I made an inexplicable blunder in this post. The Federalist Papers were, of course, written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay. My apologies. Tom Paine wrote Common Sense…which I clearly lost here somehow.
There is an immutable fact about history – if you weren’t there, if you didn’t personally know and speak to the history makers, you can have no irrefutable, complete evidence of their intent. You can know concrete things, like dates. You can read treatises written by the historical participants and get some insight into what they were thinking. “Experts” can fill in some blanks. But at some level you can’t know, beyond a shadow of doubt, everything they thought, and more importantly, why.
