Joseph J. Ellis - Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

Joseph Ellis has recently been in the news for all the wrong reasons. A prestigious historian and professor at Mount Holyoke College, he won the National Book Award for his 1996 biography of Thomas Jefferson, American Sphinx, and the Pulitzer for last year?s Founding Brothers. A few months ago, however, the Boston Globe reported that Ellis had made up a fictional past in which he served in Vietnam on General Westmoreland?s staff. He also exaggerated his activities in the Civil Rights Movement. These distortions were shared in class with his students, and Ellis propagated them in interviews as well. Although there is no indication that any of Ellis?s scholarship is faulty--on the contrary, his work is both highly respected and eminently readable--the spectacle of an historian making up his own past is uncomfortable to say the least. Compounding the allure is that so much of Ellis?s work features penetrating psychological insights into his subjects, particularly into the mind of Jefferson, a man unmatched at self-deception. Is Ellis?s skill at getting inside the minds of his subjects founded in his own ability to deceive himself?

All this might make a reader pause upon approaching Founding Brothers, Ellis?s compelling group study of selected historical events and figures from what he calls the Revolutionary Generation. But Ellis?s scholarship has always been above reproach. By all indications, his passion for historical fiction ends with his own biography. Students of history can be grateful for that, for Ellis is a marvelous historian, a gifted writer, and an engaging storyteller.

All of these qualities are on display again in Founding Brothers. The anchor of the book is the relationships between the most prominent members of the Revolutionary Generation--George Washington, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Aaron Burr--and the ways these relationships played out at crucial moments in the early history of the country. Ellis?s thesis is that the American Revolution was held together ultimately as much by personal bonds as by political ideology, that in fact personal bonds were sometimes all that stood between stability and the violent storms that conflicting ideologies can produce. In this, the American Revolution differed from its successors, the French and Russian Revolutions, in which personal bonds were severed or nonexistent in the first place, and in Ellis?s words, where the revolutions "devour[ed] their own." In the American Revolution, by contrast, such a conflagration did not occur. The disputes between the founders did not, with one notable exception, erupt into the kind of violence that destroyed or compromised subsequent revolutions.

Ellis?s approach here is episodic. He chooses six consequential events in the early history of the Republic in which personal interactions were crucial in deciding the outcome. The events are the so-called "dinner bargain" between Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison, resulting in the funding of the national debt and placement of the national capitol on the Potomac; Congress?s decision to table a resolution, signed by Franklin in his last public act, condemning slavery; Washington?s Farewell Address in 1796, arriving amidst a storm of political invective in the newspapers from the country?s emerging political parties; Adams? one-term presidency, in which he successfully held off a war with France but could not overcome the opposition of his vice president, Jefferson; the Jefferson-Adams retirement correspondence, when the two men attempted to recover their friendship and debate the meaning of the Revolution; and Hamilton?s death in a duel with Burr in 1804, the only instance when political differences erupted in bloodshed.

In examining the relationships that existed between these seven fathers--or brothers--Ellis returns to a central preoccupation of his work, the distinctly old-fashioned notion of character. His books on Jefferson and Adams also made character the focal point. In a characteristic flash of metaphoric insight, Ellis compares the relationships of the founding brothers with the very principle of the government they helped to establish: "The shape and character of the political institutions were determined by a relatively small number of leaders who knew each other, who collaborated and collided with one another in patterns that replicate at the level of personality and ideology the principle of checks and balances imbedded structurally in the Constitution."

Ellis describes the events chronologically, with the exception of the Hamilton-Burr duel, which begins the book. As the only conflict between the figures that ended violently, Ellis feels it is instructive to start here. His examination of the long-standing enmity between the men, and the code of honor they both felt obliged to uphold, is gripping and sad, imbued with the inevitability of hindsight. The long-standing dispute is over whether Hamilton or Burr fired first, a crucial distinction in establishing blame, guilt, and honor. Hamilton?s loyalists contend that Burr fired first, but Ellis is persuasive in casting doubt upon that version, while also allowing that there is no real way to know. Though Ellis is essentially a traditional historian, he finds in the Hamilton-Burr story some support for the "postmodern contention that no such thing as objective truth exists, that historic reality is an inherently enigmatic and endlessly negotiable bundle of free-floating perceptions."

