Joseph J. Ellis - Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

Founding Brothers

THE REVOLUTIONARY GENERATION

JOSEPH J. ELLIS

Vintage Books

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York

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Founding Brothers

Lively and illuminating leaves the reader with avisceral sense of a formative era in American life. A shrewd,insightful book.

The New YorkTimes

Masterful. Fascinating. Ellis isan elegant stylist. [He] captures the passion the founders brought tothe revolutionary project. [A] very fine book.

Chicago Tribune

Splendid. Revealing. An extraordinary book. Itsinsightful conclusions rest on extensive research, and its authorswriting is vigorous and lucid.

St.Louis Post-Dispatch

Ellis has shown here theconsiderable power of knowledgehis knowledge. [He] unpacks thereal issues for his readers, revealing the driving assumptions and rivetingfears that animated Americans first encounter with the organizedideologies and interests we call parties.

The Washington Post Book World

Lucid. Bustling stories that describ[e] how ourearly republic looked and felt. FoundingBrothers takes on timeworn topics and leavens them with tellingdetails. Ellis has such command of the subject matter that it feelsfresh, particularly as he segues from psychological to political, even tophysical analysis. Elliss storytelling helps us more fully hearthe Brothers voices.

BusinessWeek

Magnificent. Ellis eloquently conveys theinterconnected personal relationships and overriding issues that set thenations course. Carefully researched, beautifullywritten.

BookPage

Succinct and telling portraits. Even those familiar withthe Revolutionary generation will find much in its pagesto captivate and enlarge their understanding of our nations fledglingyears.

The New York Times BookReview

Subtle. Readers who fancy detectivestories will enjoy following Ellis down various conjecturaltrails. And those who appreciate the untangling of thought processeswill enjoy seeing Ellis tease out the deeper meanings behind the words of hisprotagonists. Splendid.

TheNews & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina)

Learned,exceedingly well-written, and perceptive. Ellis is at his bestconveying not only the historical perspective of these patrons of the AmericanRevolution, but also the personal hurts, joys, capitulations, regrets,recantations of old wrongs, familial tragedies, and ultimately the finaljudgments they make about each other and the Revolution. Along the way, Ellismanages something rare in a history, rare in any writing: he captures theineffable qualities that inhabit friendship.

The Oregonian

Ellis has long been alamp unto the feet of those who study the Revolutionary and early nationalperiods. His judgments are balanced, and his prose is effortless, everypage a reward to read.

HoustonChronicle

Splendid. A remarkable read.Elliss touching portraits are wonderful. Ellis has ascholars head but a writers heart. [He] tells the humandetails of these superhumans in short vignettes that work as individual stories[and] has a gift for selecting the best detail to illustrate an important traitor event.

The AtlantaJournal-Constitution

Contents

For Ellen

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THEIDEA that gives this book its shape first came to mind while rereadinga mischievous little classic by Lytton Strachey entitled EminentVictorians. My problem, at least as I understood it at that early stage,was a matter of scope and scale. I wanted to write a modest-sized account of amassive historical subject, wished to recover a seminal moment in Americanhistory without tripping over the dead bodies of my many scholarlypredecessors, hoped to render human and accessible that generation of politicalleaders customarily deified and capitalized as Founding Fathers.

Eminent Victorians made Strachey famous for the sophisticationof his prejudiceshis title was deeply ironicbut I want to thankhim for giving me the courage of mine. His animating idea, a combination ofstealth and selectivity, was that less could be more. It is not by thedirect method of scrupulous narration, Strachey wrote,

that the explorer of the past can hope to depict a singular epoch. Ifhe is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject inunexpected places; he will fall upon the flank and rear; he will shoot a suddenrevealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will rowout over the great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, alittle bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristicspecimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a carefulcuriosity.

With this model in mind, I rowed out over the greatocean of material generated in the founding era of American nationhood, loweredmy little bucket as far down as my rope could reach, then made sense out of thecharacteristic specimens I hoisted up with as much storytelling skill as myimagination allowed.

The characteristic specimens were drawn fromthat rich depository of published letters and documents generated by scholarlyeditors over the past half-century. Like everyone else who has tried to makesense out of Americas revolutionary generation, I am deeply indebted tothe modern editions of their papers. The endnotes reflect my dependence onspecific collections, but let me record here a more comprehensive appreciationfor the larger project of preservation and publication that, thanks to federaland private funding, permit us to recover the story of Americas foundingin all its messy grandeur.

As soon as I had drafted a chapter, Isent it out for criticism to fellow scholars with specialized knowledge aboutthe issues raised in that particular story. The following colleagues saved mefrom countless blunders: Richard Brookhiser, Andrew Burstein, Robert Dalzell,David Brion Davis, Joanne Freeman, Donald Higginbotham, Pauline Maier, LouisMazur, Philip Morgan, Peter Onuf, and Gordon Wood. As anyone familiar with thehistorical profession can attest, I had the benefit of criticism from some ofthe best minds in the business. What I chose to do with it, of course, remainsmy responsibility.

Three friends and mentors read the entiremanuscript and offered substantive or stylistic suggestions on the book as awhole: Eric McKitrick, who knows more about the political culture of the earlyrepublic than anyone else; Edmund Morgan, who first taught me to do Americanhistory and still does it better than anyone else; Stephen Smith, whose currentposition as editor of U.S. News and World Report somewhat conceals hiscalling as the sharpest pencil inside or outside the beltway.

Theentire manuscript was handwritten in ink, not with a quill but with amedium-point rollerball pen. The art of deciphering my scrawl and transcribingthe words onto a disk fell first to Helen Canney, who worked with me on threeprevious books but was taken away at an early stage of this one. Holly Sharacpicked up where she left off without missing a beat.

My agent,Gerald McCauley, handled the contractual intricacies of publication and thenbecame a one-man cheering section on the sidelines. Ashbel Green, my editor atKnopf, lived up to his reputation as the salt of the earth. His able assistant,Asya Muchnick, supervised the editing process with a hard eye and a softheart.