Although my sympathies were not always in the same place as the author’s, I found this short book to be a wonderful and vitally important read for anyone wishing to understand the revolutionary period, and the founding of the United States. It sets the stage with an introductory chapter on the Enlightenment, and then gives us brief vignettes of eight of the leading figures of the founding era: Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Adams, Paine, and Burr. It then concludes with a chapter on public opinion, describing how the founders established a democratic nation which abolished the very system which had made their own elitist class, and its contributions, possible.
The book is clearly meant as primarily an intellectual history. This should not be surprising. Gordon S. Wood is one of America’s most lauded and well respected academic scholars of the Revolutionary era, and he is as interested in the historiography of the time--the history of how historians, and Americans in general, have treated and seen their founders in subsequent decades-- as he is in the founders’ actual lives. He is steeped in the scholarly and academic debates over this time period which university professors, writing for a limited audience, each other, in scholarly journals, have engaged in both recently and in the past. He sees himself as one who can be an arbiter in these issues (as in his treatment of whether there is “a James Madison problem”). He is also less interested, at least in this volume, than a popular historian (McCullough, for example) might be, in the events which the founders lived through and influenced, and also less interested in their personalities, than he is in their intellectual writings and contributions and the value and effects of their political and philosophical ideas. One major exception to this is Washington, who was not a deep thinker, but a man of action, whose importance Woods nevertheless explains in one of the first chapters of this volume, entitled simply and without irony, "The Greatness of George Washington."
The impression left by this approach is far different than that which would come from reading a lengthier biography of any of these men. And it has its pros and its cons. There is, after all, more to a person than merely their ideas. McCullough’s John Adams is a personal hero of mine, for the way he lived his life, and the beauty and sincerity of his writings on a variety of subjects, reaching far beyond politics. Wood’s John Adams becomes irrelevant after his contributions to independence, because his constitutional theories had become obsolete (with no connection to the more important Federalist Papers) by the time he wrote them down, in a post-aristocratic America.
On the other hand, the chapters on Jefferson and Hamilton, focused as they are on these two men’s political ideologies, provide an extremely handy primer and distillation of where and how they and their fellow Republicans and Federalists differed from each other. It would have been helpful to have read these chapters in this book before reading any of the much lengthier biographies of Hamilton and Jefferson currently available, to better understand why those biographies matter. As anyone who starts reading heavily about the founders will soon learn, to understand the differences between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians is a key to understanding much of our history. Theodore Roosevelt once claimed that Lincoln had bridged the gap between these two philosophies, finally giving us a united Hamiltonian Nation, but founded on Jeffersonian democracy. TR’s statement requires a lot of background knowledge and information to even understand, let alone agree or disagree with. And this book provides the shortest possible method for understanding what he meant.
Key takeaways and/or my own personal impressions developed while reading this book:
-Washington’s greatest deed, which brought him international fame and established the basis for a free American republic, was the return of his commission to the Continental Congress, after successfully winning the revolutionary war. America is one of the only nations on earth which, after experiencing a military or otherwise violent overthrow of the existing order, did not find itself led by a despotic military dictator, installing himself into office for life. There would be no Cromwell, no Napoleon, no Lenin, Castro, Pol Pot, or Saddam Hussein in America, and this would be the case for one reason: George Washington’s greatness in refusing to pursue any such course.
-Franklin, like Hamilton, rose through the ranks of his society due to the patronage of wealthy and well-placed men, in a system of patronage which was a key feature of the society at the time, and its primary method for lifting talent out of obscurity. He loved Britain, and after gaining the wealth and fame which allowed him to retire in his 40s, he aspired to a position of rank and importance within the British Empire, which would allow him to positively influence its continuing success. He was Americanized when these hopes were denied.
-The great irony of the FDR-created shrine to Jefferson in Washington D.C. is that none of its quotes include the theme which was nearest and dearest to Jefferson’s heart and about which he wrote as much as anything: the need to keep the United States government small, its judiciary weak, and the focus of power in all but foreign affairs in local State hands. Still Jefferson probably qualifies as a modern day liberal. His affection for the French Revolution, despite its excesses, and his alignment with Paine’s views on religion and criticism of Washington (though he would never have written about either of these subjects with the directness or viciousness Paine employed), and his belief in the future rather than the traditions of the past, all make him look very much like a forbear of later American Marxists, willingly blind to the evils of Communism.
-Hamilton wanted America to be a great nation, like unto Britain, a fiscal-military state. He would have loved the modern United States. He would have loved our sophisticated banking system and stock exchanges and financial institutions. He would have cheered the independence and strength of our judiciary (if not all of its decisions). He would have loved the social mobility afforded by free enterprise and business. He would have loved our strong and well funded military and the taxes which allow its strength, and he would have been immensely proud of our CIA and our Pentagon. He would have loved that most Americans think of themselves, first and foremost, as Americans, and that their patriotism is generally directed at their nation rather than their State. He would have loved that we abolished slavery. But he would have been horrified by how democratic and egalitarian we have become.
-Madison was more nationalistic, and a bigger advocate of centralized government, than even Hamilton, going into the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, and the Virginia plan which he sought to pass at that convention was even more federalist than anything the federalists would have dreamed of, reducing the States to what Woods describes as little more than bureaucratic administrative units of the Federal Government. Nevertheless, after the Constitution was enacted, he quickly allied himself with the small-central government, pro-states-rights Jeffersonian Republicans. This inconsistency is the “Madison Problem” which Woods tries to argue, but not very convincingly in my opinion, doesn't really exist.
-While many would criticize Madison’s inept handling of the War of 1812, which led to the burning down of the American capitol, Madison was extremely proud that the nation made it through the crisis without devolving into a fiscal military state. (Here is a great mystery of American history. The founders feared the threat to liberty represented by a standing army. America today has the largest standing army in the world. But, unlike many other nations which have experienced various military coups, our military has, for decades, served us well, and never posed any real threat to our liberty that I can think of. Why is that? This would be a topic worth someone writing a book about.)
-The one virtue/ideal/ideology on which all of the founders seem to have agreed was the importance of what they called disinterestedness: that is to say, their duty to involve themselves in public affairs for the benefit of the public, and of the entire nation, without the hope of thereby acquiring personal or financial gain, beyond an honorable reputation. If the greatest thing Washington ever did was to imitate his Roman hero Cincinnatus, by returning his commission at the end of the revolutionary war, it was based on this value and virtue. Similarly, the greatest thing Hamilton may have ever done, motivated by the same virtue, was to work tirelessly to keep the Federalists in congress from throwing the tie vote between Jefferson and Burr towards Burr. Despite his own fears that Jefferson’s political ideology might undo everything he, Hamilton, had accomplished through his Federalist allies in the Nation’s first twelve years, Hamilton believed there was something even worse that could happen to America than the election of a President whose political views were radically different than his own: the election of a President, Burr, whose every instinct was to use political office for personal gain, and who did not believe in disinterestedness. That’s a great story, and one that all Americans, Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian, can appreciate, as a part of our legacy we ought to be proud of, and, to the extent necessary, try to reclaim.
