Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2000

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Acknowledgements and Preface

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-6

Key Figures

Themes

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Important Quotes

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Themes

The Great Improvisation

The government institutions Americans take for granted are without precedent before the Revolution (except on a small, temporary scale in Republican Greece and Rome) and therefore had to be wholly invented. Hindsight shows how the American Revolution will not only survive, but create a thriving republic that will set standards for the rest of the world. Still, at the time, the Revolution’s success seems “improbable,” and had the British been better organized, the whole course of Western history could have gone differently (3). While the leaders of the Revolution had long envisioned American independence, once they succeed in winning the war, they have to figure out how to maintain independence and put aside their different opinions and interests to figure out how this new, non-monarchical nation should be governed.

A prime example of improvisation is the question of how to be president of a republic without a precedent. Washington, the first president of the Union, as well as the public governed by him, has to improvise what the leader of a republic looks and acts like. The most recent head of state, George III, had been a monarch. Washington’s image and tastes are in many ways monarchical, and his physical size unquestionably denotes authority. The 1790s memorabilia with Washington’s image resemble those of any monarchical state. The only way Washington knows how to not be a monarch is to retire after two terms. Similarly, his successors, Adams and Jefferson, both have differing views of what a monarchical leader is like: Adams thinks that a figure of concentrated power in the ‘“monarchical principle”’ is inevitable, while Jefferson seeks a different kind of leader, one who is more a servant and directly answerable to the people, but who, at the same time, leads them (169). Though Adams and Jefferson privately harbor ambition, it is important to both that they be seen as having been nominated for the presidency. This way, no one can accuse them of being entitled or megalomaniacal.

United States foreign policy also has to be improvised—how far should this new nation, geographically isolated as it is from Europe, involve itself in European affairs? Both Washington and Adams prefer a policy of isolationism, engaging in foreign affairs defensively, if that. They keep a distance from what they see as the bloody, despotic revolution in France. Jefferson, on the other hand, has the idea of the spirit of ’76, the year of the revolution, as an ongoing phenomenon. He sees what is happening in France—“a wave of the future”—as a continuation of the American impetus for freedom from tyranny and seeks to form a transatlantic alliance against the common enemy, Britain (219). However, when Napoleon ascends and styles himself as emperor, Jefferson changes his mind and states that the American people are more steadfast than the French.

Securing the Union and the Problem of Slavery

In a land where the peoples have different origins and possess little shared history is states with vastly different economies and societies have competing priorities. Following the deposition of the British king, there is a fear that “once arbitrary power was acknowledged to reside elsewhere, all liberty was lost” (59). It does not matter that this power resides with an eventually elected federal government; the trauma of monarchy means that American subjects have an almost “unconscious fear of being swallowed up by a larger creature, the terror of being completely consumed, eaten alive” (59). Given the size of the United States, the public trusts more in the laws made by individual states rather than by the distant federal government.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on the issue of slavery. “Slavery was a sectional phenomenon that was dying out in the North and flourishing in the South,” Ellis writes (103). Ellis refers to the revolutionary generation’s eventual policy on slavery as “the silence” because to prevent the southern, slave-reliant states from seceding from the Union, concrete steps to end or limit slavery are deferred. It is a harsh and morally reprehensible compromise, but the new republic is still very fragile and the secession of the southern states might have compromised the integrity of the Union and made the country prone to re-invasion by Britain.

From a purely ideological perspective, slavery—the forcible capture and unpaid labor of humans—is incompatible with a revolution that has overthrown a king in favor of a more egalitarian, democratic system. Quakers and future-orientated thinkers such as Benjamin Franklin pressure the government to harness the momentum of the Revolution and have an all-out ban on the slave trade and slavery. However, the states that agree to a ban are not the ones who economically rely on the institution. Abolishing slavery means finding a way of financially compensating the slave-owning states so as not to severely damage their economies, and this in turn, requires the federal government to interfere more greatly in the rights of the states. “[E]ven the revolutionary generation, with all its extraordinary talent” can “neither solve nor face” the problem of slavery, instead handing it over to a successive generation (119).

Partisanship and Solidarity

While the revolutionary generation are able to unite in order to face the common enemy, Britain, their differences at an individual as well as a state level are ill kept at bay. Perhaps because the revolution is such an improvised affair, disagreements are bound to arise between its perpetrators. Washington, present at every key revolutionary battle and the first president of the new republic, is a useful figure, who unites “‘all hearts”’ and puts off the first contested election (121). Still, even Washington feels he should retire, not only due to old age, but because critics claim that he has monarchical pretensions (126). While criticism and a free press are the feature of a salient democracy, the criticism comes as a shock to the inexperienced revolutionary generation, who often feel obligated to answer to every insult that comes their way.

The most explosive expression of this is the duel between Burr and Hamilton, which originates because the former accused the latter of slandering him and hurting his chances of becoming governor of New York. Still, in the bloody aftermath of the duel, the press and public concede that the “virtuous leaders” of the new American republic will be debaters, not duelers (47).

With the first contested election between Jefferson and Adams, and in Adams’ first term, the politics of ideology gain ground over the politics of intimacy and blind loyalty. Political differences about how the country should be run lead to the formation of rival political parties who will eventually develop rival visions of what government and America stand for. By the end of the period Ellis is examining, the two main parties are the idealist, Virginia-focused Republicans (led by the idealistic Thomas Jefferson and supported by James Madison) and the more pragmatic capitalist Federalists, whose leading lights are Hamilton and Adams. The existence of these two political parties, though they are in their protean early stages, shows how the new American republic was founded on equivocation as much as unity.