Since the appearance of his first volume it has been recognized that Irving Brant is writing the definitive life of Madison. Not comes the keystone installment⁠—the volume dealing with Madison's vital relation to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, to putting the federal government to work under the Constitution, and to building the Democratic party.

In James Madison, Father of the Constitution new light is thrown into some of the most important areas of American history. Here are vital new facts about the framing of the Constitution. Here are absorbing revelations concerning Hamilton's funding system. Here is a digging out of Madison's hidden leadership in the great struggle that gave birth to the system of political parties.

Nearly half of this book deals with the framing and ratification of the Constitution. Centering about the great figure of the convention, it gains an interest and clarity obtainable in no other way. One finds here the real reasons why Madison may rightfully be called the father of the Constitution⁠—including some reasons which would have shocked the State Rights generation that gave him the title. He is revealed here as the chief architect of national supremacy in a democratic federal union.

This is much more, however, than a story of one man's part in the writing of the Constitution. It is a new and penetrating inquiry into the Federal Convention itself. Discarding the idea that the framers were demigods, Mr. Brant has studied them as one would a similar group living today⁠—as men. He finds them to be statesmen, innocent of personal self-interest, but powerfully swayed by economic and political motives which had their rise in the great sectional, class, commercial and Western-land struggles of the previous decade. This approach unlocks the mysteries of the convention. It reveals the real basis of the contest between large and small states, and illuminates committee actions which have so baffled historians that they have usually ignored or dismissed them as unsolvable.

In this book one finds the explanation of that greatest of enigmas⁠—why the main drafting committee proposed a sweeping "general welfare" clause almost at the end of the convention, and what happened to it. Here, for the first time, is the story arrived at by combing the records to assembly those unfinished parts and see what was done with them and why. The result is a disclosure that the framers of the Constitution, and Madison in particular, were far more partial to federal power, far more hostile to state sovereignty, than they were willing to admit in the years that followed.

The great struggle over ratification in Virginia, the crucial state, is simplified and clarified by presenting it in its real terms—as a combat between Madison and Patrick Henry, between logic and eloquence.

Here is the story of the Bill of Rights, revealed through the thoughts and purposes of the man who wrote it, with new evidence of the sweeping scope of the guarantee of religious freedom.

Here is the astounding truth, pried out of old financial records, letters and diaries, about the vast speculations connected with Hamilton's funding and assumption policies. That which was mere rumor when Madison denounced the system is presented with documentary evidence of multimillion-dollar tie-ups between American politicians and financiers and European bankers, for the exploitation of the public debt, with the second highest official of the United States Treasury as the prime mover in the speculations.

New light is thrown on collateral events—proof that Charles Pinckney, who made a fictitious claim in 1818 to authorship of the Constitution, began his plagiarisms in 1787; proof that Secretary of State Randolph was innocent of the charges which drove him from Washington's cabinet in 1795; proof that the famous bargain on assumption of debts and location of the capital were made on Madison's terms, to save national credit from destruction by Hamilton's mutineering followers; proof that the main thought in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798 originated with Madison ten years earlier.

Here, for the first time, Madison takes his proper place as a builder of the Republican-Democratic party—one who broke with Hamilton and set the party lines before Jefferson re-entered the national scene from Europe, and who took the lead in virtually every later step in party development. French Minister Fauchet called Madison "the Robespierre of the United States." Badly as the term fitted his regard for life and individual rights, this book makes it understandable as a measure of his primacy in Congress and his hostility to oppressors and exploiters.

No one can read this volume without realizing that Irving Brant's Life of Madison is one of the really important biographies in our literature.