This is not an earth-shattering finding, but it adds support to Chernow’s defense of Hamilton. Jefferson was the slave-holding aristocrat in practice, while Hamilton opposed slavery, and Hamilton’s intellectual speculations on the best form of government were not notably monarchist within the context of the time.
The book discussed on C-SPAN, was:
Bilder, Mary Sarah. Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.
The Chernow book I mention above, is:
Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004.