Review: Founding Brothers By Joseph J Ellis Essay, Research Paper

Fathers of a nation Founding Brothers

Joseph J Ellis

299pp, Faber Englishness took time to drain from the generation that made the United States of America. One of the most radical of those men, John Adams, wanted President George Washington to be addressed as “His Majesty” or “His Highness”. Though Adams was ridiculed in turn as “His Rotundity”, early Americans remained infused with British cultural habits even as they fought to shed British political control. This was the earliest version of the special relationship. We now think of American independence as foreordained, but its makers were not sure they could achieve it. There had never in the history of the world been a republic that encompassed territory so large as the quarter-continent the US aspired to be in 1787. Rome and Sparta, yes; America, surely not. Achieving it required a combination of remarkable men, poised between their ambition for independence, their uncertainty about what that might mean, and their constant, swirling debate, in the 13 separate colonies in which they lived, about how it might be done. This argument, about the power of the centre as against the rights of regions, has never ended. “The debate was not resolved so much as built into the fabric of our national identity,” Joseph Ellis writes. One might extend that to the world at large. A kind of modernity is always to be found in the history of the American revolution, and certainly in this short, engrossing, brilliantly coloured account of the men who made it. Ellis chooses the eight whom he regards as the most remarkable, asserting with old-fashioned clarity, against the grain of modern historians’ prejudices, that here was an event that depended on great men rather than on social forces or the life of the street. Four of the central players, Washington and Adams, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, were rivals and yet collaborators; sometimes soldiers, sometimes intellectuals, who shaped the political institutions that, more than 200 years later, remain the basis of the country that became the most powerful on earth. We meet these characters through a series of stories that weave, from anecdotal beginnings, a diverse account of the theory and practice of nation-building. The famous duel between Hamilton and Aaron Burr becomes a set piece not only of forensic professorial inquiry but of the argument at the heart of all constitution-making. The feelings as well as the ideologies of very serious men – and women, through the spikily candid presence of Abigail Adams – in dispute and yet in fraternity, present a complex tableau. I had not previously understood the case for saying that Washington was perhaps the wisest of them: the one who had never been to Europe, yet counselled most firmly for European peace; the one who crucially insisted on retiring after his second term. “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world,” a disbelieving George III is credited with saying. This was a decisive moment. The US proved that it would indeed be different from the Great Britain whose vanities and corruptions it sought to avoid, and hence build a new world. For all their flirtation with majesty, these men were essentially anti-British; that was the point of what they did. Their story reminds one of what recent vintage is the intimacy that has brought our two countries together on the killing fields of Afghanistan. Thomas Jefferson, a loather of the class system, was consumed by Anglophobia. “I wish that misfortune and adversity could soften the temper and humiliate the insolence of John Bull.” “Britain will never be our friend, till we are her master,” Adams opined, with prophetic insight into future cohorts of poodle prime ministers. The cultural connection, of course, remained. In the early days of America, there was no other inheritance to draw on. The genealogical lines were also copiously linked, though it is worth remembering that by 1900 there were reckoned to be about the same number of Americans of German origin as of English: 18m against 20m. But few will read this history of the founding fathers without being reminded how much of myth is invested in the notion that the English-speaking peoples are especially and uniquely Anglo-American. A different kind of myth connects the founding of America with the supposed impossibility of creating an integrated Europa. To suggest that Jacques Delors is no James Madison is entirely to miss the point. For in the obvious sense, the virgin lands of Tennessee and points west offered a possibility of federation that cannot conceivably apply to the gnarled old nation-states of a continent populated and civilised for two millennia. Washington and his heroic generation engaged on a task that is simply not available for Paris and London and Berlin. On the other hand, its experimental nature – the fact that many believed it could not be done – re-echoes today. The experiment is different, and the outcome will not be a new country. But the challenge is as formidable, and the debates of the 18th century have their application in the 21st. There has never been a more enduring constitutional work, composed by men of business not academe, than The Federalist Papers, written by Madison, Hamilton and John Jay. Ellis’s account is rich in knowledge lightly worn, a work of deep scholarship successfully masquerading as popular history. It penetrates many questions that resound today, from America’s origins as a nation bent on having “no entangling alliances” to the insidious devices by which even this generation of leaders, unique in their creativity and endurance, for the most part avoided addressing the corrosive issue of slavery -which, within a few decades, almost blew their creation apart. The book speaks to a nation that is becoming ever more absorbed by its own history, even as its solitary reach extends around the world. One could speculate on the connection between the afterburn of 9/11 and America’s new absorption with the heroic past. David McCullough’s recent biography of John Adams sold 1m hardback copies. Ellis’s has done almost as well, and won the Pulitzer Prize. In these days of trouble, it speaks to Europe with the same compelling interest.