Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

Dates Covered: 1740 - 1800
ISBN: 0375405445
HH Rating:

Our Take

A great deal of effort has gone into interpreting the events and personalities that led to the creation of the United States. Some works depict a sweeping historiography, suggesting a variety of economic and political factors made the Declaration of Independence and its children an expected consequence, if not an inevitability. This view argues that a distant geographical arm of a thinly-spread Britain managed to sever its imperial ties shouldn't be that surprising, no matter who happened to be around to sign the right papers.

An alternate interpretation is that the founders constituted a unique collection of individuals who were able to forge a new nation only through personal and professional conflicts. Founding Brothers, by Joseph J. Ellis, takes this latter view. In his introduction, Ellis professes that the event ended up being a compromise between a Jeffersonian ideal (that is, a clean break from European monarchy, and, likewise, centralized government) and a Hamiltonian practicality (surrender of state individuality to a federal collective), and spends most of his time arguing this situation echoes that of others integral to the story of the founding of the nation: that ideological and personal clashes of individuals shaped the nation irrevocably.

He argues a good case, but employs a method far closer to historical biography than historiography proper. What does this mean? Ellis expends more effort inside the heads of half a dozen or so individuals than outside them. It's a format that suits him: the guy has already written biographies of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and won the National Book Award for the latter. As such, he is suitably equipped to publish a slightly ephemeral collection of essays starring chiefly, you guessed it, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. In separate pieces he also discusses Washington's feelings on term limits, Quaker objections to slavery, Alexander Hamilton's tizzies with Aaron Burr, and Hamilton and Madison's compromise over the nature of federal government.

Ellis gives his rationale for studying these greats as a backlash for political correctness, a problem apparently so bad, he asserts, that

... any budding historian who announces that he or she wishes to focus on the political history of the early republic and its most prominent practitioners is generally regarded as having inadvertently confessed a form of intellectual bankruptcy.

Bitch and moan. Given the scrutiny endured by Hamilton and Burr in the past year (Duel by Thomas Fleming and Burr, Hamilton and Jefferson by Roger Kennedy), Ellis' retread of their encounter doesn't uncover anything really new. His chance to shine is in covering the characters he knows best, and in so doing takes a tack that wanders towards the realm of internal monologues rather than influencing political factors. While Ellis offers a lucid explanation of the motivations of statesmen, it's always through his own intellectual filter. He busily reinterprets the secular gospel made up by the writings of the founders, and puts (not incongruous, it must be said) words in their minds: "Adams would have been overjoyed" to receive a certain letter from Jefferson, for example.

A lot of this business courses throughout the book. Rather than rely on anecdotes or even actual text from these individuals to delineate their character, Ellis seems more comfortable pontificating without providing too much evidence. In the end, we are forced to rely on his interpretation of these men rather than come to our own conclusions. Hamilton was "excessively trusting of some of his particular friends"; for John Adams, "intimacy trumped ideology," but Ellis offers no writings to support these arguments.

However, once getting past the supposition that this book will be history filtered through the vaguely spongy Ellis, the rivalries and factions that kept the tottering republic together in its early days quite clearly come to light. Jefferson holds a dinner and invites Madison and Hamilton, knowing that the two men were going to argue out whether or not the federal government was going to assume debts incurred by the states. Not an insignificant event, it essentially established a precedent for federal power in this country. No minor act, it mightily pissed off the Southerners, who would have to shoulder a significant portion of the debt should the feds in Washington pick up the tab.

Only at the time, it wasn't Washington. The federal government's permanent location was up for grabs, and to appease the Southerners it was placed at the mouth of the Potomac rather than central Pennsylvania or elsewhere. At the time, the land surrounding the Potomac was abandoned and wild; the only thing to recommend it was its proximity to George Washington himself. He wasn't too thrilled with the idea, seeing as how the site encompassed some of his property. He had figured he wouldn't have to deal with cityfolk ever again, but relented. Perhaps in a nod to dreams deferred, the central street in the Washington, DC plan was dubbed Pennsylvania Avenue.

The convoluted relationship between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams receives a lot of attention. To write a book on the personal and political conflicts that founded this nation requires an exploration if the topic, and Ellis does a decent job. Consumed with how he'd look in two hundred years, Jefferson comfortably espoused conflicting viewpoints simultaneously with no apparent ill effects. The most typical example of this is his slave ownership when held against his stirring language in the Declaration of Independence, but he also did so on a lesser scale. His writings around the 1800 election were filled with crop-rotation plans and a bizarre scheme to move the University of Geneva to Virginia, suggesting he couldn't care less about the election. Yet he predicted, to the very vote, the electoral turnout of the contest.

For his part, Adams fretted incessantly to his wife about how history would perceive him. He correctly noted that Jefferson excelled in the sweeping, romantic language of the period and would likely be thought of as an embracing statesman despite his unwillingness to even speak in Congress. Adams' own presidency was a bit of a disaster, owing chiefly to an entanglement with France that Washington had left in departing the office, and that ate Adams up. Contrast this to Jefferson, who snagged the Louisiana Purchase (by all accounts of the time a wildly controversial move) and, in so doing, firmly cemented his legacy.

Well, sort of. Recent explorations of Jefferson have excoriated him roundly, not insignificant among them Ellis' last work. However, what he explores here is the relationship between the men more so than their relationship to us. How important were policy decisions and economic factors in the sweeping changes that followed the country's wobbly first steps? Would the country even remotely look like it does now had, say, Hamilton never been born, or Jefferson been a verbal extrovert? Ellis suggests not, but makes his decision behind a curtain. Our old writing teachers used to call this trick "telling rather than showing". It's frequently hard to tell whether or not Ellis is right, and, without the complete correspondence of everyone involved at your fingertips, in the end you have to decide whether or not you trust him.

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