Keeping It in the Family, Post-DNA

Joseph J. Ellis. Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. xi + 288pp. Figures, notes, and index. $26.00

Why Founding brothers? Aside from one late (1813) reference by John Adams to a Revolutionary "band of brothers," no language of brotherhood, or actual kinship, informed the political events or the personal relations Ellis describes in his new book. Ellis chooses the fraternal metaphor less for its literal meaning or its importance to contemporaries than for its resonances: commonality, rivalry, reconciliation. And, perhaps, for what it is not: the language of paternity. In the wake of what Ellis had disparagingly called the Jefferson-Hemings "miniseries" even before the release of DNA evidence linking the two families (and which actually became a televised miniseries in 2000), founding fatherhood came to have distressingly specific meanings. Brotherhood keeps those meanings at bay, in the wake of the literal, as well as literary, bastardization of Jefferson's image. ¹

Ellis is entitled to his evasion of popular Founding Fathers rhetoric, for he has regularly begun his books by ridiculing founding-father worship and by stressing ambivalence, paradox, and irony in both the lives of America's revolutionaries and in Americans' subsequent memories of them. In Founding Brothers he once again defends his method of character study as more appropriate and realistic: founders will become "human and accessible" through case studies in the "sense of urgency and improvisation" with which they acted (pp. 8, 17). Ellis hopes to make the great statesmen more human by stressing the "stunning improbability of their achievement": the American Revolution and a successful, if gradual, transition to nationhood (p. 6). The contingent, fragile nature of the "early republic" means that the critical period, or the crucial decade, of American nationhood was less the 1780s, as John Fiske had it, than the 1790s, and here Ellis follows recent syntheses of the high politics of the decade, such as Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick's The Age of Federalism (1993) and James Roger Sharp's American Politics in the Early Republic (1993). ² During the period between constitutional ratification and the Revolution of 1800, the great dialogues of the Revolutionary era continued, as founders lined up against each other on the key questions of the age. Foremost among these questions was democracy or liberty versus stability or nationhood.

Why study these conflicts in terms of character rather than, say, ideology? For Ellis, close attention to the battles between the key founding brothers helps us see how "their mutual imperfections and fallibilities, as well as their eccentricities and excesses, checked each other in much the way that Madison in Federalist 10 claimed that multiple factions would do in a large republic" (p. 17). Ellis thus takes Founding Fathers-centered history back to its logical conclusion. The history of "the revolutionary generation" is not merely represented by the battles between a Jefferson and a Hamilton: it is those battles.

Interpersonal dynamics, then, carry not only thematic resonance but explanatory weight. Yet despite his recognition that democracy and nationalization were the key issues of the early republic's political culture, Ellis insists on defining them as issues dealt with decisively by his eight statesmen--rather than by a larger polity or society. His justification for a decidedly elite definition of "political culture"--and one that goes against the grain of the way the term has been used since the 1960s--is that "politics, even at the highest level in the early republic, remained a face-to-face affair, in which the contestants, even those who were locked in political batles to the death, were forced to negotiate the emotional affinities and shared intimacies produced by frequent personal interaction" (p. 17). Personal interactions not only reveal but actually created the salient features of the post-Revolutionary achievement or settlement, which Ellis defines at the outset in clear and capacious terms: the equilibrium of national power and individual freedom; the bracketing of slavery as an...