Next to a miracle.

• Author: Guelzo, Allen
• Position: On political books

The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government

by Fergus M. Bordewich Simon & Schuster, 416 pp.

The first session of the U.S. Congress was as bitter and riven by divisions--over ideology, taxes, federal versus state power, the role of "big money," flexible versus strict interpretation of the Constitution--as the 114th Congress. The difference is, we can be proud of the first.

We have never lacked for a wealth of books explaining the federal Constitution, or laying out the dramatic motion-by-motion forging of the document in the 1789 Philadelphia Convention. David O. Stewart's The Summer of 1787 (2007), Rick Beeman's Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the Constitution (2009), and Pauline Maier's Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 (2010) are only the most recent entrants in a prosperously crowded field. What came after the Constitutional Convention, though, drops sadly out of historical view, even though the First Congress, which was the most important creation of the Constitution, was understood on all hands to be the real arena in which the Constitution would be judged a failure or a success.

This is a little like devoting most of one's attention to building a ship without inquiring whether it ever afterward actually floated. The story of the First Congress, as a Congress, has usually been shouldered aside in favor of biographies of the individual players or the internal struggles of George Washington's administration. In fact, were it not for the work of George Washington University's Kenneth Bowling's books on Politics in the First Congress, 1789-1791 (1990), Inventing Congress: Origins and Establishment of the First Federal Congress (1999), and Neither Separate nor Equal: Congress in the 1790s (2000), we might not have anything to guide us at all through a Congress that Washington described as "next to a Miracle."

Fergus Bordewich's The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government gives us, finally, a popular and finely paced account of the Congress that could have easily unmade the new American republic in the course of a few months. A good deal of the betting money, especially among the handful of European diplomats who represented the United States's minuscule number of allies in the world, was on failure. The French minister, Elie de Moustier, was certain that the new Congress would fare no better than the Confederation Congress it succeeded, and when at last it would be clear, after two tries, that Americans were incapable of governing themselves, France could step in to offer what Moustier glibly called "guidance" to the American yokels.

Instead, the First Congress surprised even its own members by the marvelous scope of its accomplishments. Sitting in three...