Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

This book was the first book that ever made me cry because it was too hard to read pleasurably. I felt like the author took stories we all already know about, and locked himself in a dark room with a thesaurus and babelfish and used the LOLZCATZ approach to writing, only in historese. I frustra-cried, it was that bad.
I felt double bad about this book because I had bought it for my dad earlier in the year as a birthday gift, and when it was on the required reading list of my American History course I felt special because it was like, ---ooooh book club with dad!---, then I felt like a loser because this tiny book, that won a freaking National Book Award for nonfiction in 1997, was the bane of my existence, I was felled by this verbose dribble. I still get red in the face when I think about this book.

Roger Ebert once said that a movie isn't epic in it's runtime, but in it's ideas. Lawrence of Arabia, for instance, isn't a great film because it's almost four hours long, but because of how much it packs into those hours. Similarly, Joseph J Ellis' book, "The Revolutionary Brothers" is a short but epic book that tackles and clarifies some of the issues and notable moments that the founding fathers faced with great skill and beautiful language. I learned a lot.

Ellis is a great storyteller who has much to say about the men (and a few women, notably Abagail Adams) who formed our country. He focuses on six specific events that, he believes, crystallize and best exemplify the magnitude of the founding fathers' work and their dramatic legacy. Among his topics: the Burr-Hamilton duel, Washington's farewell address, the infamous "dinner" at Jefferson's house, Benjamin Franklin's poignant, end-of-life attempt to end the slave trade, John Adams' turbulent presidency (undermined at every turn by Madison and Jefferson), and the final reconciliation between Adams and Jefferson through correspondence.

The most moving chapter is the one on Benjamin Franklin. He attempted to cajole the Constitutional Congress into ending the slave trade, if not slavery altogether, through a satirical pamphlet he published just three weeks before he died. The southern states, of course, would have none of it. They threatened to secede from the union unless the northern states agreed to drop the issue for at least 20 years. The northern states consented, declaring that Congress did not have the right to infringe on any state's "property" rights. Most of the northerners felt uncomfortable with slavery but, in their view, keeping the union intact took precedence very everything else, even human bondage. It was a tragic missed opportunity and, as we all know, led to a horrific war 70 years later.

I came away from this book with enhanced respect for Franklin (what an incredible wit he had!) and Washington, and much less respect for Jefferson, who comes across as devious and something of a hypocrite.

This book is a masterpiece. A word to the wise, though: it is not "history light" or pop history written for the masses. This is a very intellectual work; it could reasonably be characterized as fairly heavy reading. It is primarily an examination of the founders and their political activities during the 1790s, though the final chapter tells the story of Jefferson's and Adams' resurrected friendship and unprecedented 14 year exchange of 158 letters, ending with them both dying within hours of each other on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. This book won the Pulitzer Prize, and I can see why: the writing is precise and exquisite, the research impeccable, and the illumination of the founders' characters and comportments as revealing as the descriptions of their actions and professed beliefs. In reading this book, one comes to vividly comprehend that the course of our nation's history was not a foregone conclusion. The founders were making it up as they went along, and nothing seemed certain about how any of it would work out. Furthermore, they couldn't agree whether the constitutional federal government that had just been put into place was the fulfillment of the Revolution, or a treasonous betrayal of it. All the various sides were invoking the Spirit of '76 as justification for their views, while vilifying anyone who held opposing views. Most of all I was struck by how history was shaped by the personalities of a handful of hard driving individuals on the scene, and how easily everything could have turned out so very differently. This is history for thinkers. Be prepared to put your brain to work when you pick this book up, but believe me, it is worth it.

I picked this up in high school, trying to impress myself with how learned I could be. I really wasn't prepared for how much I enjoyed this book. I didn't think I was going to read more than a bit of it. Instead, I read it cover to cover and did it in less than two weeks. Which for a book about revolutionary war history is pretty unusual for me. This book deserves all the awards it got. It's impressively researched, fascinating, shows sides to these men that I never would have learned about otherwise. It read like a novel to me. Except it's true. Which is SO MUCH BETTER. If you have any interest at all in the time period or history in general, read it! I promise you won't be disappointed!

I'm late to the Ellis party. I've long had his name circled but this is the first time I've read one of his books. His style is so distinct that you'll only need one page to decide whether or not you're in, and my sense is that there's no middle ground—you'll either love it or hate it. I loved it.

