ThisAndThat

I finally finished reading Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis (see my post of July 31, Reading on the R5). It is not a large book but (about 248 pages in the paperback excluding notes) but, as I said, I am reading on the train so I read in short intervals and quite often there are distractions.

Ellis tells several stories about the founders of the United States. Despite his modesty in the Preface, he does quite a remarkable job of making these Revolutionaries come alive in the stories. He starts with the well known story of the Hamilton-Burr duel which sets the stage for the rest and gets the unpleasantness out of the way. And he concludes with the reconciliation of two old friends who became bitter enemies in the rough and tumble politics of the early years of the republic (John Adams and Thomas Jefferson). In between are a few more stories about the Revolutionary Generation.

All the stories contribute to understanding of the dynamics among these revolutionaries. All eventually agreed that we needed to separate from England but they disagreed about how to proceed in founding a new country after we won our freedom. The Constitution did not settle the argument but just provides an orderly framework to allow the argument to continue. The document was a series of compromises and a bit of ambiguity in many cases.And it has continued for over 200 years.

The biggest of the compromises was about the clear inconsistency of allowing slavery in a nation whose founding is based on human rights. A good number of the founders saw the inconsistency and the wrong of it but it was probably impossible to get others who were both culturally and economically dependent on slavery to agree. The reached a compromise which only delayed the day of reckoning and results in civil war. During the intervening years the institution of slavery only increased but our country also became stronger. Ellis does a very good job in getting the reader to understand how we can see the inevitable in hindsight but that what we see as inevitable was not at all obvious to the revolutionaries and that there course may well have been the best that could be done given the fragile nature of our union in their time.

I’d highly recommend this book to any one who wishes to understand the founding of the United States. Although I do not remember the book addressing this point, it puts today’s political unpleasantness in perspective.