Tomorrow on q a, former defense secretary and cia director robert gates discusses his book a passion for leadership. Lessons on change and reform from 50 years of public service. The program airs at 7 00 p. M. Eastern this week on q a, Boston CollegeLaw School Professor mary sarah builder discusses madisons hand which takes a critical look at the notes James Madison wrote during and after the convention of 1787. Mary sarah builder, you have a book out called madisons hand revising the Constitutional Convention. Whats it about. Its a biography of the notes , of madisons notes notes and madison was the only framer who we know of who took complete notes that summer. The book argues that the notes were written in their entirety the summer they wrote the constitution but madisons record is the most important account of that summer. When did you get this idea . Guest i thought i would write a narrative, a story of what it mightve been like from madisons perspective and as i began i began to investigate the notes and read them, i realized there were a lot of mystery. Things were quite how i had expected them to be and as i spent a lot of time with the notes and really wonderful access at the library of congress, it became evidence that this most important document wasnt really what we thought it was. Host where are the notes at the library of congress and how hard was it for you to see them . Guest they are in a big ball to the library of congress and you need special permission. Most people dont need to go that far. You can see them on the library of Congress Website and the library has a wonderful website with many other documents including madisons notes notes. For this book, it was important to look more carefully at the notes, and so after looking at it for about two years, the library decided i could go down and see it. I kept my notes behind, my hands behind my back the entire time and only they touched them. Host why did that take two years . Guest i think they dont want everyone who is just a regular person to wander in and see it. Madisons notes are considered a national treasure. Theyre actually labeled as a top treasure treasure and the library is very cautious about it. After a while i think they decided that some of the questions i raised about the notes were probably worth investigating but it took them a little while to be persuaded of that. Host what did the vault look like . Where is it in the library, and where did you actually look at the notes . Guest that was actually the best part of the project. Some of madisons letters they hold in the reading room and if one is very careful to explain why you dont need microfilm, you can go in the reading room and you go inside the intersanctum of the library, library, down the elevator, around the corner through two large doors and passed the vault where they hold everything. Then inside a conservation lab, one of the things i was very interest did in was in seeing whether the pages matched, whether the watermarks look the same. One of the things the library and i did is we put all the pages on a little table with light on it that allows you to see the watermark on the pages. Had you not been able to see them in the flesh so to speak, what difference would it have made regarding what you are able to write. Guest a lot of my book is based on oldfashioned textual evidence so i was pretty confident even without looking at the actual paper but the paper really helped to confirm a lot about what i had sort of suspected, particularly important was the notes, madison took the notes on sheets of paper and he folders those sheets in half. He writes on the front, across the middle, onto pages and then on the back. At some point he sewed all these little pieces of paper together into a manuscript. One of the wonderful things we noticed that we were down there was the last quarter of the manuscript, the holes he had sewn didnt match with the earlier ones. This confirmed my suspicion that the very end of the manuscript had been written later. You cant see that on the microfilm. It was really wonderful to see that in person. Host how did you spend looking at the notes . Guest we looked pretty facts because the library didnt want you to be very long. I think i was there for maybe an hour one time or two hours and then again another time. But the library was just wonderful, they took some extra images for me, they took a number of watermark images, they keep all that for probably anyone to look at now but it was really wonderful. Its a Wonderful Group of people host how long has those notes been about library of congress . After madison died in the late 1830s he left his papers to Dolly Madison, his wife and she sold them to congress. He had thought they would be worth an enormous amount of money, congress didnt didnt think they were worth so much money so finally friends of his in congress agreed to by the papers. They sent those papers to washington along with the notes. For a long time they were in the state Department Library and then the state department eventually moved them over to the library of congress itself. Originally they were in a big volume and theyve since been disassembled. Host when were the notes first made public . Guest not until 1840 after his death. When they were published they were published as madison had left them, he had carefully prepared a revised copy of the notes, he wanted them published in the middle of a collection that included all of his letters to famous people and so when the government First Published