Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (2002) - Plot & Excerpts
What an exciting book! Ellis conducts you right into the political chaos of the early republic, when the revolutionary fraternity was splintering in feuds, faction and duels (which are preferable to purges, terrors, and nights of long knives): The very idea of a legitimate opposition did not yet exist in the political culture of the 1790s, and the evolution of political parties was proceeding in an environment that continued to regard the word party as an epithet. In effect, the leadership of the revolutionary generation lacked a vocabulary adequate to describe the politics they were inventing…Lacking a consensus on what the American Revolution had intended and what the Constitution had settled, Federalists and Republicans alike were afloat on a sea of mutual accusations and partisan interpretations. The center could not hold because it did not exist.The old warhorse Washington had offered the semblance of a center; but in his second term as president, Treasury Secretary Hamilton’s fiscal plans and the brokering of a British-skewed neutrality in the French Revolutionary Wars pushed Washington’s fellow Virginians Madison and Jefferson into the opposition. Ellis argues that Washington’s experience of the army as a social adhesive availed him of a visionary nationalism that non-veterans like Madison and Jefferson simply could not comprehend. Washington said of the war: “a century in the ordinary intercourse, would not have accomplished what seven years association in arms did.” Washington’s remark echoes in the decision of President Taylor, another Virginian general, to admit California as a free state in 1850, an act seen as a class betrayal by other Southern slaveholders. (McPherson writes, “Forty years in the army had given Old Rough and Ready a national rather than sectional perspective.”)Washington’s realistic valuation of the federal government as a social adhesive and the fiscal-military organizer of the coming scramble west contrasted with Jefferson’s dreamy attachment to a static, Encyclopédie-plate republic founded on the fancied commercial innocence of the American farmer—just as Washington’s foreign policy, which bet shrewdly on Britain as the superpower of the coming century, contrasted with Jefferson’s romantic mist of Anglophobia, Francophily, and abiding faith in the Utopian promise of the French Revolution. Note the sentimental hysteria, the Manichean bravado in what Jefferson wrote a friend about the Reign of Terror: The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of that contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed I would rather have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than it is now. He seems to reach across the years, and grasp Sartre and Louis Aragon by the hand. In Ellis’s portrayal, Jefferson’s personality is one compartmentalized with a view to containing and denying to himself awareness of his more undignified ambitions and behavior. And for the American slaveholder, the pricer of souls in the land of liberty, what more requisite features than compartments and denial? Beginning with the first political challenges to slavery in the 1790s—to which Ellis devotes an absorbing chapter—slaveholders defended the institution by calling it the sole check against race-mixing. Meanwhile, what was observed down on the plantation? Rainbow harems, and broods of beige bastards. This book is the first substantive thing I’ve read on John Adams, and I like him. Ellis writes that his was an “iconoclastic and contrarian temperament that relished alienation”—a temperament destined to become a family pattern; great-grandson Henry would inherit a nervous brilliance mismatched to his, or any, time. Adams’ correspondence is full of trenchant deconstructions of the mythic revolutionary narrative then solidifying in the public mind. I like his historically-informed, disabused, mercurial style; his suspicion of the illusory equality that democracy seems to offer; his wariness before the rigidity and abstraction of French Revolutionary ideology. And though he, like all the Founders save Franklin, agreed to an official silence on slavery—that powder-keg nested in the foundations—restless apprehensions gleam through: This subject is vast and ominous. More than fifty years has it attracted my thoughts and given me much anxiety. A folio volume would not contain my lucubration on this subject. And at the end of it, I should leave the reader and myself as much at a loss what to do with it, as at the beginning.I could easily trade The Education of Henry Adams, with its sour stylistic monotony, for that lucubratory folio!Purely for his reputation in posterity, Alexander Hamilton was lucky to have been killed in that duel. Aaron Burr thereby assumes the mantle of Dangerous Man, Cataline of the republic, and Hamilton’s flirtations with “Bonapartism” fade into the background. Hamilton undermined President Adams by manipulating his cabinet behind the scenes; and while Adams pursued a peace treaty with the French, whose privateers had been seizing American ships in the West Indies, Hamilton was agitating for war (Adams was following another of Washington's recommendations: 20 years minimum of growth and consolidation