The men who created the United States have always amazed me. They could easily have gone the way of the French Revolution, but they didn't. Franklin, not Robespierre. Hamilton, not Danton. Perhaps this is why I have a tendency to collect books about these men, hoping I can always learn more about them.

The first founding declared American independence; the second, American nationhood.

The United States should have faltered in the 1790s, it's really amazing that it didn't. No money, squabbling among states, egos galore. Yet it survived because it had leaders. Flawed leaders, sure, but each one offset the next (something that seems to be missing today). Adams was New England with a bias for the old country. Jefferson was Virginia with a preference for France. Franklin was the calm while Hamilton was the fire. And Madison probably couldn't see over his desk. Their works endure.

My three star rating is because I had problems with some parts of the book. Sentences seemed to go on forever, which meant I had to re-read some paragraphs just to ensure I knew what was going on. Yet some chapters flowed nicely, so comme ci, comme ça. The book ends with the last years of Adams and Jefferson, who both died on the same day (4 July, 1826): the nation's birthday fifty years on. A good read overall and not a bad starting point for readers who want to focus on a few of the titans who took such giant steps.

Book Season = Spring (glorious relics)

Ellis gives us six insightful vignettes of leaders of the early American Republic. The author reminds us that the founders did not know whether their creation would last. They did know that it was historic, that it was fragile and that it was a bold experiment. We have to judge them and their actions in that context, in light of what they knew not what has since come to be true. The underlying theme is the dichotomy between the suspicion of central government and the need for a durable union for survival and prosperity. The Federalists led by northerners Hamilton and Adams were for a strong unified America that would take its place in the world; the Republicans led by Virginians Jefferson and Madison represented southerners who wanted minimal government that would not interfere with the states. That compromise could be reached, that political vitriol could be overcome, and that a document as strong, flexible and enduring as the Constitution could be crafted was a great and not inevitable accomplishment.

Ellis takes us into the minds of the founders to show us how the interplay of ideas and personalities actually worked, how history shaped the men and how in turn the men shaped history. He starts with a story where compromise failed, where political infighting succumbed to the revolutionary era’s code of honor, the duel. Alexander Hamilton, past his prime and with his own reputation sullied, had vilified Aaron Burr for the past fifteen years. Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel. But rather than apologize Hamilton risked everything and lost his life against the self-serving Burr, Jefferson’s Vice President. Hamilton would not repudiate what he stood for, a strong union. Ellis focuses on trying to determine who shot first and whether they aimed to kill, but I was more fascinated by the strength of Hamilton’s belief.

In the second story we learn where a compromise did work, one vital to the future of America. The assumption of state debts into a national debt pushed by Hamilton and the Federalists was accepted by Republican Virginians Jefferson and Madison in trade for placing the nation’s capital on the Potomac. Each side felt it walked away with a victory. While the Virginians gave in to Hamilton’s vision of a commercially vibrant union despite their disdain for central economic authority, they felt their proximity to the new capital would give them greater influence with the new government. At least this is the impression Jefferson gave. Jefferson also realized as a former foreign minister that lack of a cohesive economic policy rendered America impotent in the eyes of Europe and left the southern plantations at the unbridled mercy of European banks.

The third story deals with the inability to deal with slavery. Seen as an issue so divisive it would disassemble the republic, silence and obfuscation were employed to keep the subject at bay. Madison was the master of doubletalk. He seemed to support northerners’ belief that slavery was an evil that made a mockery of the Declaration of Independence, but Madison was only paying them lip service. He made sure that no action was taken and that even discussion of slavery was considered out of bounds. The Constitution itself was carefully crafted to make no direct mention of slavery. In spite of this it allowed each slave to count as 3/5ths of a person and denied the federal government any right to prevent the importation of slaves for twenty years. Northerners believed the emancipation of the slaves was inevitable thinking ultimately everyone would want to end such evil. But in the south, slavery was seen as an economic necessity and any argument or ambiguity was appropriate to keep it. Thus again a compromise, if only tacitly agreed to, was made to keep the union intact, but at what ultimate cost?

The fourth story is about George Washington’s Farewell Address. With his larger than life persona and reputation he was the one person who could cement the new republic together. But his desire to centralize authority smacked too much of monarchy for many who had just fought against it. With Washington retiring, the country was at risk of scattering into separate states. Not surprisingly then, Washington’s first point in his address was about the importance of national unity and the danger of single issue politics, a warning still relevant.