them they publish them in three volumes along with a lot of his other papers. Host what credentials did you bring to this whole project and was that part of the reason why the library eventually said, on in . Guest im a lawyer by profession and also have my phd in American History and i think one of the things that the library new was that i had written about madison before, i had written about madison as a law student and in doing so have look through some of the libraries material actually arguing that something had been catalogued was a missing manuscript of jefferson so they finally decided i wasnt a complete not. Host where did you get your under graduate degree . Guest my phd is from harvard as well as my law degree. My last year of law school i had planned to go and be a regular lawyer and a good friend of mine told me that this person was teaching a history of the Constitution Court at the law school and everybody was going to take it. I didnt know anything but i thought if everybodys going to take it, i will take it to. I was captivated. I had spent all my life in law School Learning about the constitution and all the sudden in my last semester somebody was finally explaining to me why it was the way it was. After that i clerked for a federal judge and he said i should go back into a little bit more work in history so i started off in that direction and i really havent looked back. We did have the pleasure of having bernard here but i want you to tell folks who he is. Guest bernard balin is probably the most eminent early american historian. He won the Pulitzer Prize in every single prize you could win and trained in a number of generations of history. He was important in making it clear how interesting the struggles regarding founding the country were. Host what are you doing now . Guest i teach fulltime at Boston College law school. Host i want you to set up in a moment, the whole Constitutional Convention in what happened. Back in 2005 he went with us to the hollow statues at the Constitution Center in philadelphia and her just a little bit talking about James Madison and George Washington. You are standing next to, even though hes 54 giant,. Yes this is a giant. Do you think hes gotten his due in American History . I think he has, but the funny thing, once you become president and of course were standing next to the two people in the room who did become president of the United States, you tend to be looked at from the standpoint of the president ial administration. I think James Madisons greatest contribution to American History is the work he did in the Constitutional Convention and then the work he did in the First Congress, he served in the first five houses of representatives. The First Congress in 1789, hes the one that pushed through the passage of the bill of rights. He said hes comfortable there, tell us what you can in a few minutes about James Madison. Where was he from and all that. Guest is a wonderful place to go visit because when you walk around there, you realize everybody was a lot shorter than you think they are. Host except for George Washington. Guest yes, theres theres a couple people who are tall but its still not tall by hours standards. He was the eldest son of a prominent person, he held a lot of slaves, his father did. He had left virginia to go to college at whats now princeton and he had served in the Virginia Legislature and in what we call the confederation of congress, he was born in 1751 so he wasnt really old enough to be a big player in the revolution, madisons time will come with the generation that really helps form the country, not with the generation that fights for independence. He was quiet, fairly studious. What about what he learned that princeton which was, what did he study. Guest he studied very quickly, everybody talks about how he tried to get through pretty quickly, he studied political thought, a lot of political thought, the college was very much run by people who were, at that moment interested in scottish enlightenment and interested in european philosophy and madison loved that a lot, although unlike a lot of people he doesnt have enormous notes that he read as a young man. I think theres only one book of commonplace books that he wrote down some things he learned as a young man. A lot of them learned many languages. Hes not Thomas Jefferson though. Hes much more pragmatic, he tends to read pretty quickly, he never heard a Great Library like jefferson, hes a different kind of person. What i put on the screen, this is a group of people who are at the Constitutional Convention and just to show you the ages of some of them, you can talk about them as you see it up on the screen. We have charles who is 29, Alexander Hamilton is 30, john lansing is 32 governor morris 35, James Madison 46 and george mason is 62. And youre missing franklin who was in his early 80s. So madison, george mason whos on the screen but also Benjamin Franklin really had been the movers and shakers of the time of the revolution. George mason certainly was well known out of virginia for having drafted the virginia bill of rights and was very important. Madison is okay with him. Ben franklin at the convention drives him crazy. He is in his 80s and he thinks everything should still be like it was in the revolution. Madisons competitors a little bit at the convention, the people he has captivated is that young younger group. Charles pick me who was a little younger than him drove him crazy. As i read the notes there is a lot of competitor desire