For you to twist the facts that Madison is considered the Father of the Constitution because he lived the longest is just plain wrong. He was the Father for so many other reasons.
What do you mean Ms Bilder that Madison's notes are the ONLY sustained account of what happened at the Constitutional convention? That's absolutely not true. There is another book that gives at least a partial account of what went on in the summer of 1787. Robert yates recorded his own notes but were not published until after his death. As part of the front matter of Yates' book is the account of Luther Martin (Attorney General of Maryland) while he is addressing the State Legislature of Maryland. Luther Martin and Robert Yates were in attendance of the convention for the most part. The first 99 pages are Luther Martins account of the proceedings of the convention and his objections to all or parts of the proposed new constitution. Also John Taylor of Caroline got a hold of a copy of Yates' book and gave a better argument opposing the Federalists revisionists attempts to achieve a Central Form of government.
I don't understand the remark to the effect that the compromise on slavery is "a myth." The southern states would never have ratified a Constitution that excluded slavery, and from that time on and all the way up to the Civil War, additional protections were constantly debated (think: the Missouri Compromise, Kansas-Nebraska Act, Fugitive Slave law etc.) and that issue was regularly revisited with explicit threats by southern Representatives to secede, at least once every decade.
Madison is know as the Father of the Constitution because he wrote Article 1 to add a Republican Form of Government, a Confederated (compound) Republic, to address the disparity which existed between the States in their population and wealth, by normalizing the States based upon a common factor, the proportion of the aggregate population which resides within each State, which was how they could truly join the States as equals, they are assembled equally in a popular branch, and they are assembled as equals in an equal branch for concurrence, forming a More Perfect Union. You people don’t know anything about the Constitution of the United States, in fact Constitutional Law relates to the amendments not the articles of the constitution. You law professors and students never study the articles. The requirement for amending the Articles of Confederation was that 9 of 13 States with at least 2 delegates were necessary to assemble in a congress to form a quorum just to discuss and agree on the amendments, and then all the State legislatures had to ratify those amendments before those amendments were adopted. Which makes Article 7 of the Constitution of the United States assumed something that was not accurate, that the Constitution would be in force when 9 States ratified the Constitution , which is actually false, which was the reason they wrote the Federalist Papers, because they couldn’t afford a State like New York not to ratify the Constitution, because even if one State did not ratify the constitution, they would have had to continue with the Articles of Confederation. This forms the objections of the antifederalist, that there was no reason not to make incremental changes, evaluate those changes, and continue to make changes until we had the governing system that provided the protections and equal participation they were seeking. The other was they did not want to consolidate the government to form a nationalized government that erased the role of the States and created a centralized national government, but if you understand how a Confederated Republic works, a confederation of republics, the democratic branch of the legislature has the power of concurrence, which prevents a nationalized governing system and balances the power of the large and small states!
