I got a lot out of this. It certainly provoked a lot of thoughts. I took lots of time reading and rereading much of this, so it took me a long time to read it completely. It was well worth it. The author, Joseph Ellis, presents this very well. I don't know if it was because it was the fact that I was reading this during an election year or something else, but this book sent me on a journey.

Good insights into the Founding Fathers as foresighted yet imperfect individuals.

Examining some famous events surrounding America’s birth and maturation, Founding Brothers puts a new spin on familiar topics!

Typically, we call the men who founded America the Founding Fathers. This gives us a particular image, one of old, wisened, dignified men who speak softly and lovingly. In turn, this has led us to believe that politics in the late-18th century were very civil and refined. Both are terribly inaccurate assumptions.

Beyond being a fun device for a book title, calling them the Founding Brothers gives a much better picture of how these men actually behaved. Brothers fight, brothers argue, brothers push each other’s button and can lash out in anger. And that’s precisely how these men behaved. In fact, the very first story examines how Aaron Burr, the sitting US Vice President, shot and killed the former Secretary of the Treasury over political differences! Imagine if you read that headline today!

Not exactly a time of polite disagreements, is it?

This is an excellent book for obtaining a grittier, more legitimate understanding of the formative years of the United States of America, and the men who founded it.

I picked up this book to read about the initial starting of our country and I wanted to know more details about post-revolutionary war time. I wanted to discover what struggles, victories, trials and triumphs the founding fathers went through at our nation’s inception. And this book did just that and more. What a school textbook would explain in a paragraph or two, this book did in six great chapters. The amount of detail in this book is thoroughly comprehensive and paints an incredible picture.

During our current political climate that it littered with division and hostility, this book is a great read to see that the problems we have today are very similar to the problems of early American politics. A government “for the people, by the people” is what Americans stood for who believed in the Republic. The Federalist Party wanted bigger government, but that did not align with the true American spirit or the cause of the Revolutionary War so that political party faded away.

If you want to discover the true American spirit from an unbiased opinion, please read this book. This book reveals secrets of how to handle today’s political climate.

A couple of things stand out for this reviewer. My knowledge of mid-19th century US history is rather more extensive than for this period, and one of the things that strikes me is how many of the debates around slavery in the 1790s were echoed in the 1850s - notably around the issue of slavery's westward expansion into new territories and states.
It is also of more than passing interest to note how some of the justifications for slavery at the end of the 18th century are echoed by the Christian-fascist MAGA movement of today. One of the most prominent intellectuals who has debased himself in service of this cult is David Horowitz of the Neo-fascist rag FrontPage Magazine, which I monitor to keep tabs of the crackpot Right. He will say things along the lines of "African chiefs sold Africans into slavery and hundreds of thousands of mostly white soldiers died to end slavery in America." It's a statement that omits the role of the white plantation owners and the exploitative political economy that enriched them.
But there it was in the 1790s, attempts to portray enslavement as a natural condition of Africans by one James Jackson. Benjamin Franklin famously made a mockery of this defence by citing a late 17th century Algerian pirate who allegedly said that the European Christians enlaved by Islam were clearly better off.
It is one of the many ways in which a direct line can be drawn to the MAGA movement and those who thought it was their God-given right to own people of another race as property. It is where the historic roots of the movement can be found.
The 1790s was also known as a polarising decade politically in US politics. Writing this fine piece of narrative history two decades ago, one wonders if Ellis was aware that a far more divisive decade lay in the not too distant future ...

This was a wonderful read and just what I needed at this time. Ellis succeeds here in writing entertaing and witty while at the same time being a serious scholar and presenting his arguments clearly and well argued. I completely get why this book won the pulitzer price. This is the way I like to read my history. I think this book works perfect for an introduction to the Founding Fathers and a history of the early American republic.

This book isn't one chronological narrative but more , let's say a short story collection. And in each 'story' he focuses on a certain event or relationship and links that to a broader issues of the American Revolution. I liked every chapter but the one's about Washington's farewell adress and the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were my favourites. I learned a lot, the book got me to think about a lot of things and it also succeeded to heighten my antipathy towards Thomas Jefferson.

I'm giving this 4,5 stars and not 5 for 2 reasons.
The first one is that the book is much too short for me, I crave more information and deeper analysis of some of the topics touched upon. I get that this isn't really the goal of this book but for a 5 stars I would have needed that. My second reason is that the book was supposed to give us a closer look to relationship between John and Abigail Adams and their professional partnership. We got that, a bit. But mostly it seemed to go more about Jefferson and JA then Adams and his wife. And I think that's a missed opportunity. But to conclude I certainly recommend the book

I’m a reasonably well-trained amateur historian, whose senior thesis was on the Constitutional Convention, particularly regarding the way that the characters of the men involved shaped the results. This book should be right up my ally.

