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Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (Paperback)
by Joseph J. Ellis
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American history, Biography |
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A masterpiece biography of the founders of America from one of America's top historians. |
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Author: Joseph J. Ellis
Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition
Pub. in: February, 2002
ISBN: 0375705244
Pages: 304
Measurements: 7.8 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00229
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0375705243
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- Awards & Credential -
National Bestseller in North America. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Amazon.com's Best of 2001.
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- MSL Picks -
Prior to writing this book, Founding Brothers, author Joseph J. Ellis wrote books on both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson - hence it makes sense that there would be one book that brings the two of them together, along with other movers and shakers of the early American nationhood. Often referred to as "founding fathers", in fact toward each other, they were more of a brotherhood. Hence Ellis' title.
We live in a time where the aging generation has been celebrated as 'the greatest generation', but for this title (and not meaning to take away anything of their achievement) they certain must acknowledge a rival, that being the generation of Americans who lived at the time of the Revolutionary War. Of course, this generation had a sense of greatness about it that made them conscious of what they were doing - George Washington deliberately lived and moved as if his every action would be the stuff of precedent; John Adams had his wife Abigail to begin saving his correspondence long before the outbreak of hostilities in the war.
Even with this sense about themselves, according to Ellis, "Uncertainty, in fact, was the dominant mood at that moment" - the time when the Constitution was being drafted and ratified, there was no clear sense of what was meant by certain of the compromises, particularly the meaning of who "the people" were in the legal and constitutional sense. If they weren't the federal government or the state governments, then just who were they?
Ellis identifies different possible ways of telling the early history of American nationhood, but most simply recapitulate the political debates of the time. Ellis sees these debates and early issues as setting the political stage for ongoing American development. He writes, "the revolutionary generation found a way to contain the explosive energies of the debate in the form of an ongoing argumetn or dialogue that was eventually institutionalised and rendered safe by the creation of political parties." The issues of the Revolutionary period were not solved by the Constitution and early government development, according to Ellis, but rather enshrined and codified, indeed, woven into the very fabric of the nation as ongoing (and, as Ellis points out, only broke out into warfare during the Civil War).
Ellis develops the narrative across six particular stories involving eight major characters, all of whom knew each other rather well. These figures are George Washington, John and Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr. These stories include the famous duel between Hamilton and Burr, a dinner party in which the location of the nation's capital city was decided, and George Washington's farewell address upon declining to run for a third term as president. He also recounts the on-again, off-again friendship and rivalry of Jefferson and Adams, up to the very point of Adams' death - his reported last words were about Jefferson, who died on the same day, in what seems like divinely inspired timing for both: July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of the nation.
Ellis' writing is exciting and fun to read. It is very informative, being both good history and good storytelling. It is little wonder that it was made into a History channel series. This is a little gem.
(From quoting FrKurt Messick, USA)
Target readers:
Readers interested in American history and culture, readers who love great biographies, English majors, and advanced English learners.
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Joseph J. Ellis is the author of several books of American history, among them Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams and American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, which won the 1997 National Book Award. He was educated at the College of William and Mary and Yale University and lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with his wife, Ellen, and three sons.
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From Publisher
In this landmark work of history, the National Book Award-winning author of American Sphinx explores how a group of greatly gifted but deeply flawed individuals - Hamilton, Burr, Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Adams, and Madison - confronted the overwhelming challenges before them to set the course for our nation.
The United States was more a fragile hope than a reality in 1790. During the decade that followed, the Founding Fathers - re-examined here as Founding Brothers - combined the ideals of the Declaration of Independence with the content of the Constitution to create the practical workings of our government. Through an analysis of six fascinating episodes - Hamilton and Burr's deadly duel, Washington's precedent-setting Farewell Address, Adams’ administration and political partnership with his wife, the debate about where to place the capital, Franklin’s attempt to force Congress to confront the issue of slavery and Madison's attempts to block him, and Jefferson and Adams' famous correspondence - Founding Brothers brings to life the vital issues and personalities from the most important decade in our nation’s history.
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The Generation
No event in American history which was so improbable at the time has seemed so inevitable in retrospect as the American Revolution. On the inevitability side, it is true there were voices back then urging prospective patriots to regard American independence as an early version of manifest destiny. Tom Paine, for example, claimed that it was simply a matter of common sense that an island could not rule a continent. And Thomas Jefferson's lyrical rendering of the reasons for the entire revolutionary enterprise emphasized the self-evident character of the principles at stake.
Several other prominent American revolutionaries also talked as if they were actors in a historical drama whose script had already been written by the gods. In his old age, John Adams recalled his youthful intimations of the providential forces at work: "There is nothing... more ancient in my memory," he wrote in 1807, "than the observation that arts, sciences, and empire had always travelled westward. And in conversation it was always added, since I was a child, that their next leap would be over the Atlantic into America." Adams instructed his beloved Abigail to start saving all his letters even before the outbreak of the war for independence. Then in June of 1776, he purchased "a Folio Book" to preserve copies of his entire correspondence in order to record, as he put it, "the great Events which are passed, and those greater which are rapidly advancing." Of course we tend to remember only the prophets who turn out to be right, but there does seem to have been a broadly shared sense within the revolutionary generation that they were "present at the creation."
