Reviews of Books

This volume is the third in a series of loosely joined extended essays on the major figures of the early nation. Like Joseph Ellis's two preceding works (Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams [New York, 1993] and American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson [New York, 1997]), both of them justly admired, Founding Brothers makes few accommodations to current historiographical tides. It focuses tightly on eight of the leading figures of the young republic, one of them the wife of another, all together constituting a minority within a minority. It assumes, without argument, that the acts and intentions of these few people were principally responsible for bringing the nation into being and sustaining it since then and that they thus bear, indeed require, frequent reevaluation. And, with one exception, the characters in this drama are white men.

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Yet subtly and unmistakably, while a traditional study, this is one with a modern temper. Its subjects give it away: the potential destructiveness of partisan division (the Burr-Hamilton duel); the enduring equivocal role of the nation's capital in American political culture (the famous "bargain" over the Federal City), the place of African Americans in society (the founders' silence about slavery); principles for the conduct of foreign policy (Washington's Farewell Address); the role of political couples, male and female (Jefferson and Madison, the Adamses); and finally, as it is now termed, "life review," the way in which aging people make sense of their lives (the Adams-Jefferson correspondence). No reader is likely to come away from this work without an added sense of the gravity and significance of all these matters.

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