But it is BORING. I can’t put my finger on precisely what tricks the author plays to make the result so stultifying, but they work. I kept at it off-and-on for a full month, but could never make myself read more than a couple of pages at a time.

I know it won the Pulitzer Prize, but a lot of it was just too dry for me. I would rate 2.5 if I could.

My rating system for non-fiction is just developing. I think it may be different than my system for fiction, as this certainly did not make my heart sing. But it was so good. How can you not give a top rating which finally (!) lets you see these oldy mouldy founding fathers as real people?!

We learn the background to the Hamilton/Burr duel, but we learn ever so much more than that. This disagreement was several years in the making and the temper of the times was laid out for me. One of the first compromises of the new nation was made over dinner, one which involved how we came to have our nation's capitol in Washington DC rather than all the other locations that were wanted. The subject of slavery was one of silence, never to be talked about, else the fragile new nation might be ripped apart before we ever truly knit ourselves together. Though I have read most of John Adams, I didn't get the sense in it how much of a collaboration there was between John and Abigail Adams - no, Hillary was decidedly not the first first lady to be so involved. And finally, because of a rift in the long standing friendship between Adams and Jefferson, we see how divisive politics has been with us from the beginning.

Was I simply thirsty for this kind of background to the forming of our nation or is Ellis simply so good he makes you want to turn the pages and find out what else was there in our beginning? Obviously there was the interest or I would have picked it up. But Ellis is really that good. I would read anything by this author, and will!

Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph Ellis represents a masterful, insightful account of 6 pivotal moments or episodes in early American History. What seemed most compelling was the author's manner of contrasting the personalities & resultant philosophies of the key figures. I began a rereading of Founding Brothers quite unintentionally, wanting to check the segment on the Hamilton vs. Burr duel just after reading Gore Vidal's novel Burr, ending up reading the Ellis book a 2nd time.



The book begins with a brief look at the origins of the former American colonies, an overview of the "revolutionary generation", a term that Ellis contends began as an epithet, made in reference to "an inferior, provincial creature." Meanwhile, the word Democrat was initially a reference to "someone who panders to the crude & mindless whims of the masses".

Early on, coverage of "The Duel" analyzes what Ellis considers "a momentary breakdown in the dominant pattern of nonviolent conflict within the American revolutionary generation." Burr is reckoned to have been a genius at positioning himself amidst competing factions, at the disposal of whoever needed his services the most, a quality that sounds quite familiar even today. The author contends that at the point of the duel, neither Hamilton nor Burr had much of a political future, two legendary American figures acting out a desperate scenario neither was really committed to.

The section titled "The Dinner", portrays Thomas Jefferson brokering amity between Hamilton & Madison, who co-authored the Federalist Papers with John Jay having played a considerably lesser role. Madison is seen as exceedingly subtle & having "an intellectually sophisticated comprehension of the choices facing the new American republic of any member of the revolutionary generation." Hamilton is pitted as a Horatio Alger hero who aspired to fame but not necessarily to fortune. The dominant issue separating and defining many of this generation was how each sided with the issue of agrarian vs. commercial sources of wealth and whether to give sway to a relatively powerless vs. a more potent federal government, this at a time when the newly created government was so very vulnerable.



"The Silence" covers the attempt in 1790 to resolve the issue of slavery, with Ben Franklin's last words having urged this but James Madison fearing disunity at this early stage of America's development convinces his colleagues to leave slavery in place--perhaps forever, or so it seemed. Jefferson meanwhile sketched out a plan whereby all slaves born after 1800 would eventually be freed & proposed a bill in congress that would prohibit slavery in all of the western states, a bill that failed to pass by a single vote.

From the beginning, any clear resolution of the slavery question one way or the other rendered ratification of the constitution virtually impossible. For this reason, Ellis contends that the stalemate over the issue of slavery fostered an unwillingness to meet the problem head-on, or a "prudent exercise in ambiguity". Any serious debate involved "the political potential to destroy the union." In spite of that, Madison more than most understood that slavery violated the promise of the American Revolution.