Washington sought to ensure peace with the Jay treaty aligning US interests with England. While beneficial territorially and economically to America, opponents felt the U.S. had succumbed to British power. Why had we fought the revolution just to give our freedom back? Jefferson was appalled. Jefferson was a Francophile even approving of the French Revolution. Jefferson took Robespierre, The Committee of Public Safety and heads rolling in the streets of Paris in stride. It was Jefferson who later used the phrase “entangling alliances” sometimes mistakenly attributed to Washington.

Jefferson had first turned against Washington when Washington raised a militia to quell the Whiskey Rebellion. Jefferson asked what right the federal government had to make these farmers pay a tax. Jefferson began denigrating Washington behind his back, questioning his judgement and whether senility was setting in. Washington was well aware of Jefferson’s attacks when he with Hamilton’s considerable help wrote the Farewell Address. Washington thus took care to produce a well thought out statement. Worried that future presidents might not be able to hold the country together, he proposed federal programs to strengthen the union: a national university, national military academy, larger navy and even agricultural subsidies. The underlying issue remains contentious to this day: Is the federal government the friend or foe, the problem or the solution.

Nothing better symbolizes the acrimonious political division of the country between supporters of weak government and those of strong, than the split between Jefferson and Adams. Their story is Ellis’s fifth. These friends and collaborators during the revolution became political enemies following Adams election as President. Adams reached out to include Jefferson in his administration, but Jefferson refused, perhaps more from political expediency than policy differences. Jefferson following Madison’s advice saw that any president following Washington was doomed to failure. All the differences Washington’s stature enabled him to keep at bay would now spill out into open hostility. Jefferson with the help of Madison took every opportunity to undermine Adams, spreading rumor and innuendo. Adams didn��t help himself signing the deeply unpopular Alien and Sedition Acts at the urging of his closest advisor, wife Abigail. Adams was also facing an arch enemy in his own party, Alexander Hamilton, who wanted to lead the New Army to take over America. Despite all this, Adams for the most part acted prudently and displaying great fortitude struck a peace treaty with France. Unfortunately, this came too late to help him in the 1800 election which he lost to Jefferson. Adams and Jefferson would not communicate with each other for another 12 years.

The sixth and final story is that of the Jefferson-Adams correspondence that marked the beginning of reconciliation 12 years later. It would continue for 13 years, written as much for posterity as for each other. Adams is more visceral presenting his view of a contingent world subject to chance, good fortune in the case of the revolution but uncertainty for the country’s future. Jefferson is eloquent depicting the young nation’s history as a natural flow of events leading to independence, freedom and a future of prosperity and hope. They worked through their differences with Adams spilling out his frustrations and Jefferson putting them in perspective. The one huge exception was the dispute that the nation had swept under the carpet - slavery. Even the blunt anti- slavery Adams did not bring this up with Jefferson. The smooth spoken slave owning Jefferson felt it a topic to be resolved by the next generation. Of all their disagreements the one they avoided is the one that would tear the republic apart. Incredibly, hundreds of miles apart, both died within hours of each other on the fiftieth anniversary of their signing of the Declaration of Independence. Two disparate spirits tightly intertwined.

Ellis takes us from a period when the nation was singular in purpose, when there were no political parties. Then underneath Washington’s unifying presidency, the first parties, the Federalists and Republicans, were forming. Each party became a vociferous advocate for its view of the proper role of government. As Jefferson wrote Adams, it was this way even before there was an America, “The same political parties which now agitate the U.S. have existed all thro’ time. And in fact the terms of whig and tory belong to natural as well as civil history. They denote the temper and constitution and mind of different individuals.” Today as Jefferson presciently saw, the same divisive politics are still the norm. Exceptionally gifted, thoughtful leaders like Washington, Adams and Jefferson are not.

Ellis doesn't write bad history and this effort is no exception. An effort that illuminates the real men that our founders were.