before we tangle with a European power). Hamilton was then Inspector-General of the New Army, and planned, with the outbreak of war, to lead a chastising march through Jeffersonian Virginia, en route to seize Florida, Louisiana, and, even more grandiosely, Mexico and Peru. Those are big dreams! Hamilton wanted to do himself, and in one campaign, what would take Napoleon in a giving mood, Jefferson in a nation-building mood, Zachary Taylor, Winfield Scott, Grant, Sherman, and six subsequent decades to accomplish. Adams’ conclusion of a treaty with France abolished the prospect of such folly. Ellis leaves one with so many images. Abigail Adams overhears the ex-president cursing his enemies as he works in the fields alongside the hired men. James Callender, the scandalmongering pamphleteer Jefferson hired to smear Adams before the 1800 election, languishes, accused of libel, in a Richmond jail, where he hears rumors of Jefferson’s slave mistress, rumors he publishes once he decides the payment for his hatchet job on Adams is inadequate. Washington gallops along the Potomac, sighting the prospects of the capitol to bear his name. James Madison, at the Constitutional Convention, confides to his diary the observation that “the States were divided into different interests not by their difference of size, but principally from their having or not having slaves. It did not lie between the large and small States: it lay between the Northern and Southern.”
Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis is lively, well-written book, which argues that the founders succeeded not because they liked each other or got along, most of the time they didn't, but because they resolved their differences by doing politics face to face. Ellis writes in vivid images and analogies but is sometimes too wordy for his own good. For instance, Ellis demonstrates that Adams wanted, in modern terms, to "deconstruct" all romanticized accounts of the founding. But this is because Adams thought the historians of his day didn't do justice to the greatness of his own contribution. Ellis writes: "At its nub, his [Adam's] critique of the historical fictions circulating as seductive truths was much like a campaign to smash all the statures, because the sculptor had failed to render a satisfactory likeness of yours truly" (217). What a vivid and memorable sentence, but could've been more effective if shortened into a punch. Ellis goes on to show just how much the ambitious Adams wanted to be the central figure of the American pantheon of heroes. When Adams was hidden between the lines given to Washington and Jefferson, he wanted to grab the pages of history and start shredding. Privately he mocked Washington for his lack of classical education and once referred to him (though not cited in Ellis) as "old mutton head." Ellis says Washington read mostly newspapers.Adams was almost post modern in wanting to show that reality defies neat dissection into good guys sporting white hats and bad guys in black hats. He especially wanted to expose Jefferson's betrayals of the Adam's administration. He also wanted to vindicate himself to his critics showing, among other things, that he was responsible for averting war with France in 1800 and not interested in creating an Adam's dynasty by passing on the presidency to John Quincy. Ellis shows that Adams was jealous of Jefferson because the July 4th Declaration of Independence came to be seen as the defining moment of the new nation. Instead, Adams pointed to the debates in Congress that made that declaration possible. It turns out that Jefferson hadn't participate in those debates, shy as he was, but Adams held forth there and won the day when, on MAY 15, 1776, "Congress passed a resolution calling for new constitutions in each of the states" (242-43). This was definitive, Adams thought, because the states were creating "separate and independent American governments" and thus breaking with their British Charters. This was the true and original declaration of independence. He looked back on Jefferson's writing of the Declaration as a historical accident that occurred because Adams himself deferred to his junior partner in order to give him something to do. Why couldn't people like his historian friend Mercy Otis Watson see John Adams as the ultimate American hero that he was? Ellis also argues that historians do their best work when they realize that history doesn't look inevitable at the moment when it was happening. Historians must give uncertainty back to the actors in the historical moment, while also considering the outcomes from the modern vantage point. He writes: "We need a historical perspective that frames the issues with one eye on the precarious contingencies felt at the time, while the other eye looks forward to the more expansive consequences perceived dimly, if at all, by those trapped in the moment. We need, in effect, to be nearsighted and farsighted at the same time" (6-7). Ellis is the master of using alliteration like "contingencies" and "consequences," which stick in the mind. He is the truly rare combination of a competent historian and clear writer. He proves his thesis in spades showing how the founding fathers were indeed brothers who succeeded not because they didn't clash, but