Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation – Joseph J. Ellis

Founding Brothers presents the world of the revolutionary generation and the people who made it happen in the most thoughtful and insightful volume about the beginnings of the American experiment I have yet read.  Joseph Ellis chooses several seminal moments and places them within a context of the development of ideas of “Americanness.”  He clarifies relationships and issues, bringing them into clear focus for the general reader.

In considering Virginia’s two-faced response to the slavery question in the 1790’s, Ellis says that the Commonwealth “talked northern, but thought southern.”  He neglects to consider Virginia’s role as a breeder of slaves for other states.  It is my understanding that many of Virginia’s largest plantations, including the huge Carter-Lee plantation, were in the business of breeding slaves and supplying them to states further south.  If this is true, the Virginia had a stake in ending the importation of slaves while continuing the institution of slavery. 

“Based on what we now know about the Anglo-American connection in the pre-Revolution era – that is, before it was severed – the initial identification of the colonial population as “Americans” came from English writers who used the term negatively, as a way of referring to a marginal or peripheral population unworthy of equal status with full-blooded Englishmen back at the metropolitan center of the British Empire.  The word was uttered and heard as an insult that designated an inferior or subordinate people.  The entire thrust of the colonists’ justification for independence was to reject that designation on the grounds that they possessed all the rights of British citizens.  And the ultimate source of those rights did not lie in any indigenously American origins, but rather in a transcendent realm of natural rights allegedly shared by all men everywhere….The term American like the term democrat began as an epithet, the former referring to a provincial, inferior creature, the latter to one who panders to the crude and mindless whims of the masses.” (10)

In page after page, Ellis provides insights into how the efforts of the revolutionary generation following the establishment of the infant United States established precedents and traditions that created the country we now enjoy.  He highlights the importance of the Hamilton-Burr duel as showing the futility of settling American problems through interpersonal violence.  He discusses how the wily Madison led Congress through the forest of confusions surrounding slavery to put off the crucial decisions until the Union could be established on a more thorough footing.  The power of Washington’s hold on the Nation’s imagination has long eluded me.  Ellis helped me to see how Washington’s vision of a continental American empire coupled with his refusal to take on the final trappings of monarchy set precedents now enshrined in the Constitution.  I had always viewed him as a man best distinguished by his silence.  Ellis shows how Washington mixes silence with eloquence to create the core values of America.

Ellis’ insights into American history (and history in general) are so frequent and lucid, it is difficult to isolate them.  In discussing the rivalry and finally renewed friendship between Jefferson and Adams, he points out that history as history often cleans up and creates necessary myths cloaking the messiness of living history.  He shows how the actual creation of our revolution happened a day at a time and was made up as it went along rather than the myth-filled story we all love of patriots coming together to create a nearly unanimous uprising against England’s tyranny.

This marvelously structured small book fittingly begins with the duel to the death between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.  It ends with the elegiac verbal duel in a series of letters between the retired former presidents and seminal revolutionary Patriots Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.  Between the two duels, Ellis presents the founders (Washington, Adams, Abigail Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Burr, Franklin) creating and developing the conversation about the nature of government in a republic which continues to this day.  He is perhaps at his best when he details the degree to which the competing ideas about the nature of democracy, the powers of central vs. diffused power, and the sense that these men (and one woman) were present and deeply involved in creating the ideas that echo down through the ages.  The current spread of democratic institutions, for instance, seems to fulfill Jefferson’s professed belief that worldwide democracy was inevitable.  This fascinating book deserves not only reading, but close study.