Founding Brothers praises the Founding Fathers as seven truly extraordinary men who deserve the god-like reputation that they have gained in the public imagination. Author Joseph Ellis notes that while other historians have attempted to tell the story of the early American republic through minor figures or ordinary citizens, it is important to focus on the Founding Fathers themselves, because they are emblematic of the revolutionary moment and the nation that emerged as a result. Although the revolutionary generation wanted to shed the god-king model of the European monarchy, the Founding Fathers were (and still are) imbued with a god-like status, which Ellis argues is well-deserved. However, he also points out that the Founding Fathers were still only human, and that collaboration among men, rather than godly heroism, was crucial for the shaping of America.
While the revolutionary generation may have sought to reject the god-king model of the European monarchy, the culture of leadership with which they replaced it also tended to posit political leaders as gods. Indeed, what was distinctive about this new reign of politician-gods was that it operated through collaboration, rather than the arbitrary, supreme authority of a singular king. The focus on conflict, compromise, and collaboration in Founding Brothers emphasizes that this distinction is a major one. The new model of political leadership demonstrated by the heroes of the revolutionary generation was of a group of “gods” whose power was kept in check by their differences and disagreements—that is to say, by each other.
Much of Ellis’ descriptions of the Founding Fathers reflects the god-like status that these men acquired both during their lifetimes and ever since—a status, Ellis argues, that is deeply deserved. Ellis describes the Founding Fathers as “gods on Mount Olympus,” illustrating that they are etched into history with the prestige and power of gods from Greek mythology (who, it is worth noting, both supported and undermined each other—and, like the Founding Fathers, got into frequent quarrels). For example, Ellis observes that Benjamin Franklin seemed “immortal,” like a god who had come to earth. Ellis describes him as “the greatest American scientist, the most deft diplomat, the most accomplished prose stylist, the sharpest wit,” concluding that “Franklin defied all the categories by inhabiting them all with such distinction and nonchalant grace.” Similarly, Ellis observes that “by the time [George Washington] assumed the presidency in 1789—no other candidate was even thinkable—the mythology surrounding Washington’s reputation had grown like ivy over a statue, effectively covering the man with an aura of omnipotence, rendering the distinction between his human qualities and his heroic achievements impossible to delineate.” These descriptions suggest that the heroic status of these leaders actually obscured the reality that they were men, like the metaphor of ivy growing over a statue. At the same time, Ellis himself seems to concur with much of the mythology surrounding these figures. Rather than seeking to disprove the mythological image of the Founding Fathers by focusing on their flaws (as John Adams did in his correspondence with Benjamin Rush), Founding Brothers largely concludes that the heroic, god-like impression of the men it describes is both deserved and accurate.
On the other hand, the emphasis on conflict and compromise in Founding Brothers shows that each of these men was indeed only human, and that collaboration was necessary in order to build the American republic. This forms a major difference between the emerging American system of government and the monarchical rule of European nations. For example, Ellis points out that “the American presidency was fundamentally different from a European monarchy […] presidents, no matter how indispensable, were inherently disposable.” At first this statement appears to contradict itself. How can a president be both “indispensable” and “disposable”? The answer is that the American presidency is indeed a sort of paradox, wherein the president is expected to be both those things. As the book points out, the president was so important that he was considered indispensable. For example, people worried that when Washington died, the republic would die with him. At the same time, Washington himself undermined his own king-like status by resigning after his second term, thereby reminding the public that no matter how apparently transcendent his powers, in reality he was “disposable,” meaning that another man would eventually come to fill his role and be able to successfully lead the nation. This form of succession is a kind of collaboration, wherein heroic leadership and the shaping of history is seen as a group exercise, where differences between people strengthen and enrich the nation as a whole.
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Heroism, Leadership, and Collaboration Quotes in Founding Brothers
No event in American history which was so improbable at the time has seemed so inevitable in retrospect as the American Revolution. On the inevitability side, it is true there were voices back then urging prospective patriots to regard American independence as an early version of manifest destiny. Tom Paine, for example, claimed that it was simply a matter of common sense that an island could not rule a continent […] Several other prominent American revolutionaries also talked as if they were actors in a historical drama whose script had already been written by the gods.
Hindsight, then, is a tricky tool. Too much of it and we obscure the all-pervasive sense of contingency as well as the problematic character of the choices facing the revolutionary generation. On the other hand, without some measure of hindsight, some panoramic perspective on the past from our perch in the present, we lose the chief advantage—perhaps the only advantage—that the discipline of history provides, and we are then thrown without resources into the patternless swirl of events with all the time-bound participants themselves.
