Jack N. Rakove

“How could those who wrote the Constitution possibly understand its meaning better than those who had the experience of observing and participating in its operation? It is one thing to rail against the evils of politically unaccountable judges enlarging constitutional rights beyond the ideas and purposes of their adopters; another to explain why morally sustainable claims of equality be held captive to the extraordinary obstacles of Article V or subject to the partial and incomplete understandings of 1789 or 1868.”
― Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution

“At the start, we need to recognize that there were at least two generations of 1776: an older cohort who led the colonies into independence (such as the Adamses, Washington, Mason, Dickinson) and another that came of age with it, “young men of the Revolution” (such as John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, who, coincidentally, co-authored The Federalist essays of 1787–1788).”
― Jack N. Rakove, Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America