In his Pulitzer Prize winning book Founding Brothers. The Revolutionary Generation, Joseph Ellis introduces us to eight of the most important people of the Revolutionary era.   Rather than focusing on the role of these individuals during the Revolution, however, or in the drawing up and ratification of the Constitution, Ellis focuses on the decade of the 1790s.   He argues that the events of this decade were "the most crucial and consequential in American history," that it was during these years that the "purposely ambiguous theory" of republican government outlined in the Constitution was translated into a new set of political institutions and traditions.   "The shape and character" of these new political institutions, he insists, "were determined by a relatively small number of leaders who knew each other, who collaborated and collided with one another in patterns that replicated at the level of personality and ideology the principle of checks and balances imbedded structurally in the Constitution" (13).

              Six members of the Revolutionary Generation--Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Adams and Abigail Adams--are featured most prominently in Professor Ellis's account.   Two others--Benjamin Franklin and Aaron Burr--receive much less attention.   All eight, however, are identified as crucial historical actors who have played an important role in shaping the nation's political institutions and practices.

             As you read and review successive chapters of Professor Ellis's book, you will need to pay careful attention to the character and personality of each of these key individuals as well as to the way they interacted with one another.   You will eventually be required to write a clearly argued, well documented, essay focusing on two of these individuals, their interaction with one another and the way in which this interaction helped shape the nation's political institutions.   You will also be required to find a primary source that sheds light on one of these interactions and explain the historical significance of that document.

              As you try to come to grips with his analysis of the early evolution of the nation's republican institutions, keep in mind that Professor Ellis argues that the driving force behind this evolution was "the key insight, shared by most of the vanguard members of the revolutionary generation,...that the very arguments used to justify secession from the British Empire also undermined the legitimacy of any national government capable of overseeing such a far-flung population, or establishing uniform laws that knotted together the thirteen sovereign states....For the core argument used to discredit the authority of Parliament and the British monarch…was an obsessive suspicion of any centralized political power that operated in faraway places beyond the immediate supervision or surveillance of the citizens it claimed to govern" (7).   The new United States Constitution, drawn up in 1787, "professed to solve what was an apparently insoluble political problem.   For it purported to create a consolidated federal government with powers sufficient to coerce obedience to national laws...while remaining true to the republican principles of 1776.   At least logically, this was an impossibility, since the core impulse of these republican principles, the original 'spirit of '76,' was an instinctive aversion to coercive political power of any sort " (9).

              The adoption of the United States Constitution, Professor Ellis insists, touched off a heated debate over the "true meaning" of the Revolution, a debate that continues today.   In its most familiar form, the debate took the form of a conflict between state and federal sovereignty, but it also involved "conflicting attitudes toward government itself, competing versions of citizenship, differing postures on the twin goals of freedom and equality" (16).   During the 1790s, the debate became particularly heated because each side believed that the future of the nation and of republican government hung in balance.   Remarkably, despite the ferocity of their disagreements, "the revolutionary generation found a way to contain the explosive energies of the debate in the form of an ongoing argument or dialogue that was eventually institutionalized and rendered safe by the creation of political parties" (15).   Violence was averted because discussion of the one issue on which agreement was impossible, the abolition of slavery, was postponed for two generations.   Until the outbreak of the Civil War, therefore, the political history of the United States remained "an oscillation between new versions of the old tension," involving sometimes heated debates, but little or no violence (16).