About the Presenter
Derek A. Webb is an Assistant Professor of Law at the Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law. He teaches and writes in the fields of constitutional law, civil procedure, legal history, Supreme Court practice and history, and American political thought. At Mount Vernon, he will finish a book manuscript under contract with Cambridge University Press on George Washington’s transmittal letter of the Constitution – or what Webb calls the “Constitution’s cover letter” – that Washington signed, affixed, and had distributed with all copies of the Constitution during the yearlong debate over its ratification.
In particular, he plans to explore what Washington – and many of his contemporaries on both the Federalist and Anti-Federalist side of the debate – meant when he said that the Constitution was “the result of a spirit of amity, and of that mutual concession and deference which the peculiarity of our political situation rendered indispensable.”
At Mount Vernon, he plans to look at how the letter was drafted, how often it was attached to original copies of the Constitution, what else Washington said about the letter and the "spirit of amity," and how often it was cited and quoted by others during the ratification debates and in the early republic.