The National Archives today launched Founders Online, which collects the papers of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin - about 120,000 documents in all, with more to come - on one website. The papers are annotated so references to people and events are explained. Editorial notes are added where background and context are needed. And best of all, the website is searchable.
To test the website’s capabilities I did a quick search centered around the debate on whether the Constitution should include a bill of rights. I clicked on Jefferson and typed in “bill of rights.” Letters to Madison, Washington, Edward Rutledge and several others appeared. I then did the same with Madison and Alexander. Easy.
Jefferson was in Paris during the Constitutional Convention and could comment on the convention’s result only from afar. There were things Jefferson liked about the Constitution and there were things he didn’t like. One of his biggest objections was the absence of a bill of rights. Madison supported a bill of rights but didn’t consider the lack of one a fatal flaw. He could go either way. “I have favored it because I supposed it might be of use, and if properly executed could not be of disservice,” Madison wrote Jefferson on Oct. 17, 1788.
Hamilton thought a bill of rights not only unnecessary but also potentially dangerous. Applying restrictions on the government implies the government has powers the Constitution does not give it. In Federalist No. 84 Hamilton questioned the wisdom of declaring “that things shall not be done which there is no power to do,” writing:
“ ’WE THE PEOPLE of the United States, to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.’ Here is a better recognition of popular rights than volumes of those aphorisms which make the principal figure in several of our state bills of rights, and which would sound much better in a treatise of ethics than in a constitution of government.”
Hamilton lost the argument, of course, but I find his point compelling in this way: The Bill of Rights locked us into thinking that the rights it enumerates are the only rights we have. The Ninth Amendment (“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”) tries to remind us that there are fundamental rights beyond the ones mentioned in the Constitution but as Jack Rakove, a history professor at Stanford University has written, the amendment “lies inertly a joker that has never been played.”
My only complaint about Founders Online is its document collection is limited to the papers of the six founders everyone knows (or thinks they know). Some of the words of founders such as Rufus King, John Jay and Edmund Randolph exist on the website but only when they appear in letters written to Jefferson et al. The papers of these men and of dozens of individuals who contributed significantly to the nation’s creation deserve to be included.
But this criticism is minor considered against what Founders Online offers. It is an invaluable resource. Countless hours of reading await.