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An illuminating research of the intertwined lives of the founders of the American republic - John Adams, Aaron Burr, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington. During the 1790s, which Ellis calls the most decisive decade inside our nation's history, the greatest statesmen with their generation - and perhaps any - arrived together to determine the new republic and direct its course for the arriving centuries. Ellis targets six discrete occasions that exemplify the most crucial issues facing the fragile new country: Burr and Hamilton's fatal duel and what may have really happened; Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison's hidden knowledge dinner, where the couch of the permanent capital was decided in exchange for passing of Hamilton's financial plan; Franklin's petition to get rid of the "peculiar organization" of slavery - his previous public function - and Madison's attempts to quash it; Washington's precedent-setting Farewell Address, announcing his old age from general public office and offering his country some final advice; Adams' difficult term as Washington's successor and his alleged design to move the presidency on to his son; and lastly Adams and Jefferson's renewed correspondence at the ends with their lives, where they compared their different views of the Revolution and its own legacy. In a exciting and interesting narrative, Ellis recounts the sometimes collaborative, sometimes archly antagonistic interactions between these men and shows us the private characters behind the public personas: Adams, the ever-combative iconoclast whose closest politics collaborator was his better half, Abigail; Burr - crafty, simple, and one of the most despised public results of his time; Hamilton, whose audacious manner and deep financial savvy masked his humble roots; Jefferson, renowned for his eloquence but so reclusive and taciturn that he almost never spoke lots of sentences in public; Madison - small, sickly, and paralyzingly shy yet one of the most effective debaters of his technology; and the stiffly formal Washington, the best realist, larger than life, and America's only truly indispensable figure. Ellis argues that the assessments and balances that permitted the newborn American republic to put up with were not generally legal, constitutional, or institutional but intensely personal, rooted in the vibrant interaction of market leaders with quite different visions and worth. Revisiting the old-fashioned idea that character matters, Founding Brothers informs our knowledge of American politics - then and today - and provides us a fresh perspective on the unstable forces that condition history.
