Reviewed by Jeffery A. Smith | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 27.2

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Reviewed by Jeffery A. Smith | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 27.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

*From Chinese Exclusion to Guantánamo Bay: Plenary Power and the Prerogative State.* By Natsu Taylor Saito. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007. 497 pp. Photos, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95 (cloth).
At the end of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, George Mason said he could not sign the document the delegates had drafted. The author of Virginia's seminal declaration of rights and an opponent of slavery, he objected to the lack of guarantees for freedom in the federal Constitution. According to James Madison's notes, Mason made "animadversions on the dangerous power and structure of the Government, concluding that it would end either in a monarchy, or a tyrannical aristocracy; which, he was in doubt, but one or other, he was sure" (Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison [Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966], p. 651).	1
Under public pressure, the First Congress then wrote the Bill of Rights, which were ratified by the states as the first ten constitutional amendments in 1791. However, as Natsu Taylor Saito shows, freedom has been shredded by suppression of the subjugated and supposedly subversive "Other." In 1798 Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts to rid the country of foreign radicals and to restrict Jeffersonian journalists accused of being in league with revolutionary France. In 1857 the Supreme Court's Dred Scott ruling declared that slaves were property and not U.S. citizens who could sue for their freedom after living in free territory.	. . .

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