for credit and a little jealousy pinckney. After the convention pinckney writes a wonderful letter, not because its wonderful of what it says but it really puts you back in that moment. He had this enormous handwriting and he writes madison crowing about how hes married and enjoying married life and then a big dig toward madison when he says but of course you are not married yet. They were quite competitive in some ways. You mention in your book, i cant remember the last name, kitty somebody who was pursuing at the convention at only 16 years old. Guest he was interested, James Madison was interested in kitty flip floyd long before she went to the convention purge she was very young and there are letters where he talks about her with jefferson. A lot of the biographers have really focused on her, i tend to think he was quite enamored by a woman named eliza whose mother ran the boarding house that madison stayed at who had married a person who had been in prison down in new orleans and then died. Madison writes a lot of letters to her and my own guess is that he was quite close to her also. You tell us in the book that he was 43 when he got married to Dolly Madison who is 25 and i was in 1794. I want to show the actual physical room at the Independence Hall where the convention was held. Tell us, when were the dates of that and when were they inside this room. Guest so thats Independence Hall and the delegates met there from may of 1787 through the ends of the convention which was september 17 and the delegates we believe set by state because they voted by state, each state had a vote and the president of the convention was George Washington and he would have sat in sort of government the entire situation. Host where did James Madison sit in that room . Guest we dont know. We know Different Things about different times. He said he sat up close and we would assume that means he sat with many of the virginians, they needed to vote together and he was very close to people at the beginning of the convention, a very goodlooking governor of virginia. You implied that James Madison was for openness and a little more transparency but that room was pretty much nailed down when they have their debates. Guest one of the things we sometimes forget is that what we take for granted in legislation assemblies is that they be open. That wasnt true the back then. In fact, when when congress opened the senate remain close into the 1790s until public outcry forced them to let them in peer people thought you should have the right to know what congress did and do have this sort of final product but they didnt necessarily yet believe completely that you should be able to watch all of the deliberations as the public. People would have liked to have known what was going on but i think sometimes the strands have misinterpreted it as if the convention was some kind of wrong secret proceeding. It was pretty much normal. Only after the convention when the debates began does america really switch toward the notion that the public has a right to observe the delegates or representatives discussing that. How many delegates were at the convention and how are they chosen . Each state sent different people, madison actually wrote the legislation in virginia that said people should be elected and he was elected but conventions, the state sent different numbers of people to philadelphia. I think the number is Something Like in the 70s are elected, most of that summer theres less than 50 people who are actually in that room. By the end end i think they are down below 40 in terms of who is actually there. The convention is a much smaller number of people that we sometimes imagine it is a mac i want to put on the screen the breakdown of the ages and it starts with somebody whos 26. We dont dont have their name on the screen but as you can see those between 25 and 29 there were four and eight between 50 and 59, 60 between 65 and then Benjamin Franklin. Yes Benjamin Franklin is holding up the tail and. Is that a young group. Guest i actually think its not a young group at all. You know we know they are writing the constitution because we can look back and see it, they didnt really know they were writing the constitution. The year before madison and others had gathered to try to write a constitution and failed miserably, it basically stopped and they had to say to congress you should have a better convention so we know theyre going to write a convention but they dont know that. A lot of them port and people go but its not clear that its completely the place to be. My own sense is thats pretty much the age we would expect, huge number of people have political experience and many of them were serving in congress at the same time in many of them have been governors. Its a quite Impressive Group of people if what you want our people with daytoday practical political experience. Host how did James Madison first get in . He begins in virginia, hes elected and i think he serves very locally in the beginning but he serves from the Virginia Legislature. Its during those years that he becomes friends with Thomas Jefferson and also becomes very much antagonistic to people like patrick henry. He comes to really dislike the virginia legislation during those years. He felt the Virginia Legislature was counter to National Interest and hes part of a group of people including washington who want the government to move toward stronger National Power and they want to be respected by the European Company countries and have the Revenue Sources