| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

James H. Read. Power versus Liberty: Madison, Hamilton, Wilson, and Jefferson. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. 2000. Pp. xi, 201. Cloth $47.50, paper $16.50.

Few eighteenth-century Americans questioned the Whig axiom that centralized governmental power inexorably imperils political liberty. This book by James H. Read is a study of how four "founding fathers" grappled with this received wisdom. Three of them, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and James Wilson, rejected the notion, while Thomas Jefferson tenaciously clung to it. Madison, explains Read, decided that an "energetic" federal government posed no threat to personal or public liberty provided that it exercised only constitutionally prescribed powers. For Madison, the critical issue was not the amount of power the general government wielded but simply whether that power exceeded what the people had intended to confer upon it. Read demonstrates that Hamilton agreed that centralized power bolstered liberty, but he did not share Madison's commitment to the ratifiers' original intent. Believing that the 1787 Constitution left the states too potent, Hamilton tried to administer the federal government into a much stronger regime than the framers had intended, hoping for popular acceptance after the fact. . . .

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