These early premonitions of American destiny have been reinforced and locked into our collective memory by the subsequent triumph of the political ideals the American Revolution first announced, as Jefferson so nicely put it, "to a candid world." Throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America, former colonies of European powers have won their independence with such predictable regularity that colonial status has become an exotic vestige of bygone days, a mere way station for emerging nations. The republican experiment launched so boldly by the revolutionary generation in America encountered entrenched opposition in the two centuries that followed, but it thoroughly vanquished the monarchical dynasties of the nineteenth century and then the totalitarian despotisms of the twentieth, just as Jefferson predicted it would. Though it seems somewhat extreme to declare, as one contemporary political philosopher has phrased it, that "the end of history" is now at hand, it is true that all alternative forms of political organization appear to be fighting a futile rear-guard action against the liberal institutions and ideas first established in the United States in the late eighteenth century. At least it seems safe to say that some form of representative government based on the principle of popular sovereignty and some form of market economy fueled by the energies of individual citizens have become the commonly accepted ingredients for national success throughout the world. These legacies are so familiar to us, we are so accustomed to taking their success for granted, that the era in which they were born cannot help but be remembered as a land of foregone conclusions.
Despite the confident and providential statements of leaders like Paine, Jefferson, and Adams, the conclusions that look so foregone to us had yet to congeal for them. The old adage applies: Men make history, and the leading members of the revolutionary generation realized they were doing so, but they can never know the history they are making. We can look back and make the era of the American Revolution a center point, then scan the terrain upstream and downstream, but they can only know what is downstream. An anecdote that Benjamin Rush, the Philadelphia physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, liked to tell in his old age makes the point memorably. On July 4, 1776, just after the Continental Congress had finished making its revisions of the Declaration and sent it off to the printer for publication, Rush overheard a conversation between Benjamin Harrison of Virginia and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts: "I shall have a great advantage over you, Mr. Gerry," said Harrison, "when we are all hung for what we are now doing. From the size and weight of my body I shall die in a few minutes, but from the lightness of your body you will dance in the air an hour or two before you are dead." Rush recalled that the comment "procured a transient smile, but it was soon succeeded by the solemnity with which the whole business was conducted."
Based on what we now know about the military history of the American Revolution, if the British commanders had prosecuted the war more vigorously in its earliest stages, the Continental Army might very well have been destroyed at the start and the movement for American independence nipped in the bud. The signers of the Declaration would then have been hunted down, tried, and executed for treason, and American history would have flowed forward in a wholly different direction.
In the long run, the evolution of an independent American nation, gradually developing its political and economic strength over the nineteenth century within the protective constraints of the British Empire, was virtually inevitable. This was Paine's point. But that was not the way history happened. The creation of a separate American nation occurred suddenly rather than gradually, in revolutionary rather than evolutionary fashion, the decisive events that shaped the political ideas and institutions of the emerging state all taking place with dynamic intensity during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. No one present at the start knew how it would turn out in the end. What in retrospect has the look of a foreordained unfolding of God's will was in reality an improvisational affair in which sheer chance, pure luck - both good and bad - and specific decisions made in the crucible of specific military and political crises determined the outcome. At the dawn of a new century, indeed a new millennium, the United States is now the oldest enduring republic in world history, with a set of political institutions and traditions that have stood the test of time. The basic framework for all these institutions and traditions was built in a sudden spasm of enforced inspiration and makeshift construction during the final decades of the eighteenth century.
If hindsight enhances our appreciation for the solidity and stability of the republican legacy, it also blinds us to the truly stunning improbability of the achievement itself. All the major accomplishments were unprecedented. Though there have been many successful colonial rebellions against imperial domination since the American Revolution, none had occurred before. Taken together, the British army and navy constituted the most powerful military force in the world, destined in the course of the succeeding century to defeat all national competitors for its claim as the first hegemonic power of the modern era. Though the republican paradigm - representative government bottomed on the principle of popular sovereignty - has become the political norm in the twentieth century, no republican government prior to the American Revolution, apart from a few Swiss cantons and Greek city-states, had ever survived for long, and none had ever been tried over a landmass as large as the thirteen colonies. (There was one exception, but it proved the rule: the short-lived Roman Republic of Cicero, which succumbed to the imperial command of Julius Caesar.) And finally the thirteen colonies, spread along the Eastern Seaboard and stretching inward to the Alleghenies and beyond into unexplored forests occupied by hostile Indian tribes, had no history of enduring cooperation. The very term American Revolution propagates a wholly fictional sense of national coherence not present at the moment and only discernible in latent form by historians engaged in after-the-fact appraisals of how it could possibly have turned out so well.
Hindsight, then, is a tricky tool. Too much of it and we obscure the all-pervasive sense of contingency as well as the problematic character of the choices facing the revolutionary generation. On the other hand, without some measure of hindsight, some panoramic perspective on the past from our perch in the present, we lose the chief advantage - perhaps the only advantage - that the discipline of history provides, and we are then thrown without resources into the patternless swirl of events with all the time-bound participants themselves. What we need is a form of hindsight that does not impose itself arbitrarily on the mentality of the revolutionary generation, does not presume that we are witnessing the birth of an inevitable American superpower. 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.
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| View all 14 comments |
Gordon S. Wood (The New York Review of Books) (MSL quote), USA
<>
Founding Brothers is a wonderful book, one of the best... on the Founders ever written... Ellis has established himself as the Founders’ historian for our time.
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Business Week (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-22 00:00>
Lucid... Ellis has such command of the subject matter that it feels fresh, particularly as he segues from psychological to political, even to physical analysis... Ellis’s storytelling helps us more fully hear the Brothers’ voices. |
The New York Times Book Review (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-22 00:00>
A splendid book - humane, learned, written with flair and radiant with a calm intelligence and wit.
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The New York Times (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-22 00:00>
Lively and illuminating... leaves the reader with a visceral sense of a formative era in American life. |
View all 14 comments |
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