The author juxtaposes the figure of Washington with Jefferson, suggesting that the former was "a rock-ribbed realist who instinctively mistrusted visionary schemes that floated seductively in men's minds, unmoored to palpable realities." And later, he comments that "Washington's realism was rooted in his commitment to control, over himself & all events with the power to determine his fate." America's first president is contrasted with Jefferson for whom ideals constituted the supreme reality. And here is just one sample of the manner in which Ellis compares & contrasts two key members of America's revolutionary generation:

The heroic portraits of all of the great men were romanticized distortions. Franklin for example was a superb scientist & masterful prose stylist but a vacuous political thinker & a diplomatic fraud who spent the bulk of his time in Paris flirting with younger women of the salon set. Washington was an indisputable American patriarch, but more an actor than a leader, brilliant in striking poses in an almost Shakespearean fashion but was also poorly read, seldom wrote his own speeches & apparently had little sense of grammar or syntax.

One of the many areas of coverage that I found worth the rereading of this book was the eventual reconciliation between Adams & Jefferson, with Adams making the decisive move but with Benjamin Rush also playing an important role, declaring to Adams that "I consider you & him the North and South Poles of the American Revolution". Ellis declares that Jefferson seemed to think that once unmoored from the British the American ship would sail freely into a proverbial sunset, while Adams thought the new nation required a "fully empowered federal government on the Federalist model." Almost wonderfully, Founding Brothers ends on a most upbeat note with the reconciliation of these two giants of the revolutionary generation.

There is no small measure of criticism of Prof. Ellis for his use of what some at this site consider overly elaborate vocabulary in relating the 6 segments in Founding Brothers but I did not find this to be the case. Neither did I sense that Ellis was speaking as a professor to students or as a professor to other professors. Rather, having read Founding Brothers twice, I find the audience for this & the 2 other books I've read by Joseph Ellis to be very broadly-based & likely of special interest to anyone keen to learn more about the cast of characters who served to set the direction for American History during the revolutionary phase & just after.

I've also been fortunate to hear Ellis speak locally & enjoyed his meticulous but hardly pedantic approach to American History. The author does however occasionally employ words that were common at the time of the American Revolution but are uncommon today, an example being the word manumission rather than emancipation.

The first photo image within my review is of the author, Joseph Ellis; the second image, (left to right) is of Hamilton, Jefferson & Madison.

Pulitzer Prize winning non-fiction. I read the paperback
edition & gave it 4 stars. An interesting read on many levels.

The historian/ author Ellis focused on 7 men who made the
American Revolution a reality. He showed the humanness
behind each man. And how they adjusted to the new govern-
ment of the US.

George Washington was less formally educated than most
founding fathers. George read 10 newspapers daily. He was
a Federalist & believed in a strong Executive/ President. He
encouraged the US to remain neutral and not to take sides in
European wars. Rumors spread toward the end of his 2nd
term that he was senile.

John Adams, a Federalist, was our 2nd President. Thomas
Jefferson was his VP. Jefferson considered himself a
"Republican" as in the gov't was a republic, as opposed
to a monarchy. He favored being an ally of France, not
England. Jefferson worked behind the scenes against
Adams & hired James Callender to dig up/ spread dirt
about Adams. Callender heard rumors Jefferson had a
sexual liaison with his mulatto slave, Sally Hemmings.
JC put this rumor in print.

Our 3rd President, Jefferson, and Adams had a falling out
and didn't speak for 12 years. Afterward they communicated
again. Both men worried: how would history perceive them?

Per the author, Alexander Hamilton rubbed people the wrong
way. Jefferson, Adams, and Ben Franklin detested him. He
insulted Aaron Burr, said sorry & stopped and started again.
Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel & shot @ him and
Hamilton died the next day.

The US Constitution was established. Two Quaker delegates
in Congress (from NY & PA.) demanded in Feb 1790 that the
federal government put an immediate end to the African
slave trade. The Constitution prohibited Congress from
passing any law that restricted or abolished the slave trade
until 1808. Southern states were in an uproar. They thought
slaves as 'property' worth $100-200 apiece. The founding
fathers feared the US would collapse into separate sections.
What to do? Slaves were made dependent on plantation
owners. If freed where would the slaves go? how would
they live? Southerners complained how would So. states
find cheap labor to work their plantations?

The American Revolutionary generation, or as Ellis quotes member John Adams several times that “band of brothers” is the topic of this work. The subjects include George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr. Each of these men interacted with one another as their various paths crossed from the time of the first Continental Congress, through the early years of the United States following the creation and ratification of the Constitution. Ellis details seminal events during that period to showcase both the personalities of the men, as well as their contributions to the creation of the new nation.

Ellis’ brilliance is found in his balance. He is simultaneously enamored with the Founding Fathers(or as he prefers to term them founding brothers), but also highly aware of their humanity and shortcomings. The beauty of this work is that those sometimes troublesome personal characteristics do nothing to detract from the incredible and legendary work they accomplished together to create an entirely new form of government, but rather improve upon the historical narrative that has been passed on to successive generations.