Book Review

Joseph J. Ellis writes readable books about important subjects. His prose is always easy, sometimes stunningly attractive. He has a winning gift for putting a familiar point in language fresh enough and simple enough to give it novel force. He is as good as any author writing on the early years of the American republic at biographical assessments and descriptions. For Founding Brothers, he adopts a format eminently suited to his skills and aimed to answer a compelling question: why did the federal republic endure and succeed through its critical first decade, when, by most informed assessments of the odds, it should have splintered from its great diversity or proved ungovernable on its republican assumptions? Ultimately, he suggests, it managed to endure because the nation's greatest generation of political leaders—honorable and virtuous men who disagreed and fought with one another as ferociously as any generation has but acted for posterity as well as for themselves—"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." This is a compelling, thoughtful way to put the point that both of the colliding parties of the 1790s were essential to the shaping of the sort of nation that emerged, and, plainly, there is none of the inane debunking here that marks so many recent works. For all these reasons, Founding Brothers will be widely read and frequently assigned as an alluring introduction to these years. Some cautions, then, may be in order.

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