Joseph J. Ellis's Pulitzer Prize-winning group portrait of the revolutionary generation renders the Founding Fathers not as statuesque patriarchs but instead as a sometimes raucous fraternity of strong-willed statesmen competing and collaborating to answer questions that the War for Independence posed but did not answer: When coinciding claims of liberty, equality, and union come into conflict, which would prevail?
Did the new republic derive its authority from laws or men? Would sovereignty reside in the states, the national government, or, as the Constitution of 1787-88 somewhat imaginatively claimed, an "American" people who at the outset of the federal experiment did not really exist? As Ellis's expert account makes clear, the founders proved themselves so adept at constructing alternative responses that today these questions continue to resonate. (Ellis, 2000)
Ellis is selective in characterizing this generation, which he describes (notwithstanding recent claims by Tom Brokaw) as the greatest in American history. He focuses on George Washington, whose willingness to not only embrace but also relinquish power made him "an incalculable asset" to the revolutionary enterprise; John Adams, Washington's fiercely independent, realistic, and self-sacrificing successor; Thomas Jefferson, the graceful willow of a man whose lofty rhetoric reflected his soaring capacity for self-delusion; James Madison, the detail-oriented political scientist and Jeffersonian tactician; and Benjamin Franklin, the venerable sage whose knack for timing placed him at the head of the American abolitionist movement at the only moment it may have had a decent chance of peaceably succeeding. (Ellis, 2000)
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