His distinguishing feature is that he's verbose. He uses more words than he needs and takes the long way home in his arguments. But I found his word choice so vibrant and sentence structure so electric that I didn't find the extended journey a drag. I quite enjoyed meandering with him on unnecessarily long trails of thought.

As for substance, the book basically seeks to answer one simple question: How the heck did these guys pull this off? The American experiment had all odds against it and was completely unprecedented. There wasn't a road map for this sort of thing. How did they do it?

What makes answering that question so difficult is, as Ellis articulates, at least twofold. One is the bias of hindsight. History has stitched together a clean narrative of events when the reality of the time was anything but tidy.

The other is that the Founding Fathers were actors in the great drama of world history, and they knew it. They therefore actively tried to shape the narrative that would be embraced by posterity, not always recording events precisely as they occurred, but rather as they wanted them to be remembered.

In order to reach the true answer to the question then, you have to cut through the golden halo surrounding the American origin story, realizing it was cast by the men themselves and has been calcified by time.

That is Ellis's endeavor.

He also acknowledges that, really, it's an unanswerable question. Everyone will have their own opinions. But his framing of the issue is so compelling that it at least gives the reader the right lens through which to interpret the scenes for themselves.

"And so while Hamilton and his followers could claim that the compromise permitted the core features of his financial plan to win approval, which in turn meant the institutionalization of fiscal reforms with centralizing implications that would prove very difficult to dislodge, the permanent residence of the capital on the Potomac institutionalized political values designed to carry the nation in a fundamentally different direction."

This is a sentence found on page 80 of Joseph J. Ellis's Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation.

Personally, I don't understand this sentence at all when I read it once, so lets dissect this sentence, shall we?

First phrase:
"And so while Hamilton and his followers could claim that the compromise permitted the core features of his financial plan to win approval..."

-The main part of this sente... I mean phrase is that "the compromise permitted the core features of [Hamilton's] financial plan to win approval." Who in the world of academia talks like this? Anyway, this phrase pretty much boils down to, "...the compromise satisfied the main parts of Hamilton's financial plan."

Second phrase:
"...which in turn meant the institutionalization of fiscal reforms with centralizing implications that would prove very difficult to dislodge..."

-Okay. This is a little more difficult. So, if Hamilton approves this "compromise" that satisfies the main parts of his financial plan, it would result in "the institutionalization of fiscal reforms", which I take to mean the government will have more financial responsibilities. This reform will have "centralizing implications that would prove very difficult to dislodge," which I'm guessing is a fancy way for saying that this will make the central government more powerful, which will be difficult to change in the future.

Third phrase:
"...the permanent residence of the capital on the Potomac institutionalized political values designed to carry the nation in a fundamentally different direction."

-Well, after reading this phrase 5 times over, I think it means that because the capital is permanently in Potomac, the nation is actually heading in the opposite direction that Hamilton's plan is.

So after 10 minutes of dissection, this sentence is saying that "While the compromise potentially satisfied the core of Hamilton's financial plan, which would place more financial responsibilities on the government that would be difficult to repeal in the future, the fact that the capital was permanently in Potomac suggested that the nation was heading in a different direction."

...

Wow. Even after simplifying the sentence and reducing the word count from 64 to 48 and the syllable count from 125 to 88, that is still one beast of a sentence.

Ellis's excessive, pretentious use of multi-syllabic words shows that Ellis is married to his Thesaurus. No one, not even scholars, talks like Ellis nor can understand Ellis. One may be able to get a general sense of what is going on, but I'm sure there are better, less painful ways to learn of these stories.

After doing this sentence dissection for a deceptively short, grueling, uneventful, draining, brain-mushing, incredibly taxing 248 pages, I have come away with a sure fire way to make me feel like my IQ is in the negative range... and with a significantly higher vocabulary.

Good luck, fellow readers.