because they looked at each other across the table of creative compromise. Unfortunately, many of the compromises, like the three-fifths compromise, just prolonged the debate until the slave question erupted into civil war. The founding fathers also feuded over whether federal or state power had ultimate sovereignty. This too was finally settled by civil war, and yet the debate goes on in the fallout over how much federal power should be wielded over states, private individuals, and corporations. In terms of feuding fathers, one squabble went out with a bang, but Ellis argues that the Burr-Hamilton duel was an anomaly. Most quarrels were settled like the Hamilton-Madison argument over whether the federal government should shoulder the burden of state debts after the Revolution. Hamilton, the federalist of federalists, wanted the government to assume this responsibility for the states it was going to rule. Madison feared this would make the states dependent upon and thus subservient to federal power. Jefferson invited the two disputants to dinner, where Madison promised not to make it a hill to die on as long as the future capitol would reside in Virginia. Jefferson and Adams feuded over Jefferson's role in paying a newspaper to print libels against Adams when they were serving together as President and Vice President. Adams had some newspaper men thrown in prison under his controversial "Alien and Sedition Acts" and probably wished he could do the same to his VP. But even this row resolved itself as the two "explained" themselves to each other through statesman like correspondence in their twilight years. It was the Founders way to feud, and then work it out after "looking each other in the eye." The founders successfully created a new nation because they talked, broke bread together, and lived cooperatively. They would probably be amazed that their union is still together and using their legacy to debate the same issues. But today's political wars tend to be fought on the impersonal battle fields of cyber space and the air waves. Could we accomplish more by settling our differences in community, instead of demonizing each other to our constituents in the partisan media outlets or over twitter or facebook? I think Ellis's Founding Brothers suggests we could.
What do You think about Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (2002)?
I picked this up in high school, trying to impress myself with how learned I could be. I really wasn't prepared for how much I enjoyed this book. I didn't think I was going to read more than a bit of it. Instead, I read it cover to cover and did it in less than two weeks. Which for a book about revolutionary war history is pretty unusual for me. This book deserves all the awards it got. It's impressively researched, fascinating, shows sides to these men that I never would have learned about otherwise. It read like a novel to me. Except it's true. Which is SO MUCH BETTER. If you have any interest at all in the time period or history in general, read it! I promise you won't be disappointed!
—Kelly
Historian Joseph Ellis's thesis seems to be that the so-called "Founding Fathers" may be better understood as "Founding Brothers," men who were peers, who watched history unfold in realtime, men who made mistakes and sometimes learned and sometimes didn't. This expansive history examines these very human figures in the context of (mainly) the 1790's and brings them to life through the lenses of six different events.Though this was my second reading of this excellent book, I found much that I had missed the first time and got a lot out of the additional read.These men (and Abigail) were certainly brilliant and talented, but Ellis does a great job casting light on their humanity and imperfections. Jefferson comes off as a brilliant statesman, but also as a conniving self-serving, self-deluded little weasel. Adams is perhaps the greatest genius of his generation, but is held captive to a grudge-bearing, emotionally self-destructive nature and is quite pitiful in the end. Hamilton, while also a courageous architect of our national system, harbored dark impulses to dictatorial power and almost certainly schemed to establish himself as an American proto-Napoleon. Far from degrading their accomplishments, these revelations only amplify the marvel at what these flawed men accomplished.
—Joe
What a disappointment. Founding Brothers reads like an apologetic for long-time Founding Father of disrepute, John Adams, whose aggrandizement here expectedly reduces Thomas Jefferson to the dual role of timely revolutionary opportunist and self-deluding contradictorian, which may not be a word. Given this, Adams' non-maneuver of allowing the Treaty of Tripoli to be unanimously ratified by the Senate in 1797 is a conspicuous no-show. Or did it not quite raise the pedestal to advertise his imprimatur on a document which states that our Government is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion? Rather, much effort is given to impute Jefferson for the expanding rift between Monticello and Quincy using examples collectively pettier than the Adams-approved Alien and Sedition Acts which received a page, possibly two, of underwhelming condemnation. I'd say no but I've already eaten it. Blech!
—Tom
