Assessing the Giants of the Founding Era: A New History?

Jack Rakove holds an eminent place among scholars of the founding of the U.S. national government and especially on how its political leaders created a lasting, if often misunderstood, legacy. His important scholarly contributions started with The Beginnings of National Politics (1979), and his approach there remains present in the book under review as well as in publications about James Madison, his Pulitzer Prize-winning Original Meanings (1996), and other work exploring how the political commitments of the Founding Fathers were modified by back-and-forth negotiation and the sometimes quotidian influences on decision making. Rakove seeks to better understand how a small group crafted the federal Constitution and initiated modern constitutionalism. In doing so, he assesses real people engaged in day-to-day political conflicts who regularly compromised their principles and rarely (perhaps never) accurately understood the long-term consequences of their achievements. While something of a traditionalist in studying political elites, Rakove has ranged widely in his career, working closely with top legal scholars and political scientists as well as filing friend-of-the-court briefs, while also writing for undergraduates and the general public (the intended audience for Revolutionaries). Even if the appearance of Stanford University's William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to discuss this book was not Rakove's most commanding performance, who can fail to be impressed (and a bit jealous) of such reach for an early American historian?

Rakove earned his Ph.D. under Bernard Bailyn at Harvard in 1975, falling roughly at the mid-point of the more than seventy doctoral students Bailyn trained over more than four decades. Since Revolutionaries is dedicated to Bailyn, their intellectual connection merits consideration before turning to the book, a comparative biography of major patriots. The historiographic pigeonholing of Rakove as a neo-Whig historian concerned solely with political elites and their ideas in the supposedly narrow tradition of his advisor's landmark Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (orig. 1967) uncharitably constricts the range and intent of both historians. While they share commitments that dramatically diverge from those of social historians, whose work perhaps pushed Bailyn to shrilly reject any socioeconomic origins for the Revolution, the ideological emphasis by Bailyn, which Rakove extends, helpfully punctured sweeping intellectual abstractions about the origins of the American Revolution. Where Bailyn challenged hegemonic claims about Lockean influence on the Revolution, Rakove introduced categorically inclined legal scholars and political scientists to the messy legislative process and the basic progression of change over time, while also showing the general public and some retrograde political historians that even the most impressive of the Founders did not secure unalloyed triumphs. Interestingly, what Rakove stressed in his festschrift contribution was an appreciation for his mentor's close attention to the social conditions of colonial society as the essential foundation for the Revolution. Rakove concludes that essay by contextualizing Bailyn's work as a cross-generational inquiry with Oscar Handlin (Bailyn's own teacher), on the social roots of the long struggle between liberty and order in American society and government.¹

The Handlin-Bailyn connection is instructive for the Bailyn-Rakove one, and also because the two-generation motif is the most sustained interpretive arc in Revolutionaries, a primarily descriptive book that offers few theoretical or thematic statements. Its core organizing insight is that "there were at least two generations of 1776" (p. 15): an older cohort, of whom John Adams, Dickinson, Washington, Mason, Henry Laurens, Franklin, and Jefferson is each emphasized in turn; and a younger cohort of John Laurens, Jay, Madison, and Hamilton, who emerge in the second half of the book, especially its final two chapters. The former group led the colonies into the Revolution and produced the Declaration of Independence, while the second "came of age with it" and labored to make the federal Constitution (p. 15). Rather than conjure a single founding...