Berkin vs. Middlekauff on the Constitutional Convention
This paper compares Carol Berkin's A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution (2002) with Robert Middlekauff's The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution 1763–1789 (1982), focusing on how each author portrays the process, goals, and outcomes of the Constitutional Convention. The analysis examines differences in narrative style, character development, treatment of key figures such as Madison, Washington, and Adams, and coverage of the slavery debate. Berkin's book is characterized as skeptical, novelistic, and focused narrowly on the convention itself, while Middlekauff's broader, more detailed historical work provides deeper biographical portraits and wider context for understanding the founding era.
- Introduction: Two Books, One Convention: Berkin's motivation and framing of the 2000 election
- Scope, Style, and Authorial Approach: Comparing page count, tone, and narrative style
- Portraying the Key Delegates: Madison and Washington depicted by each author
- Adams, Jefferson, and the Question of Executive Power: Adams-Jefferson contrast and executive branch debate
- Slavery at the Convention: Each author's treatment of slavery and race
- Conclusions and Overall Assessment: Final assessments and structural observations
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper uses direct quotation from both primary sources to substantiate every comparative claim, grounding abstract stylistic observations in specific textual evidence.
- It moves systematically through thematic categories — scope, character portrayal, slavery — rather than bouncing randomly between the two books, making the comparison easy to follow.
- The opening contextual frame (the 2000 election, September 11) gives the review contemporary relevance while also setting up the author's motivation critique of Berkin's framing.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates comparative textual analysis: placing two authors' treatments of the same historical event side by side and evaluating differences in depth, tone, and interpretive emphasis. By quoting each author on the same figure (e.g., Madison, Adams) in sequence, the writer lets readers see the contrast directly rather than simply asserting it, which is a strong model for comparative book review writing.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a contextual introduction critiquing Berkin's framing of the 2000 election, then transitions into a sustained comparison organized around scope and style, delegate characterization, the Adams–Jefferson dynamic, and slavery. It closes with a brief look at each author's concluding approach. The structure is largely thematic, though it occasionally returns to the books' formal differences (footnotes, page counts, index length) to anchor the stylistic argument.
Introduction: Two Books, One Convention
In terms of contemporary relevance, upon first glance Carol Berkin's book A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution would seem to have an advantage over other books about the framing of the U.S. Constitution, such as The Glorious Cause by Robert Middlekauff. That extra degree of relevance for Berkin's book is due to its date of publication (2002), after the Supreme Court — in a 5-4 vote — effectively decided the 2000 presidential election in favor of George W. Bush, and after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001. Berkin explains that those events stimulated her desire to write a book on the creation of the Constitution, providing the "genesis" of her decision to tackle this difficult subject (Berkin, p. 1).
Those are admirable reasons for taking on a difficult historical subject. However, Berkin would appear to be glossing over "the most celebrated disputed election in presidential history" (Berkin, p. 2) by claiming of the 2000 election crisis that "the American Constitution had come through yet another trial by fire and a peaceful transition of power had been achieved" (Berkin, p. 2). What actually transpired was that the American political system had allowed the Supreme Court to essentially elect Bush by a 5-4 margin along party lines. One wonders what Patrick Henry, John Adams, and Richard Henry Lee — among other delegates to the convention — would have said, if they could have foreseen the year 2000, about the U.S. Supreme Court overriding the Florida Supreme Court's authority.
Berkin writes on page 17 that Henry, Adams, and Lee were "Americans when they contrasted themselves with the citizens, government officials, and soldiers of England," but at home they were "Virginians, New Jerseyites, Connecticut men." Clearly, states' rights were important to a group of highly educated men who had just helped win the Revolutionary War and shed the shackles of a powerful central government in England. In 2000, it was states' rights being subordinated to federal power when the U.S. Supreme Court halted the recounting of ballots in Florida — a recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court — that might otherwise have given Al Gore a victory. Later, in November 2001, technical recounts by the National Opinion Research Center suggested Gore might have won had "overvotes" been considered. But that is another story. The Constitution's awesome power and scope lurks behind nearly every important political event in America, and every politician invoking "the founding fathers," "the framers," or "our Constitution" acknowledges that enduring weight.
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