Washington. Adams. Jefferson. Madison. These are the names of the first four presidents of the United States of America, but they are also the names of the men who were among the most prominent voices of our founding era. There are other founders, indeed, who, though they never attained our nation''s highest office, still live on in our history--Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, and, most notably, Alexander Hamilton among them. However, other founders, as relevant but with names not as well known, are missing from our nation''s popular history. Some indi- viduals whose words and ideas contributed much to the founding of the nation have been relegated to the footnotes of history.

And even others have, as a practical matter, been expunged from history alto- gether. The familiar narrative many of us were taught as children about our founding--that great men came together to forge a constitution that set America on its present course--isn''t exactly true, either. At least it isn''t complete. Most Americans can name only a few of the nearly sixty men who were sent to the 1787 convention that produced our Constitu- tion; fewer still know about the sixteen attendees who, for various reasons, never signed the document, including the three who defiantly refused. A number of those who attended the convention even actively campaigned against its final product. Many men who had given everything they had for independence--pledging their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to resist a distant, remote government that recognized no limitations on its sovereign power--believed the Constitution would lead to the new nation''s ruin. And the delegates who did sign the Constitution, and fought vigorously for its adoption, had no intention of creating a sprawling, unaccountable federal bureau- cracy like the one we have in Washington, DC, today. Why don''t we know more about these delegates? There were others who, while not delegates, still had a profound effect on the development of the American Republic.

There were women, Native Americans, and African Americans who played a significant role in the fight for independence and in the thinking that went into our Constitution. Why are those names absent from popular history? To find the answers to these questions, we must take a journey back to the early days of our Republic. * * * During the debates surrounding the Constitution''s drafting and rat- ification, the doubts, skepticism, and outright fear of what the Con- stitution would bring ultimately made the document stronger and more just. That may sound strange to us in the twenty-first century, but remember: the founders, by declaring their independence from Great Britain and building their own system from scratch, had placed themselves in uncharted territory. The men--each in his own right, sometimes working together and often not--were unusually gifted, but they were still making this up as they went along. What became our governing document was the result of a brilliant compromise between the Anti-Federalists and the Federalists--between those who championed a divided and limited but strong central govern- ment, and those who feared that almost any central government would expand its authority at the expense of individual liberty and state autonomy. We today are the beneficiaries of that Great Compromise, but too many of us don''t fully understand it. And that is because history, over time, has tended to remember only one side of the argument, crowding out dissenting voices and obscuring the full story of the American experiment.

In the last century, in particular, historians and politi- cians who consider themselves more enlightened than the founders-- and believe in the power of bureaucrats to manage the affairs of an entire country from a distant capital--have done special damage to the legacy of the founding generation, a legacy that warned against the dangers of a distant, centralized government. Most of us, for example, are never presented with the arguments raised by the Anti-Federalists, who opposed the Constitution''s rat- ification based on concerns that it would vest too much power in the federal government and thereby imperil liberty. And just as disturb- ing, many of the Federalists have been mischaracterized as early advocates of big government. Some have tried to portray the found- ers as proto-progressives, even though the founders lived a full cen- tury before there was anything even resembling a "progressive." Those perpetuating this mischaracterization have done so by erasing the truth that nearly every founder shared a healthy skepticism of a large federal bureaucracy--one that might eventually mimic some of the worst features of the very government they had just fought a revolution to escape. No one living in America in the late eighteenth century--certainly none of the brilliant minds who forged our founding documents-- could have contemplated just how strong, or how large, that govern- ment would become. Nor could they have imagined how much control the city named for George Washington would come to have over ordinary citizens. Take Alexander Hamilton, for example, a brilliant man who spoke up during the debates over the Constitution as one of the most fervent advocates of a stronger national government.

In 2016 Hillary Clinton''s presidential campaign adopted Hamilton as something of a mascot--quoting the eponymous hit show written by Lin-Manuel Miranda in speeches and renting out the entirety of Broadway''s Richard Rodgers Theatre, where the musical was performed for a fundraiser. A century earlier, Herbert Croly, one of the most influential progressive intellectuals of the period and cofounder of The New Republic, praised Hamilton for advocating a policy of "active interference with the natural course of American economic and political business and its regulation and guidance in the national direction." Many on the left who are staunch advocates of big government have expressed a kinship with Alexander Hamilton--but theirs is a perverted vision. It is true that Hamilton fought vigorously for ratifi-cation of the Constitution. It is true that he believed that a federal government should have the power to accomplish a number of things that it could not do under the Articles of Confederation. But what Hamilton''s fans on the left neglect to mention, or in some cases don''t even realize, is that Alexander Hamilton never envisioned--and certainly never favored--the sort of massive, intrusive, unaccountable federal government that today thrives in Washington, DC. More to the point, once the Constitution was in place, he scoffed at and ridiculed the idea that the federal government could be anything other than the modest, divided, and tightly constrained government outlined in that document. In The Federalist Papers, a series of documents published throughout the colonies in support of the new Constitution, Hamilton responded to concerns articulated by many of our founders--including people you will meet in this book--that the Constitution could become a Trojan horse for oppressive government.

Hamilton thought such a notion ludicrous, even paranoid. "Allowing the utmost latitude to the love of power which any reasonable man can require"--he wrote in Federalist number 17 under the name "Publius"--"I confess I am at a loss to discover what temptation the persons intrusted with the administration of the general government could ever feel to divest the States of the authorities of that description." The "government of the Union" could never become "too powerful . to enable it to absorb those residuary authorities, which it might be judged proper to leave with the States for local purposes . it is therefore improbable that there should exist a disposition in the federal councils to usurp the powers with which they are connected; because the attempt to exercise those powers would be as troublesome as it would be nugatory [insignificant]; and the possession of them, for that reason, would con- tribute nothing to the dignity, to the importance, or to the splendor of the national government." Supposing that such a perversion of the Constitution was attempted, Hamilton wrote, the states and localities would always be more powerful than a central government. "It will always be far more easy for the State governments to encroach upon the national author- ities than for the national government to encroach upon the State authorities," he said.3 In Federalist number 32, Hamilton explained that "State governments would clearly retain all the rights of sover- eignty which they before had" prior to the Constitution''s enactment, as long as those powers had not been "exclusively delegated" to the federal government--making the Constitution''s real goal, in Ham- ilton''s view "only .

a partial union or consolidation." This was also a view shared by his colleague, and fellow advocate for the Constitution, James Madison, who wrote in Federalist number 45 that "the powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to thefederal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite." In short, their view of what the federal government--first in Philadelphia and then in Washington, DC--was meant to be, and what the Constitution clearly intended, is not at all what that government has become over the last eighty years. They did not envi- sion a Congress that would take more and more power from states and localities, regulating nearly every aspect of human existence-- education, agriculture, health care, commerce, transportatio.