What an exciting book! Ellis conducts you right into the political chaos of the early republic, when the revolutionary fraternity was splintering in feuds, faction and duels (which are preferable to purges, terrors, and nights of long knives):

The very idea of a legitimate opposition did not yet exist in the political culture of the 1790s, and the evolution of political parties was proceeding in an environment that continued to regard the word party as an epithet. In effect, the leadership of the revolutionary generation lacked a vocabulary adequate to describe the politics they were inventing…Lacking a consensus on what the American Revolution had intended and what the Constitution had settled, Federalists and Republicans alike were afloat on a sea of mutual accusations and partisan interpretations. The center could not hold because it did not exist.

The old warhorse Washington had offered the semblance of a center; but in his second term as president, Treasury Secretary Hamilton’s fiscal plans and the brokering of a British-skewed neutrality in the French Revolutionary Wars pushed Washington’s fellow Virginians Madison and Jefferson into the opposition. Ellis argues that Washington’s experience of the army as a social adhesive availed him of a visionary nationalism that non-veterans like Madison and Jefferson simply could not comprehend. Washington said of the war: “a century in the ordinary intercourse, would not have accomplished what seven years association in arms did.” Washington’s remark echoes in the decision of President Taylor, another Virginian general, to admit California as a free state in 1850, an act seen as a class betrayal by other Southern slaveholders. (McPherson writes, “Forty years in the army had given Old Rough and Ready a national rather than sectional perspective.”)


Washington’s realistic valuation of the federal government as a social adhesive and the fiscal-military organizer of the coming scramble west contrasted with Jefferson’s dreamy attachment to a static, Encyclopédie-plate republic founded on the fancied commercial innocence of the American farmer—just as Washington’s foreign policy, which bet shrewdly on Britain as the superpower of the coming century, contrasted with Jefferson’s romantic mist of Anglophobia, Francophily, and abiding faith in the Utopian promise of the French Revolution. Note the sentimental hysteria, the Manichean bravado in what Jefferson wrote a friend about the Reign of Terror:

The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of that contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed I would rather have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than it is now.

He seems to reach across the years, and grasp Sartre and Louis Aragon by the hand. In Ellis’s portrayal, Jefferson’s personality is one compartmentalized with a view to containing and denying to himself awareness of his more undignified ambitions and behavior. And for the American slaveholder, the pricer of souls in the land of liberty, what more requisite features than compartments and denial? Beginning with the first political challenges to slavery in the 1790s—to which Ellis devotes an absorbing chapter—slaveholders defended the institution by calling it the sole check against race-mixing. Meanwhile, what was observed down on the plantation? Rainbow harems, and broods of beige bastards.


This book is the first substantive thing I’ve read on John Adams, and I like him. Ellis writes that his was an “iconoclastic and contrarian temperament that relished alienation”—a temperament destined to become a family pattern; great-grandson Henry would inherit a nervous brilliance mismatched to his, or any, time. Adams’ correspondence is full of trenchant deconstructions of the mythic revolutionary narrative then solidifying in the public mind. I like his historically-informed, disabused, mercurial style; his suspicion of the illusory equality that democracy seems to offer; his wariness before the rigidity and abstraction of French Revolutionary ideology. And though he, like all the Founders save Franklin, agreed to an official silence on slavery—that powder-keg nested in the foundations—restless apprehensions gleam through:

This subject is vast and ominous. More than fifty years has it attracted my thoughts and given me much anxiety. A folio volume would not contain my lucubration on this subject. And at the end of it, I should leave the reader and myself as much at a loss what to do with it, as at the beginning.

I could easily trade The Education of Henry Adams, with its sour stylistic monotony, for that lucubratory folio!


Purely for his reputation in posterity, Alexander Hamilton was lucky to have been killed in that duel. Aaron Burr thereby assumes the mantle of Dangerous Man, Cataline of the republic, and Hamilton’s flirtations with “Bonapartism” fade into the background. Hamilton undermined President Adams by manipulating his cabinet behind the scenes; and while Adams pursued a peace treaty with the French, whose privateers had been seizing American ships in the West Indies, Hamilton was agitating for war (Adams was following another of Washington's recommendations: 20 years minimum of growth and consolidation before we tangle with a European power). Hamilton was then Inspector-General of the New Army, and planned, with the outbreak of war, to lead a chastising march through Jeffersonian Virginia, en route to seize Florida, Louisiana, and, even more grandiosely, Mexico and Peru. Those are big dreams! Hamilton wanted to do himself, and in one campaign, what would take Napoleon in a giving mood, Jefferson in a nation-building mood, Zachary Taylor, Winfield Scott, Grant, Sherman, and six subsequent decades to accomplish. Adams’ conclusion of a treaty with France abolished the prospect of such folly.


