Prior to writing this book, 'Founding Brothers', author Joseph J. Ellis wrote books on both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson - hence it makes sense that there would be one book that brings the two of them together, along with other movers and shakers of the early American nationhood. Often referred to as 'founding fathers', in fact toward each other, they were more of a brotherhood. Hence Ellis' title.
We live in a time where the aging generation has been celebrated as 'the greatest generation', but for this title (and not meaning to take away anything of their achievement) they certain must acknowledge a rival, that being the generation of Americans who lived at the time of the Revolutionary War. Of course, this generation had a sense of greatness about it that made them conscious of what they were doing - George Washington deliberately lived and moved as if his every action would be the stuff of precedent; John Adams had his wife Abigail to begin saving his correspondence long before the outbreak of hostilities in the war.
Even with this sense about themselves, according to Ellis, 'Uncertainty, in fact, was the dominant mood at that moment' - the time when the Constitution was being drafted and ratified, there was no clear sense of what was meant by certain of the compromises, particularly the meaning of who 'the people' were in the legal and constitutional sense. If they weren't the federal government or the state governments, then just who were they?
Ellis identifies different possible ways of telling the early history of American nationhood, but most simply recapitulate the political debates of the time. Ellis sees these debates and early issues as setting the political stage for ongoing American development. He writes, 'the revolutionary generation found a way to contain the explosive energies of the debate in the form of an ongoing argumetn or dialogue that was eventually institutionalised and rendered safe by the creation of political parties.' The issues of the Revolutionary period were not solved by the Constitution and early government development, according to Ellis, but rather enshrined and codified, indeed, woven into the very fabric of the nation as ongoing (and, as Ellis points out, only broke out into warfare during the Civil War).
Ellis develops the narrative across six particular stories involving eight major characters, all of whom knew each other rather well. These figures are George Washington, John and Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr. These stories include the famous duel between Hamilton and Burr, a dinner party in which the location of the nation's capital city was decided, and George Washington's farewell address upon declining to run for a third term as president. He also recounts the on-again, off-again friendship and rivalry of Jefferson and Adams, up to the very point of Adams' death - his reported last words were about Jefferson, who died on the same day, in what seems like divinely inspired timing for both: July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of the nation.
Ellis' writing is exciting and fun to read. It is very informative, being both good history and good storytelling. It is little wonder that it was made into a History channel series. This is a little gem.
