Joseph J. Ellis
Authors: Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
Tags: #Statesmen - United States, #United States - History - 1783-1815, #Historical, #Presidents & Heads of State, #Presidents, #Anecdotes, #Political, #Presidents - United States, #General, #United States, #United States - Politics and Government - 1783-1809, #History & Theory, #Political Science, #Revolutionary Period (1775-1800), #Biography & Autobiography, #Statesmen, #Biography, #History
JOSEPH J. ELLIS’s
Founding Brothers
“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 author’s writing is vigorous and lucid.”
—
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Ellis has shown here the considerable power of knowledge—his 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.… Ellis’s 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 nation’s 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 nation’s 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.… Ellis’s touching portraits are wonderful.… Ellis has a scholar’s head but a writer’s 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
Founding Brothers
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.
JOSEPH J. ELLIS
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. Statesmen—United States—Biography—Anecdotes.
2. Presidents—United States—Biography—Anecdotes.
3. United States—History—1783-1815—Anecdotes.
4. United States—Politics and government—1783-1809—Anecdotes.
I. Title.
1302.5.145 2000
973.4′092′2—1121 99-059304
eISBN: 978-1-4000-7768-7
v3.1_r2
For Ellen
CONTENTSACKNOWLEDGMENTST
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 prejudices—his title was deeply ironic—but 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 America’s 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 America’s founding in all its messy grandeur.
As soon as I had drafted a chapter, I sent it out for criticism to fellow scholars with specialized knowledge about the issues raised in that particular story. The following colleagues saved me from countless blunders: Richard Brookhiser, Andrew Burstein, Robert Dalzell, David Brion Davis, Joanne Freeman, Donald Higginbotham, Pauline Maier, Louis Mazur, Philip Morgan, Peter Onuf, and Gordon Wood. As anyone familiar with the historical profession can attest, I had the benefit of criticism from some of the best minds in the business. What I chose to do with it, of course, remains my responsibility.
Three friends and mentors read the entire manuscript and offered substantive or stylistic suggestions on the book as a whole: Eric McKitrick, who knows more about the political culture of the early republic than anyone else; Edmund Morgan, who first taught me to do American history and still does it better than anyone else; Stephen Smith, whose current position as editor of
U.S. News and World Report
somewhat conceals his calling as the sharpest pencil inside or outside the beltway.
The entire manuscript was handwritten in ink, not with a quill but with a medium-point rollerball pen. The art of deciphering my scrawl and transcribing the words onto a disk fell first to Helen Canney, who worked with me on three previous books but was taken away at an early stage of this one. Holly Sharac picked up where she left off without missing a beat.
My agent, Gerald McCauley, handled the contractual intricacies of publication and then became a one-man cheering section on the sidelines. Ashbel Green, my editor at Knopf, 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 soft heart.