41 pages • 1-hour read
Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
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Acknowledgements and Preface Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Acknowledgements Summary
Ellis credits the early-20th-century English author Lytton Strachey with giving him the idea for his book. Strachey wrote a title called Eminent Victorians, a biography of four prominent nineteenth-century figures. Rather than merely narrating the facts of a person’s life in the order they happened, Strachey’s approach is to “‘attack his subject in unexpected places […] shoot a sudden revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined’’’ and tug a ‘“characteristic specimen’” from those far depths up for curious examination (ix). Ellis wants to apply a similar exploratory approach to America’s revolutionary generation. His resources in this endeavor are the revolutionary generation’s published letters and documents.
Preface Summary: “The Generation”
Ellis describes how “[n]o event in American history which was so improbable at the time seemed so inevitable in retrospect as the American Revolution” (3). The republican experiment launched by the American revolutionary generation is important on a global scale because it sets a precedent for the dissolution of other European monarchical colonies.
However, despite providential statements from members of the revolutionary generation, “the conclusions that look so foregone to us had to yet to congeal for them” (4). While it is not clear that the Revolution will succeed and lead to America becoming a world leader and influencer, there are intimations of a great future at the beginning. Ellis argues for looking at it from a middle approach that “frames the issues with one eye on the precarious contingencies felt at the time, while the other eye looks forward to the more expansive consequences perceived […] by those trapped in the moment” (6).
Based on what historians now know about the military history of the American Revolution, the British army and navy were the most powerful in the world at the time. Had British commanders been more vigorous in the earliest stages of the Revolutionary War, the movement for American independence would have been halted and the signers of the Declaration of Independence tried and executed for treason.
It is also likely that over time, and had the Revolution not happened, an American nation would have evolved to independence as it gradually developed political and economic strength over the nineteenth century and challenged a weakening British Empire. Still, as Ellis points out, “the creation of an American nation occurred suddenly rather than gradually,” and the early nation is “an improvisational affair” concocted by people who agree on independence but disagree on several other matters (5). A crucial point of commonality among members of the revolutionary generation is “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). This belief leads them to feel that the British hold on America is illegitimate.
The new republican experiment is beset with challenges. In the short-term, it is difficult to govern such a large area—–thirteen colonies—by the principles used to run small-scale republican states in Ancient Greece and Rome. This means that revolutionary leaders have to take short-term measures such as allowing the early American republic to dissolve into a cluster of state or regional sovereignties before reaching the promised land of a unified nation.
In 1789 when newly elected members of the federal government gather in New York, they consider the assets and liabilities of their experiment. Assets include the isolation of the American continent from Europe; its bounteous and potentially lucrative natural resources; a youthful population of nearly 4 million, with the potential to expand; the broad distribution of prosperity; and the clear commitment to republican political institutions. Liabilities include a lack of precedent for a republican government over a country the scale of the United States; the dominant intellectual legacy of the Revolution stigmatizing all concentrated political power; the states having no common history as a nation; and finally and most problematically, the fact that 700,000 inhabitants of the fledgling US republics are black slaves, who live in conditions that defy the republican rhetoric of 1776.
The key figures in the revolutionary generation–Abigail and John Adams, Aaron Burr, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington—have conflicting views, despite the common value of republicanism. However, Ellis considers that “the key point is that the debate was not resolved so much as built into the fabric of our national identity” (16). Mostly all male and all white, the public figures of the revolutionary generation are not representative of the population as a whole, but nothing like them has ever existed in Europe.
Acknowledgments and Preface Analysis
While Ellis’ subject matter is historical, he follows the example of the English biographer Lytton Strachey in providing a personalized view of the lives and events in his narrative. Like Strachey, Ellis’ intention is to delve deep into matters that are of personal interest to him as well as of general significance to the reader. He identifies as an American historian, the “living legacy” of the revolutionary generation (15). He often uses the pronoun “we” and addresses a generalized American reader, assuming that this reader, too, is the living legacy of the Revolution and sharing in his view of events. For example, when he considers that, with the exception of the Civil War, the United States has resolved internal issues with debate rather than violence, he writes “with that one bloody exception, we have been living with it [debate and contradiction] successfully for over two hundred years” (16).
Ellis likens the revolutionary generation’s politics to an orchestra playing out of tune:
The politics of the 1790s was a truly cacophonous affair […] in terms of shrill accusatory rhetoric, flamboyant displays of ideological intransigence, intense personal rivalries and hyperbolic claims of imminent catastrophe (16).
Ellis argues that this period of American history is as exciting and fundamental as periods generally considered more heroic, such as the abolition of slavery after the Civil War or America’s role in World War II in the 1940s.
Moreover, in referring to how the revolutionary generation’s efforts relate to America’s emergence as a superpower in the twentieth century, Ellis makes their contribution relevant to the lives and concerns of modern Americans. In constantly referring to how the presumed American reader takes the successful result of the Revolution for granted, Ellis highlights the obstacles to the success of the American republican project in order to bring its leaders, and the battles they grappled with, to life.
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