Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation - Founding Brothers : the Revolutionary Generation

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

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

Splendid. Revealing. An extraordinary book. Its insightful conclusions rest on extensive research, and its authors writing is vigorous and lucid.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Ellis has shown here the considerable power of knowledgehis knowledge. [He] unpacks the real issues for his readers, revealing the driving assumptions and riveting fears that animated Americans first encounter with the organized ideologies and interests we call parties.

The Washington Post Book World

Lucid. Bustling stories that describ[e] how our early republic looked and felt. Founding Brothers takes on timeworn topics and leavens them with telling details. Ellis has such command of the subject matter that it feels fresh, particularly as he segues from psychological to political, even to physical analysis. Elliss storytelling helps us more fully hear the Brothers voices.

Business Week

Magnificent. Ellis eloquently conveys the interconnected personal relationships and overriding issues that set the nations course. Carefully researched, beautifully written.

Book Page

Succinct and telling portraits. Even those familiar with the Revolutionary generation will find much in its pages to captivate and enlarge their understanding of our nations fledgling years.

The New York Times Book Review

Subtle. Readers who fancy detective stories will enjoy following Ellis down various conjectural trails. And those who appreciate the untangling of thought processes will enjoy seeing Ellis tease out the deeper meanings behind the words of his protagonists. Splendid.

The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina)

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

The Oregonian

Ellis has long been a lamp unto the feet of those who study the Revolutionary and early national periods. His judgments are balanced, and his prose is effortless, every page a reward to read.

Houston Chronicle

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

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Joseph J. Ellis is the author of several books of American history, among them Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams and American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, which won the 1997 National Book Award. He was educated at the College of William and Mary and Yale University and lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with his wife, Ellen, and three sons.

American Sphinx:
The Character of Thomas Jefferson

Passionate Sage:
The Character and Legacy of John Adams

After the Revolution:
Profiles of Early American Culture

School for Soldiers:
West Point and the Profession of Arms (with Robert Moore)

The New England Mind in Transition

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 2002

Copyright 2000 by Joseph J. Ellis

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2000.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Ellis, Joseph J.

Founding brothers: the revolutionary generation / by Joseph J. Ellis.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. StatesmenUnited StatesBiographyAnecdotes.
2. PresidentsUnited StatesBiographyAnecdotes.
3. United StatesHistory1783-1815Anecdotes.
4. United StatesPolitics and government1783-1809Anecdotes.
I. Title.
1302.5.145 2000
973.409221121 99-059304

eISBN: 978-1-4000-7768-7

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1_r2

For Ellen

T HE IDEA that gives this book its shape first came to mind while rereading a mischievous little classic by Lytton Strachey entitled Eminent Victorians. 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 a massive historical subject, wished to recover a seminal moment in American history without tripping over the dead bodies of my many scholarly predecessors, hoped to render human and accessible that generation of political leaders customarily deified and capitalized as Founding Fathers.

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

that the explorer of the past can hope to depict a singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank and rear; he will shoot a sudden revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over the great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.

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

The characteristic specimens were drawn from that rich depository of published letters and documents generated by scholarly editors over the past half-century. Like everyone else who has tried to make sense out of Americas revolutionary generation, I am deeply indebted to the modern editions of their papers. The endnotes reflect my dependence on specific collections, but let me record here a more comprehensive appreciation for the larger project of preservation and publication that, thanks to federal and private funding, permit us to recover the story of Americas founding in all its messy grandeur.