Ellis returns to the idea of hindsight throughout the book. As he writes in his introduction, "No event in American history which was so improbable at the time has seemed so inevitable in retrospect as the American Revolution." But the thrust of the book is how contingent and tenuous it all was, and how much depended on the characters of the men involved, in addition to generous samplings of luck and chance.

Several of the pieces cover ground that Ellis has treated before in previous work, but without this interactive focus. His description of the Madison-Hamilton-Jefferson bargain, "The Dinner," reads like a suspenseful short story, as three men come together in an impromptu meeting to hammer out a deal on some of the most contentious, and consequential, issues of the early republic. Few historians have Ellis?s gifts of scholarly insight and sheer readability. The chapter, after all, is about a 200-year-old fiscal bargain, not exactly beach reading. Yet Ellis renders the tale with his enviable blend of psychological insight and wit, creating three-dimensional character portraits of each key player in what he calls "the most meaningful dinner party in American history."

As a biographer of both Jefferson and Adams, it comes as no surprise that Ellis?s strongest chapters are the final two, dealing with Adams? lonely one-term presidency (in which his wife Abigail serves as de facto chief of staff), and with the retirement correspondence between the two men. His exploration of Adams? turbulent character and his psychic pain in retirement, in which he correctly sensed that he would play a supporting role to Jefferson in history, is moving and compelling. The book?s final chapter, "The Friendship," describes the slow process by which Jefferson and Adams came to write one another again, after years of icy silence precipitated by their political differences. It?s a story that Ellis has told twice before in his respective biographies of the two men, but his chapter here is perhaps his most beautiful rendering. In barely forty pages, he covers the immense grounds of contention between the two founders, explores the psychological gulf between them that made them see history so differently, and describes the bond, the love, that existed between them despite it all. For they had been original members of the "band of brothers" of 1776, had worked side by side while history was being made, had fought and separated and reconciled over the course of fifty years. Capping it all off was one of the most sublime events in American history, the mutual passing of the two patriarchs on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. As Ellis writes, "No serious novelist would ever dare to make this up?Call it a miracle, an accident, or a case of two powerful personalities willing themselves to expire on schedule and according to script. But it happened."

There are some cracks in the foundation of Founding Brothers, none of which weaken its value as history (and great reading), but which make Ellis?s conceit a bit artificial. The principal flaw is that, in calling the book Founding Brothers, Ellis gives prominence in title (and book jacket) to a few men who don?t quite fit into the scheme: Benjamin Franklin and Aaron Burr. No one questions Franklin?s credentials as a founding father (Ellis calls him the founding grandfather), but he doesn?t figure very much in the chapter that is nominally his, "The Silence," which deals with the antislavery resolution debate in 1790. Franklin affixed his name to the resolution, and did some work in its behalf, but he died shortly after it was proposed. He is wrongly headlined here with the others, and does not figure in any of the other chapters.

Burr does figure prominently in the chapter on what is known as The Duel, but his problem is different: No one would call Burr a founding father, brother, or cousin. He was a dashing figure, a consequential figure in certain respects, but mostly a shockingly opportunistic politician whose deepest motives no one has ever been able to determine. As Ellis rightly states, the story of The Duel is sui generis to the Revolutionary Generation; but Burr is sui generis, too, and is not a member of this club.

Conversely, in his introduction, Ellis adds one other figure to the group, but she--Abigail Adams--does not appear on the book jacket with the other seven men. There is a better argument for Abigail as one of the founders than there is for Burr, as her role in Adams? political career has been revealed as a truly intimate partnership. The chapter on the Adams presidency is called "The Collaborators," and the term refers to John and Abigail. Founding Siblings? Not a very attractive book title, and perhaps we need to look no further to explain Abigail?s absence from the cover.

Ellis is what might be called a New Traditionalist. His scholarship brings a contemporary eye to the founding, not shrinking from gender and racial issues, but also not committing the myopia of "presentism," judging the figures by 2001 ideological standards. His voice is psychologically astute, witty, often ironic. His scholarship is traditional and learned. The result is a highly accessible work on the founders that nevertheless retains time-honored values and truths: That character is past and prelude, that the great events in history do tend to be made by leaders, not common people, and that human actions are the prime levers of historical change.