possible influence on the Revolution. The drawbacks of generalizing without sufficient primary sources become apparent, however, in Elkins' study of American slavery in which -- despite some sound theses and persuasive theoretical points -- the proposed impact of slavery on people's personality types is not entirely convincing. Elkins' difficulty derives from the fact that he generalizes to a presumed "movement" (i.e., the existence of a plantation-slave personality type) without sufficient evidence from primary sources regarding the existence of this type or the interests of those said to act in this particular manner. Thus, while Beard, Brown and Countryman offer convincing new grounds on which to generalize about a mass of people, Elkins, at best, provides a theoretical argument that might provide grounds for specific research into the questions he raises.
In An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (first edition 1913) Beard noted that historians had previously approached American history in three less than satisfactory ways. They viewed the course of history as guided by a higher power, or as the result of the prevailing genius of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, or else they avoided interpretation and simply "concerned themselves with critical editions of the documents and with the 'impartial' presentation of related facts" (Beard 3). Beard recognized that these approaches often took the creators of the Constitution at their own valuation (i.e., as having fulfilled the new nation's needs with the creation of government by and for the people) and proposed to examine the possibility that, like any group of human beings, these men were also motivated to some degree by their own interests. His chosen course was to attempt to discover whether anything could be determined regarding the influence of the framers' and ratifiers' economic interests on the nature and structure of the new Constitution.
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