Joseph J. Ellis - Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

Joseph J. Ellis, author of the National Book Award Winning Jefferson biography American Sphinx has hit another home run with Founding Brothers, a history of America in the 1790's, which picked up the Pulitzer Prize in 2001.

The book draws extensively on an astounding number of more scholarly works, and Ellis is quick to thank some of academia?s greatest living historians for their input, but it is no mere compilation of smarter peoples? thoughts. The author has a gift for pulling out the great themes that drive American history and for presenting those themes in a way that the most lay readers would find compelling.

The thesis of Founding Brothers is a simple one: The tension between states? rights and centralized federal power has been present from the beginning, has never gone away, and it is that tension, not one or the other side of the debate, that truly represents the founders intent, much to our lasting benefit and turmoil.

Ellis spins out his thesis with a series of small stories, that are compelling in themselves, but which represent much larger trends both in the founding generation and throughout the course that the nation would take in the two subsequent centuries. He focuses on the usual suspects: Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Franklin and Hamilton, and to a lesser extent Marshall, Burr, Abigail Adams, Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry and other peripheral patriots. And in very tangible ways, he shows that each of these were really thinking, almost constantly, about two things: What was this revolution about? How do I make it work? In almost inevitable ways, the answer to the first question informs the many answers to the second.

For Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Henry and most of the South (The Republicans), the revolution was about breaking the shackles of oppression ? about liberty pure and simple. For them, the revolution was symbolized by the Declaration of Independence. So any later intimations that sovereignty lies in the central government were seen as a betrayal of the revolution, which occurred in one fell swoop in July 1776.

For the Adamses and Hamilton, and to some degree Washington, and the North (the Federalists) the revolution was about building a new nation that could stand on its own. For them, the revolution was symbolized by the Constitution. So any later power plays that would put the rights of any single state above the needs of the nation were seen as a betrayal of the revolution, which was a process that began in the years leading up to 1776, reached its peak in 1789, and needed to stabilize yet.

Who was right? Of course they both were. And neither. Lawyers are taught that it?s folly to try to determine legislative intent with regard to any given law, because no such thing exists. Laws are as much a result of compromise, back-room dealing and unknown forces as they are of any intent to address a real problem. But in the 1790's, legislative intent with regard to the constitution was still very much up in the air, and before consensus ossified the founding fathers were each intent on having their personal view adopted as legislative intent.

Ellis shows us the tension and jockeying in snippets: Through the famous duel between Hamilton and Burr; over a casual dinner at Jefferson?s house, in a brief letter written by Washington, in the personal devotion between Madison and Jefferson, and elsewhere.

A book like Founding Brothers could easily become hagiography, given the true genius to be found in the real greatest generation. But a thoughtful focus on the other central theme of American history ? slavery ? shows the founding fathers to have been frustrated by their own inability to tackle the subject, cowardly in their willingness to pass the problem on to succeeding generations, and thoroughly modern in their ability to justify political decisions.

Chapter 3, The Silence, begins, as all of the chapters do, with a small event: The delivery to congress of a petition by a small group of Pennsylvania Quakers demanding that the slave trade be ended. Not that slavery be abolished, but that the continuation of the trade from Africa be halted. In the end, congress uses technicalities and points of parliamentary procedure to keep the motion from coming to a vote. But the uproar that the petition causes outside of chambers is indicative of the entire battle over slavery. And Ellis uses that uproar to expand on the theme ? to really examine the zeitgeist of the era and the justifications and very real fears of the people who were shaping the nation.

While the general economic imperative of slavery in the south, and the political imperative to appease the south if the nation was to hold together are known and widely discussed, Ellis draws on a wealth of primary material to show that, in the 1780's, the common belief was that slaver y was fading out anyway, and that the problem would be less intractable in 20 or 30 years (He also shows that the founding generation utterly failed to see the trend that had actually just begun to take hold: that the changing export economy and foreign held debt owed by the planter class would demand an exponential growth in the use of slaves that would make the institution even more impossible to abolish in the coming 70 years). Ellis also presents some interesting apologies related to the fact that there had never been a true multicultural society at that point, which led to the pervasive presumption that something would need to be done with one sixth of the national population if the institution was abolished. He never excuses their behavior, but nor does he flinch from presenting difficult ?truths? through the eyes of those who were trying to deal with the nation?s worst problem.

Chapter 4, The Farewell, is a fascinating account of the cult of George Washington, his indispensability to the survival of the republic, and the genius of the timing and manner of his departure from the public stage. For reasons I have never been fully able to understand, Washington was thought of as the Father of the Nation even before he became its first president. He was not one of the great minds of his generation, and he was certainly not a successful general by most conventional standards. But he was a good, self-taught man, who managed to see certain things on a scale that escaped the Adams?, Jeffersons and Madisons of his day. He saw that even though he would lose nearly every battle in the Revolutionary War, if he could simply keep the Continental Army together, England could never win the war. It was a lesson he used as a template for his presidency: Though there would be a number of losses in terms of his personal vision of what the revolution had meant, the primary task was simply to keep the nation together. He was also an enigma, in that he was humble and honest enough to consistently choose in the interests of the nation, but arrogant (or self-aware) enough to know that his presence as a quasi-king in the first decade of the nation?s existence was necessary if it was to come to think of itself as a single nation. And he was right.

Again, the remarkable act of having given up the seat of power after eight years has been much discussed (At the time, King George commented that if Washington rejected the mantle of emperor ?he will be the greatest man in the world?). But focus on that act alone minimizes the many ways that his other well thought out actions, in line with a fully developed view of the world and America?s place in it, saved the nation in its infancy.

Ultimately, ?Slavery? and ?Washington as the necessary man? are mere tangents to the central theme of Founding Brothers, though. The remaining stories focus with penetration on the true philosophical debates of the day, and show how those debates still rage. For anyone who has a general interest in political theory and history, and how current events, from our involvement in Afghanistan to the structure of the American financial system, fit within the framework of arguments laid down by the founders of the Republic, Founding Brothers is a great place to start.