Recording the Constitutional Convention | Dr. Nicholas Cole | BRI’s Constitutional Conversations

0:00 hi I’m Tony Williams he’s senior teaching fellow with the Bill of Rights Institute and joining us today for Constitution Day is Nikolas Cole and Nikolas I’m hoping that you can introduce yourself to the audience of course I’m Nikolas Cole I’m a senior research fellow at Pembroke College at the University of Oxford where I run the

0:20 quill project thankful well thank you again for joining us and please go ahead and if you could tell us about your exciting project we love to hear about it so the the quilt project is a way of understanding how negotiation worked at the Constitutional Convention and in similar processes if you’ve if you’ve

0:43 ever looked at the records that we have from the convention whether it’s the official journal kept by William Jackson or the diary kept by James Madison which is much more famous and you’ll see that over the course of three months not much of the record is taken up with notes

1:03 that a proposition was made to include particular language or exclude particular language or change particular language and this can be incredibly difficult to read because what everybody at the convention would have had access to is a secretary at the front of the room who could read out for them at any

1:24 particular moment what they hadn’t hadn’t agreed whereas when you just see it written down in the minutes it can be very hard to try and recreate in your mind the exact implications of changing a particular word or or including different language so what we’ve done with the the computer is actually

1:46 programming and all the proposals made and all of the votes taken so that you can see a reconstruction of as near as we can get it the exact textual context within which any particular decision was made or suggestion was made for different language so that we can we can bring you as nearly as we possibly can

2:08 into the particular moments of the convention and then around cool we can build all kinds of other resources to help you analyze what’s going on or understand better what’s going on and we hope really bring to life the idea that the Constitution is a product of negotiation by a whole group

2:28 of people rather than being the particular brainchild of one or two individuals so looking more broadly at the Constitution rather than just Madison as the father of the Constitution looking at this whole process of negotiation yeah I think we wanted to take seriously the thing that

2:49 the framers themselves the founders themselves were most proud of which was that the Constitution had come out of a rational process of debate that was serious and formal and involved iterative discussions of language over the course of a long period of time and

3:09 that that was a much more rational way of designing a constitution than asking a very wise man to go into a room and write a constitution for them which is what you know the ancient Greeks had done or or other states had done and the Federalist Papers right at the very beginning of the document reflects on

3:29 how remarkable it is that America will be governed through reflection and choice and what they’re really referring to is the fact that this wasn’t just the creation of one or two individuals it was a compromise reached with great difficulty and sometimes some very heated debate and by a group of people

3:52 who had very different perspectives on on how America should be governed and we really wanted to take that idea seriously and help lay it out for people so that we can better understand really what compromise meant at the end of the 18th century