Ellis leaves one with so many images. Abigail Adams overhears the ex-president cursing his enemies as he works in the fields alongside the hired men. James Callender, the scandalmongering pamphleteer Jefferson hired to smear Adams before the 1800 election, languishes, accused of libel, in a Richmond jail, where he hears rumors of Jefferson’s slave mistress, rumors he publishes once he decides the payment for his hatchet job on Adams is inadequate. Washington gallops along the Potomac, sighting the prospects of the capitol to bear his name. James Madison, at the Constitutional Convention, confides to his diary the observation that “the States were divided into different interests not by their difference of size, but principally from their having or not having slaves. It did not lie between the large and small States: it lay between the Northern and Southern.”

I knew I was gonna hate the reviews for "Founding Brothers" the moment I noticed its composite rating is, depressingly, less than four stars...

...Wait. Am I allowed to make fun of other reviewers on Goodreads? Will that get me banned?

I'll just say this: the word for a "nonsensical work" is "drivel," not "dribble." And "Founding Brothers" is not drivel. It's a beautifully written, smartly argued, and ACCESSIBLY succinct masterpiece (accessibly in caps because some Goodreaders seem to be under the impression that Ellis writes "purple prose" that's too full of "big words"... I dunno guys. He's writing about political disputes among aristocratic philosophers from the 18th century. What do you expect? Fucking "Frog and Toad are Friends"?). Its portraits of the "Revolutionary Generation" are human portraits, and Ellis resists the simplifying urges to make the Founders Gods (a la whatever story the right wing is telling you these days) or Monsters (a la whatever story the left wing is telling you these days). It's got me all fired up about American history again, and in October of 2016, that's a pretty weird feeling.

(To clarify, for you readers of the future out there: in October 2016, Trump wasn't yet president, so we still had a democracy to be excited about. And just what is this "democracy," you ask? Well, that's a long story. And you probably aren't allowed to hear it anyway, because your America is a totalitarian wasteland where any opinion other than "America is Great Again" will get you deported or killed.)

I think giving this book five stars actually does a disservice to the author: It deserves 20! Joesph Ellis' work, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, is a wonderful narrative that immerses the reader in the minds of the founders of the United States of America, and explores the consequences of their actions (or inactions).

Ellis divides the book into six chapters, each revolving around a pivotal point in time, or around specific persons. People mentioned, specifically:
* George Washington,
* Alexander Hamilton,
* Aaron Burr,
* Thomas Jefferson,
* James Madison,
* Benjamin Franklin,
* John Adams, and
* Abigail Adams, his wife.

This book is more than an "autobiography" of the foundation of the country. Ellis dives into the relationships that these men, and woman, had with one another and explains, very well, why they were "Founding Brothers." It most certainly was a fraternity that built this country. Think about it, they put their names to a document that went right into the face of King George III, and that meant certain death had they lost the war with the British Empire.

I came away with the following insight after finishing the book:
* Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr both got what was coming to them.
* Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Munroe were vindictive curs. (Although Jefferson redeemed himself in 1812.)
* John Adams, and, more importantly, Abigail Adams, should be considered true American heroes. Especially Abigail; for all that she did for John, and the advancement of women.

I highly recommend this book to everybody--history buff or not.

Founding Brothers focuses on short episodes of history rather than the life of a single person or a prolonged event. This approach allows for the main characters consisting of Washington, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson et. al. to enter and leave each story as scripted by history and leads to enhanced depictions of the interactions that these revolutionary figures had with each other. No single individual is the focus of the book, which makes the stories feel more complete as each one comes to its end.

At the same time, however, the approach or the writing did not bring the Founding Fathers any closer to being human in spite of the fact that the book’s title could be taken to imply the opposite. The key characters of the Revolution all tend to keep their politically deified personas. They moved through each story as the wise men in the Romanesque togas that are depicted on the murals inside the National Archives. Before reading Founding Brothers I was hoping for a more ‘brotherly’ look at the characters, meaning depictions that were closer to being human.