The central players in the drama were not the marginal or peripheral figures, whose lives are more typical, but rather the political leaders at the center of the national story who wielded power. What’s more, 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 replicated at the level of personality and ideology the principle of checks and balances imbedded structurally in the Constitution.
Strictly speaking, Hamilton’s concession should have been the end of it. Affairs of honor were supposed to involve only personal charges. Political or ideological disagreements, no matter how deep, lay outside the field of honor on which a gentleman could demand satisfaction. Hamilton’s distinction between personal and political criticism was designed to change the dispute with Burr from an affair of honor to a political difference of opinion.
The hyperbolic tone of Hamilton’s anti-Burr comments derived not so much from intense personal dislike per se as from his intense fear that the precarious condition of the infant nation rendered it so vulnerable to Burr’s considerable talents. Burr embodied Hamilton’s daring and energy run amok in a political culture still groping for its stable shape.
In fact, Jefferson’s headache coincided with a veritable plague that seemed to descend on the leadership of the Virginia dynasty. Madison was laid up with dysentery, Edmund Randolph remained in Virginia to care for his wife, who had nearly died delivering a stillborn baby, and, most ominously of all, George Washington came down with the flu and developed pulmonary complications that the physicians considered life-threatening. "You cannot conceive the public alarm on this occasion," Jefferson reported to William Short, his former secretary in Paris, adding that Washington's demise would in all probability have meant the abrupt end of the whole national experiment.
The Compromise of 1790 is most famous for averting a political crisis that many statesmen of the time considered a threat to the survival of the infant republic. But it also exposed the incompatible expectations concerning America’s future that animated these same statesmen.
The permanent residence of the capital on the Potomac institutionalized political values designed to carry the nation in a fundamentally different direction. It was also symbolic in a personal sense for Jefferson and Madison. For the Compromise of 1790 signaled the resumption of their political partnership after five years of separation. Now, “the great collaboration" was truly an alliance worthy of its name.
Hindsight permits us to listen to the debate of 1790 with knowledge that none of the participants possessed. For we know full well what they could perceive dimly, if at all—namely, that slavery would become the central and defining problem for the next seventy years of American history; that the inability to take decisive action against slavery in the decades immediately following the Revolution permitted the size of the enslaved population to grow exponentially and the legal and political institutions of the developing U.S. government to become entwined in compromises with slavery’s persistence; and that eventually over 6oo,ooo Americans would die in the nation's bloodiest war to resolve the crisis, a trauma generating social shock waves that would reverberate for at least another century.
Any attempt to take decisive action against slavery in 1790, given all these considerations, confronted great, perhaps impossible, odds. The prospects for success were remote at best. But then the prospects for victory against the most powerful army and navy in the world had been remote in 1776, as had the likelihood that thirteen separate and sovereign states would create a unified republican government in 1787. Great leadership had emerged in each previous instance to transform the improbable into the inevitable. Ending slavery was a challenge on the same gigantic scale as these earlier achievements. Whether even a heroic level of leadership stood any chance was uncertain because—and here was the cruelest irony—the effort to make the Revolution truly complete seemed diametrically opposed to remaining a united nation.
What Voltaire was to France, Franklin was to America, the symbol of mankind’s triumphal arrival at modernity. When the two great philosopher-kings embraced amid the assembled throngs of Paris, the scene created a sensation, as if the gods had landed on earth and declared the dawning of the Enlightenment. The greatest American scientist, the most deft diplomat, the most accomplished prose stylist, the sharpest wit, Franklin defied all the categories by inhabiting them all with such distinction and nonchalant grace.
The very notion of a republican king was a repudiation of the spirit of '76 and a contradiction in terms. Washington’s presidency had become trapped within that contradiction. He was living the great paradox of the early American republic: What was politically essential for the survival of the infant nation was ideologically at odds with what it claimed to stand for.
Lacking a consensus on what the American Revolution had intended and what the Constitution had settled, Federalists and Republicans alike were afloat in a sea of mutual accusations and partisan interpretations. The center could not hold because it did not exist.
Jefferson's position on political parties, like his stance on slavery, seemed to straddle a rather massive contradiction. In both instances his posture of public probity—slavery should be ended and political parties were evil agents that corrupted republican values—was at odds with his personal behavior and political interest.
For at the highest level of political life in the early republic, relationships remained resolutely personal, dependent on mutual trust, and therefore vulnerable to betrayals whenever the public and private overlapped.
The correspondence can be read as an extended conversation between two gods on Mount Olympus because both men were determined to project that impression.
