There's comfort to be found in the company of an old tree. It was there before you were born and might be there long after you have chased your final moonbeam into the beyond. Who can fail to be reassured by such constancy?
If old trees resonate, then maybe you'll find solace in reading or rereading Joseph Ellis's 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winning book Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. We live in chaotic and dire times, full of scoundrels and perils upon perils. Yet few struggles are truly unprecedented, as history knows. Likewise, good historians have a way of offering helpful perspective so that we can see that the tree, if you will, has always been here and will very likely continue.
I picked up Founding Brothers around July 4, because Independence Day, set against the particularly queasy-making tableau of this year's presidential election, was awakening in me a keener love of country than I've ever felt. I wanted a book that would immerse me in the past to sample the wisdom of the remarkable, flawed, visionary generation that begat this glorious mess we call the United States.
Founding Brothers was first published during the time I happened to serve as the book review editor at The Plain Dealer.1 So when I came across the paperback, I recalled how joyfully this book had been received upon publication, and I suspected it might speak to my twitterpated heart.
The narrative focuses on a handful of events that took place among the core group of men who, having just won independence, were now building their plane as they flew: Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison.
The story begins with dramatic flair, as Ellis recounts the episode in which Aaron Burr, the nation's third vice president, infamously duels with and kills Alexander Hamilton, who had served as the nation's first U.S. Treasury Secretary. The plot itself has enough intrigue for a true-crime podcast, and the whole sad incident can be laid at the altar of boundless ego cloaked as honor. Ellis weaves in political context to provide a portrait not just of the men themselves but of a babbling Baby America — cranky, colicky and already loved beyond measure.
George Washington is, of course, a father among the brothers, so I was surprised that he didn't capture a bigger spotlight in this book. Yet a lengthy chapter is devoted to his 1796 Farewell Address, which was completed (with Hamilton's help) as he prepared to leave office at the end of his second term as president. The threat of party politics preoccupied the founders in general, and the scourge of factionalism was of special concern to the prescient Washington, who believed partisanship was at odds with the principles of the republic.
He sounded this warning time and again over the years and repeats it in his farewell. I can just see him looking down at us now, dangling his stockinged legs from a passing cumulus cloud and pitching his fake teeth at us in disgust as he observes our modern-day partisan rages: I thold thee tho!
The address also served as Washington's announcement that he would not seek a third term. Thus began the tradition of a rotating presidency and the peaceful transfer of power — and an utterly new era.
"...(O)ver the entire life space of the revolutionary war and the experiment with republican government, Washington had stood at the helm of the ship of state," Ellis writes. "Now he was sailing off into the sunset. The precedent he was setting may have seemed uplifting in retrospect, but at the time the glaring and painful reality was that the United States without Washington was itself unprecedented."
This is one of many moments in Founding Brothers when the reader is forcibly shaken out of the illusion that the early Americans always knew our new nation would flourish. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Their times, as ours, often teetered between normal life and disaster.
A chapter titled "Silence" takes on the Founders' failures around slavery, describing the moral and economic calculations that pushed abolition forward before yanking it backward as terms of the new government were being negotiated. Here we meet the sage Ben Franklin as he invests the last years of his long life writing on behalf of abolition and pointing out that slavery was contradictory to the very principles of the nation. (Speaking of contradiction, Ellis necessarily reminds us that Franklin also had "a few house slaves.")
Franklin serves as a center of gravity on this issue, but the chapter primarily spotlights the conspiracy of silence that kept emancipation at bay. From both North and South, the founders eventually coalesced around the idea that the problem was too thorny; that addressing it might destroy the foundation of their new republic; and that therefore slavery should not be discussed. Perhaps this was the first recorded incident of American politicians kicking the can down the road. (This should give pause to today's leaders, who are currently can-kicking federal debt and meaningful action on climate change.)
By far the most moving thread running through Founding Brothers is the relationship between Federalist John Adams, who succeeded Washington as president, and Republican Thomas Jefferson, who served as Adams' vice president. Stylistic opposites, the two for a long time were as close as family and worked together in the establishment of a government free of British rule. With their common enemy vanquished, however, their views of the role of a central government came to the fore, with Adams believing it should be strong and Jefferson advocating for power resting in the hands of the states. Even as members of the same executive administration, then, distrust and loathing grew between them. Jefferson quietly but actively fought his old friend's presidential agenda while pretending to remain above the fray, and eventually succeeded him as president.
The effect of this cold war, especially on Adams's spirit, cannot be overstated. It was bitter and poignant, exposing, as cold wars do, human frailty and the fragility of friendships.
So it is doubly interesting to watch how time and ambassadorial efforts by a mutual friend manage to revive a relationship that seemed irredeemably damaged. In the end, the men resumed correspondence and recaptured the mutual affection that party politics had nearly killed. They famously died within hours of each other on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
In these stories we hear familiar drumbeats: ferocious political fighting, bad actors, the plague of worry that all is doomed, and behavior among grown men that was more suited for the playground. All of that coexisted alongside shared dreams, bold thinking, self-sacrifice and the desire to make something better for the world of tomorrow.
Then as now, everything was far from perfect even as it was full of wonder.
I loved Founding Brothers and have only two caveats.
My inner pedant offers the first. How does a writer as elegant as Ellis misuse the word "bemused"2,3 twice in the span of a few pages? It doesn't mean amused or amusing. Yes, I am THAT reader, the one who will stop dead in her tracks if an author claims to have seen "Canadian geese." You typically just can't get me back after a crime like that.
As for "bemused," well ... is it even necessary? It honks off people like me when it is misused, which is most of the time. On the rare occasion that it's deployed correctly, it tends to confound almost everyone else. Let's all agree to throw the word in the trash heap so it can do no further harm to nice books like this one.
Second: Founding Brothers is a wonderful work that should be enjoyed and fully absorbed. To that end, it makes poor bedtime reading if you tend to doze off after a couple of paragraphs. It requires a dose of vigor from its readers.
Show up with some, and it'll pay you back in spades.
Notes
1. The Plain Dealer was once known as Ohio's largest newspaper. I was a writer and editor there from 1990 through 2008.
2. "Even without the benefit of photography, Franklin's image — with its bemused smile, its bespectacled but twinkling eyes, its ever-bald head framed by gray hair flowing down to his shoulders — was more famous and familiar to the world than the face of any American of the age." Paperback page 109.
3. "Under the pseudonym 'Historicus,' he published a parody of the speech delivered by James Jackson of Georgia. It was a vintage Franklin performance, reminiscent of his bemused but devastating recommendation to the English government in 1770 about the surest means to take the decisive action guaranteed to destroy the British Empire." Paperback page 111.
Here is a portrait of Ben by Joseph Siffred Duplessis, c. 1785. He looks AMUSED, doesn’t he?
About the art
I drew the top image in ink and colored it digitally.
I appreciate the recommendation. Headed there as soon as possible. My own inner pedant preoccupation is "impossibly." One use and the author gets a huge black mark accompanied by profanity that shocks my cats. A second in the same work and I go nuclear.