The stories did spark a desire for further reading. They brought to light John Adam’s pragmatic realism and emphasized Thomas Jefferson’s utopian dreams. All of the stories suggested a far more contentious political climate at the very start of the nation and illuminated parallels in today’s political climate. It was tempting, after reading Founding Brothers, to conclude that our present-day political conflicts will also pass into history, but the stories brought to light fundamental differences between today's political impasses and those faced at the birth of the nation. We may indeed be in the midst of our own demise as pondered by John Adams near the end of his years.

no

You would figure that the history of America’s “Revolutionary Era” would be milked dry by now and the stories of its players a stale drama. This book represents the effort of a professional historian to forge new insights by looking collectively at the so-called Founding Fathers, stretching a metaphor for their alliances and conflicts as being emblematic of the very checks and balances that they built into the Constitution in 1787. Through a set of six lively essays, he probes the diverse personalities and substantive interactions among these figures in relationship to the major issues that arose in the decade after the new government was formed (essentially the 1790s). His focus is on Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, and Hamilton, with supplemental attention given to Madison, Burr, and Franklin. Because they all knew each other and worked together in collaboration and strife over such a long time, Ellis adopts the phrase “Founding Brothers” for his title.

In his preface, Ellis points out that despite these white dudes being lionized and mythologized by so many for so long, each generation sees the launch of the nation a bit differently, with different implications for contemporary controversies according to who is looking:
A golden haze surrounds this period for many Americans, but as a contaminated radioactive cloud for those unhappy with what we have become and how we got here.

The draw of this book for me is in the opportunity to understand personalities of these players on history’s stage a bit better and to appreciate how their human strengths and flaws came into play in shaping the country’s course. As an effective way to clarify the impact of personality on amplifying political differences, Ellis kicks off his book by examining the pistol duel between Vice President Burr and Hamilton that ended in the senseless death of the latter. I have had the pleasure of a satirical dose of the quirks and dark spots in Burr’s character from reading Vidal’s novel “Burr”. I didn’t realize how much Hamilton brought on the challenge from Burr by his campaign of continual gossip and insults of Burr in social situations. I pictured Hamilton as an effete snob, but learned he came from humble roots. Through prior readings I’ve gotten to know and admire Adams, Washington, and Franklin, but for Jefferson and Hamilton what little I know makes me somewhat biased against them. I came away with some fresh angles on the first three and for the latter two substantially more about what made them tick (though little to make me love them any better). Regardless of personal appeal or distaste, their alliances and conflicts moved the country through the bad patches.

In a wonderful chapter called “The Collaborators”, Ellis compares and contrasts the early close collaboration between Adams and Jefferson, best seen in their teamwork on the Declaration of Independence, with that of Jefferson and Madison, a match of strategist with tactician that led to Jefferson beating Adams in his run for a second term. In between, we get the falling out between Jefferson and Adams during their competition to replace Washington and the full bloom of Adams’ productive collaboration with his wife Abigail during his presidency.

I get a kick out of Ellis’ evocative language in the challenges to the friendship between Adams and Jefferson:
They were an incongruous pair, but everyone seemed to argue that history made them into a pair. The incongruities leapt out for all to see: Adams, the short, stout, candid-to-a-fault New Englander; Jefferson, the tall, slender, elegantly elusive Virginian; Adams, the highly combustible., ever combative, mile-a-minute talker, whose favorite form of conversation was an argument; Jefferson, the always cool and self-contained enigma, who regarded debate and argument as violations of the natural harmonies he heard inside his own head. The list could go on—the Yankee and the Cavalier, the orator and the writer, the bulldog and the greyhound. They were the odd couple of the American Revolution.

For Washington and Adams, a strong central government was essential to achieve the nation’s great opportunity to settle and harness the resources of a continent, negotiate beneficial trade agreements with other nations, and develop an adequate defense from threats. Adams wrote of the need to retain a “monarchical principle” of power in the government to get things done as the only pragmatic way to achieve national cohesion over territories so much vaster the Greek city states that first developed a democracy. For Jefferson and his protégé Madison, any conferral of substantial power at the federal level came to represent a revival of the kind of tyranny for which the revolution was waged. When Hamilton and the group of Federalists began machinations to establish a national bank to facilitate economic growth, this pushed Jefferson’s buttons even more as a betrayal of a revolution for individual rights and agrarian values and a return of power to a monied and largely urban elite, i.e. a new aristocracy. Thus, the “all-for-one and one-for-all” sense of unity that emerged when the Revolutionary War was on soon came to an end, and the age of vicious party politics began.