Founding Brothers, Joseph Ellis' Pulitzer Prize for History from 2001, is an amazing read. I remember learning about the American Revolutionary War in high school and finding it and most of American history pretty boring (I preferred European history class much more), and so until recently, I kind of avoided the subject in my reading. Well, I have come around on that opinion. In an effort to read about real presidents (in my disarray about Drumpf and a sort of delayed reaction to Dubya before that), I read Dallek's FDF biography and then Ellis' His Excellency about George Washington and now plan to read more presidential biographies. While not a biography per se, Founding Brothers is a fascinating look at several of the major players during the period immediately following George Washington's presidency (so between about 1795 to about 1805 roughly) built around several themes. This form of narration draws the readers in and makes them want to know more about these titanic actors on the world stage. Now, that sounds awfully pompous, but when you think about what they were doing in creating the world's first elected republic and the fact that it did not devolve as in all previous cases and sadly many, many future situations, into am autocracy (which is what many of us fear is happening now as I write).

The first story is about the fatal dual between economist and patriot Alexander Hamilton and one of his arch rivals Vice President Aaron Burr. Having read the Washington biography, I knew a little about how much Washington trusted Hamilton who was on hand during the military campaign and the two terms as president. I did not know how far out of normalcy he had gotten by 1804 in terms of extreme Federalist ideals and even creating (at considerable cost) a sort of private, but publicly funded, militia. Without going into the details (because that would spoil your enjoyment of the book), the chapter describes Hamilton's verbal and later literal physical duel with Burr which draws a sort of telling parallel to the ideas and principles that made up each of the actors in this drama.

The next chapter talks about a fateful dinner at Thomas Jefferson's house several years earlier where a major compromise was struck between the advocates of the federal government assuming the states' accumulated debt versus those that wanted the capital of the newly United States to be located on the Potomac River near George Washington's property at Mount Vernon. These issues on the surface appear unrelated, but Ellis does a great job explaining in fact how the issues of states rights on the Republican side (ominously including slavery) and the idea of a strong federal government (the Federalist side) were actually far more divisive and could easily have led to a major outbreak of hostilities between the northern and southern colonies at this critical start of the country. At stake also was the legacy of the omnipresent American hero and demigod, George Washington, who some felt was too monarchal despite his having voluntarily retired after the war and only reluctantly having become the first president.

There is a chapter about slavery that is extremely enlightening as well. There was an unspoken agreement to not talk about slavery lest, as I mentioned above, the situation degenerate into a civil war. There was even an agreement to put off any discussions of the slave trade in Congress until 1808. However, in 1798, some Quakers put forward motions about emancipation and nullification of slavery which were debated in the House before being suppressed and forgotten in the Senate. During these debates however, the spectre of white supremacy reared its ugly head quite publicly as South Carolina and Georgia expressed their fears of a dying white race due to miscegenation (yes, the same argument that Hitler used against Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, and handicapped people to justify the Holocaust and the argument still used by the alt-right today to justify White Lives Matter and incidents such as Charlottesville in late 2017). The issues of payment for loss of property to slave owners (which would have been the equivalent of 10-20x the GNP at the time) and the relocation of the slaves (who constituted nearly 30-40% of the population of most of the slave-holding southern states) were too divisive for any sane debate to take place. The real tragedy here is that, since many of the Framers (Washington, Jefferson and Madison among others) were slave-holders themselves, the issue was muddled despite any moral compunctions that it might raise. The real missed opportunity here according to the author was having someone as revered and infallible as Washington not jumping in to take the moral high ground and abolish slavery forthwith. He could conceivably have done this just with the force of his personality (and he did in fact free his slaves...but posthumously), but he decided not to act. It is interesting to note that ALL of the actors knew that they were just postponing the eventual Civil War by refusing to debate it in the Senate.

The other chapters deal with the relationships between the various men and in particular, the last two chapters talk about the interesting and stormy relationship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. This was another massive reveal for me that makes me want to read more biographies to understand these men, their lives, and their impact on American history. There is also a lot here about the touchy issues of isolationism vs global trade that had major effects on history and were ever-changing as the French Revolution became the Directory and later the Empire and as England evolved from American enemy to American trading partner.

I think this is a deceptively thin book that actually requires lots of time to fully appreciate as it is stocked full of anecdotes and contextual information that really makes the Revolutionary Age stand out and feel real and relevant. I found it incredible that many of the issues that cleaved the nation in two and threatened to tear it asunder continue in today's USA particularly in the Drumpf era when, not unlike towards 1800 when the Federalists and Republicans could not stand to be in the same room together.