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Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation Paperback – February 5, 2002
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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.
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateFebruary 5, 2002
- Dimensions5.13 x 0.64 x 7.98 inches
- ISBN-109780375705243
- ISBN-13978-0375705243
- Lexile measure1410L
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Lively and illuminating…leaves the reader with a visceral sense of a formative era in American life.”–The New York Times
“Masterful…. Fascinating…. Ellis is an elegant stylist…. [He] captures the passion the founders brought to the revolutionary project…. [A] very fine book.”–Chicago Tribune
“Learned, exceedingly well-written, and perceptive.”–The Oregonian
“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.”–Business Week
“Splendid…. Revealing…. An extraordinary book. Its insightful conclusions rest on extensive research, and its author’s writing is vigorous and lucid.”–St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Vivid and unforgettable . . . [an] enduring achievement.” –The Boston Globe
“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.” –Gordon S. Wood, The New York Review of Books
From the Inside Flap
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.
From the Back Cover
“Lively and illuminating…leaves the reader with a visceral sense of a formative era in American life.”–The New York Times
“Masterful…. Fascinating…. Ellis is an elegant stylist…. [He] captures the passion the founders brought to the revolutionary project…. [A] very fine book.”–Chicago Tribune
“Learned, exceedingly well-written, and perceptive.”–The Oregonian
“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.”–Business Week
“Splendid…. Revealing…. An extraordinary book. Its insightful conclusions rest on extensive research, and its author’s writing is vigorous and lucid.”–St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Vivid and unforgettable . . . [an] enduring achievement.” –The Boston Globe
“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.” –Gordon S. Wood, The New York Review of Books
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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.
On the farsighted side, the key insight, recognized by a few of the political leaders in the revolutionary generation, is that the geographic isolation of the North American continent and the bountiful natural resources contained within it provided the fledging nation with massive advantages and almost limitless potential. In 1783, just after the military victory over Great Britain was confirmed in the Treaty of Paris, no less a figure than George Washington gave this continental vision its most eloquent formulation: "The Citizens of America," Washington wrote, "placed in the most enviable condition, as the sole Lords and Proprietors of a vast Tract of Continent, comprehending all the various soils and climates of the World, and abounding with all the necessaries and co...
Product details
- ASIN : 0375705244
- Publisher : Vintage (February 5, 2002)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780375705243
- ISBN-13 : 978-0375705243
- Lexile measure : 1410L
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.13 x 0.64 x 7.98 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #21,060 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #26 in American Revolution Biographies (Books)
- #31 in Deals in Books
- #39 in U.S. Revolution & Founding History
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Joseph J. Ellis is Ford Foundation Professor of History at Mount Holyoke and author of the National Book Award-winning American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Founding Brothers, and The Passionate Sage (Norton).
Photo by Larry D. Moore [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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Ellis's concision is a feature of his account; he states in the acknowledgments, "I wanted to write a modest-sized account of a massive historical subject…hoped to render human and accessible that generation of political leaders customarily deified and capitalized as Founding Fathers." But how to do this with what he calls the "great ocean of material" ? He found his answer reading Lytton Strachey's famous biography Eminent Victorians, where Strachey uses "stealth and selectivity" with the idea that less could be more.
Ellis's version of "less could be more" consists of six defining episodes that occurred in roughly the decade after the ratification of the Constitution (1790 - 1800). Ellis chose this decade because it was "the most crucial and consequential in American history…It set the precedents, established in palpable fact what the Constitution had only outlined in purposely ambiguous theory, thereby opening up and closing off options for all the history that followed."
Another remarkable quality of Founding Brothers is Ellis's ability to combine limpid prose and novel-quality storytelling with the erudition of a first-rate historian. Yes, a historical account that is educational and a joy to read. Who would have thunk it?
And, yes, in case you are wondering, Ellis succeeds marvelously in achieving his goal of "rendering human and accessible" those great men (and Abigail Adams) who audaciously succeeded against all odds of bringing the American nation to birth.
In our current historical moment when the greatness of what has been called the "American experiment" is being
questioned, and the founders of that "experiment" are being judged by anachronistic moral and ethical standards, and their names and likenesses are being removed from schools and government buildings; we are sorely in need of books like Founding Brothers to remind us what a remarkable achievement in the history of the world the United States of America is.
Highly recommended.
Ellis is a gifted writer but even better, he is gifted in choosing the incidents and relationships that illustrate the conflicts that had to be raised, faced and compromised to allow the new country to continue. The Burr Hamilton duel. The love affair between Adams and his wife. The disrespect Jefferson felt, but hid from even his friends. The invisible elephant in middle of the room that was slavery. The impact of one personality -- George Washington -- had in keeping the country together. There are bits of humor, lots of examples, some fine imagining and nice underlying juxtaposition of issues with their examples. The author can see a theme underlying the disputes. While he calls the eight chapters "stories", I suspect he chose the word to avoid calling them 'essays' and thus scaring off most of us who don't want to read boring, windy expositions of historical views. On the other hand, I was originally attracted to history precisely because it is all stories, and I read history in part to see if I can understand the meaning, if there is any, behind the stories. Ellis, I suspect, sees it my way (or more properly, I see it his). He tells the story and manages to tell you why the story matters. While he never says as much, The Founding Brothers is about the second American Revolution--the one that took place in the Congress, the plantations of Viginia, the small towns of Massachusetts, the bluffs of New Jersey. With one exception, the second Revolution is bloodless, but wounding; barely civilized at times, but world shaking. It was the overturning of all that had come before in the notion of nations, the idea of governing, and the attempt to make practical the very romantic idea of individual liberty.
I was around in the sixties, which self conciously billed itself as a revolution and at the time, the people behind the bullhorns were exhorting their fellow citizens to shake off the shackles of a lying government and take over the government for the people. I remember thinking at the time, Great, but let's say it works, and the government falls. What do we do then? All of the romantic ideas could be put into practice, but how? And who gets to decide?
The Founding Brothers describes with charm, insight, clarity and sympathy the 'how' after the Revolutionary War is done, and the only weapons were wit, ideals, ideas and politics. A failure of politics would be the end of America then. Just as it might be now.
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If you are looking for a history book, full of details, written with passion and enthusiasm, this is it.
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