Forever after, party loyalty would threaten to belie the ideal that the elected government was to serve the entire populace. Dirty tricks, smear campaigns, and fake news came out of the woodwork surprisingly early. In the election to replace Washington, Jefferson is guilty of paying a “scandalmonger” to do a hatchet job on Adams’ character in the press and in a pamphlet, painting “Adams as ‘a hoary headed incendiary’ who was equally determined on war with France and on declaring himself president for life, with John Quincy lurking in the background as his successor. When Jefferson’s role was definitively revealed, “Jefferson seemed genuinely surprised at the revelation, suggesting that for him the deepest secrets were not the ones he kept from his enemies but the ones he kept from himself”. (Another choice quote: “Jefferson’s nearly Herculean powers of self-denial also helped keep the cause pure, at least in the privacy of his own mind”; elsewhere Ellis notes that Jefferson could probably pass a lie detector test denying each of his various duplicities).

After his narrow victory, Adams invited Jefferson into his cabinet, but party politics and ideology kept Jefferson from acceding to revival of their old collaborative spirit. Adams had filled his cabinet with Hamilton and his followers, whose manipulations on behalf of their agenda disgusted Adams himself. He resorted to using his wife Abigail as his effective cabinet of one for all important help with his deliberations. The breach with Jefferson yawned even wider when Adams undermined Jefferson’s longstanding goal of an alliance with France by forging a secret agreement with England to secure umbrella protections from their fleet in exchange for a favorable trade status for them. More fuel for their personal conflict was added to the fire when Adams acceded to his wife’s unfortunate push for the Aliens and Sedition Act to protect him from libelous attacks in the press. When the law came to be used as a political weapon selectively against the Republican-leaning press, the gloves really came off.

Only much later, after Jefferson’s term and retirement, did the pair take up correspondence and slowly let go of their mutual sense of betrayal. Their remarkable correspondence over many years until their deaths on the 50th anniversary of Independence Day reveals a return to true friendship and a great repository of their attempts to make sense of history. Ellis’ coverage of the correspondence makes for a nice complement to the in-depth treatment of the rapprochement in McCullough’s wonderful biography “John Adams.”

Ironically, it was Adams that succeeded in achieving a parallel treaty with France to balance out the English one, though it came too late in his presidency to affect the election of Jefferson. He had been trying to follow Washington’s lead on navigating a path of neutrality with respect to the centuries old struggle between England and France for dominance of western Europe. However, these was not a stable government to negotiate with for a long time, and the attempt by Tallyrand to extract a hefty bribe just to get to the table set progress back. In turn, it was ironic that it was Jefferson who achieved the Louisiana Purchase and thereby unleashed true imperial spirit for taking over the continent. And it was he that helped achieve the banning of the slave trade.

With hindsight we can see the raw deal that was being set up for the future for blacks and Indians. Mostly, the leaders at the time colluded in an active deferral in addressing the slavery issue. Too hot to handle. The southern colonies wouldn’t have joined the Union if slavery was in the lineup for federal interference. In an important chapter of this book, “The Silence”, it was disturbing to see how a simple petition to Congress by some early Quaker abolitionists in 1790 could reveal the terrible instability of the nation. Endorsed by Franklin, it couldn’t be ignored. Their presentation of the contradiction between trafficking in human beings and the precept of “all men are created equal” was clear, as was their argument that is was the duty of Congress was to resolve it. Despite the consensus buried in the Constitution that no law could be passed restricting the slave trade for 20 years, the Pennsylvania petitioners maintained that Congress could still do its constitutional duty of abolishing slavery under its “general welfare” clause that empowered them to “take whatever action it deemed ‘necessary and proper’ to …’Countenance the Restoration of Liberty for all Negroes'.” That brought out plenty of tap-dancing from the southern delegation about state rights and the practice being okay with God according to certain biblical passages. With a few states making threats about seceding, the petition was ignored.

In retrospect, it’s easy to be forgiving that it would take some time to call the bluff of hard-core states like South Carolina. But Ellis takes a surprising tack by arguing that this point in time was near the end of the period when slavery could be abolished with limited impact. The census for 1790 revealed exponential growth of the population of slaves similar to that of whites since 1776, reaching 700,000 out of nearly 4 million total non-Indian population (I was shocked that New York and New Jersey still had 33,000) . With the added likelihood of new slave states being added to the Union, the door was closely quickly on the economic feasibility of a compensated emancipation from the federal coffers.

