Woody Holton - Unruly Americans (Book Review)

This book seems to be essential reading to understand the origins of the Constitution.

It seems obvious that our Constitution, looking at it in the context of its time, is a conservative document favorite elites that kept its provisions as far from the people as possible, the framers being consistently aware of what would pass, what they could get away with.  It would have more restrictive and conservative had they thought they could get it past the people.

Woody Holton upends what we think we know of the Constitution's origins by telling the history of the average Americans who challenged the framers of the Constitution and forced on them the revisions that produced the document we now venerate. The framers who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 were determined to reverse America's post–Revolutionary War slide into democracy. They believed too many middling Americans exercised too much influence over state and national policies. That the framers were only partially successful in curtailing citizen rights is due to the reaction, sometimes violent, of unruly average Americans. 

If not to protect civil liberties and the freedom of the people, what motivated the framers? In Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, Holton provides the startling discovery that the primary purpose of the Constitution was, simply put, to make America more attractive to investment. And the linchpin to that endeavor was taking power away from the states and ultimately away from the people. In an eye-opening interpretation of the Constitution, Holton captures how the same class of Americans that produced Shays's Rebellion in Massachusetts (and rebellions in damn near every other state) produced the Constitution we now revere.  (From Amazon)

The author points out the supreme irony of the Constitution that we think first of the Bill of Rights and yet it was the Antifederalists protesting that gave us the first ten amendments that we revere today.  Those people who were against the document gave us the most remembered part of it.  This is how the losers won.