None of the Founding Fathers really countenanced a fully bi-racial society. All imagined shipping the massive number of freed slaves somewhere else, to some colony in Africa, South America, or to some place out West (not too different from the mindset during Lincoln’s presidency 75 years later). Jefferson may have loved his slave Sally Hemings and had children by her, but he did not free her and did not conceive of blacks worthy of full citizenship. In the case of his fellow Virginian, Washington, Ellis provides bits of evidence that he did imagine a fully integrated society. Some quote shows he believed that low expectations of their capabilities arose from the outcomes of their environment and not intrinsic character. Also, his will specified that after his wife also died that his Mt. Vernon estate be sold and proceeds be used to support opportunities for his freed family slaves and their descendants over a few generations.

That Washington had an unusually egalitarian streak about the races is also suggested in his “Letter to the Cherokee Nation", in which he encourages them to seek assimilation into white society as the only solution for all Indians given the inevitable settlement of all their lands by the unstoppable whites. Washington acknowledged that he was asking a lot, that “this path may seem may seem a little difficult to enter … because it meant subduing their understandable urge to resist and sacrificing many of their most distinctive and cherished tribal values. “ I appreciate Ellis’ summary:

Whatever moral deficiencies and cultural condescensions a modern-day audience might find in Washington’s advice, two salient points are clear: First, it was in keeping with his relentless realism about the limited choices that history offered; and, second, it projected Indians into the mix of people called Americans.

I wonder if in this Age of Trump whether Ellis will feel obliged to change this view of this roller-coaster of America’s first decade :
..in terms of shrill accusatory rhetoric, flamboyant displays of ideological intransigence, intense personal rivalries, and hyperbolic claims of immanent catastrophe, it has no equal in American history.

First I want to address the low ratings some give the book for its vocabulary. Anyone who went high school and did even moderately well academically can read this book without struggling. The prose are accessible and, to me, is the book’s greatest strengths. The basic premise is that, by and large, US political conflict can be best understood as the perpetual deferment of a resolution to conflict that began between the Federalists and the Republicans. The lone exception was the Civil War in which some decision about the long-neglected political matter (I’ll get to this interpretation next) of slavery came to a head and nearly destroyed the nation. My problem with the book stems from Ellis’s framing—namely, that the conflicts within the revolutionary generation, of this period in particular and of subsequent periods more generally, are best understood as political/ideological differences while virtually ignoring the economic motors that drove these interests. I’m becoming increasingly aware that you can understand history and politics by simply looking at letters and polemical writings of political elites, which make up the bulk Ellis’s sources. But it was still a compelling read that, when I first opened the book nearly 20 years ago during my freshmen college class, made me curious about history and historical interpretation. For that I will give this 3 stars.

Books like this are my attempt to curb the excesses of my ignorance of history. This one was in just the right range for me — far enough beyond my knowledge to pose a challenge but not so far as to prove an impossibility. I just need to keep reading more of this sort so a little of each sticks and eventually builds up a substantive comprehension.

I liked the focus on men rather than on abstractions. One thing's for sure: our nation was founded by sinners. Burr made me sad. The early loss of so many of his family members unmoored him from the Edwards heritage that should have been such a blessing to and through him. Hamilton didn't appeal at all. The sketch of Washington's character as more stage actor than true statesman was interesting. My opinion of Jefferson plummeted, but his final correspondence with Adams redeemed it somewhat. I think I liked Adams best of all, but his setbacks and trials were probably for his good. Madison was the sixth major figure covered, but five minutes after I've finished the book, I've already forgotten any details about him.

The book was very well written by Ellis and very well read by Walter.

Also, Abigail Adams was the first female vice president. #changemymind

Ellis writes with impressive detail & impeccable precision. Considering the monumental scope of the topic, the size of this work is extremely impressive (248 pages).

The tone certainly verges on nostalgia/romanticism.

Good reminder how many times the Union nearly disintegrated in its infancy.

The excerpts of letters from personal correspondence that Ellis included were inspiring and thoroughly enjoyable to read. Perhaps we should revive the tradition of letter writing.

4.4 stars