Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics
September 11, 2023
Historian Brands (The Last Campaign) returns with a reliable account of the early American Republic’s political turmoil, concentrating on four well-known figures: John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. This group, which the American Revolution brought together, were forced apart by the “skulduggery” of their early years governing the new nation. Focusing on the Republic’s first two decades, from 1781 and the beginnings of government under the Articles of Confederation (“the stepchild of American politics”) to Jefferson’s divisive win in the 1800 presidential election, Brands traces the growth of discord among the country’s founders. At the Annapolis Convention in 1786, many aired concerns over the Articles’ loose federation of states. By 1787’s Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, America’s “brawling birth” was in full swing, and some of the founders, such as Patrick Henry, refused to attend. (“I smelt a rat,” he explained.) After the convention, state ratification debates kicked off between Federalists, who favored the Constitution’s strong central government, and Antifederalists, who were concerned about government overreach. Political divisions didn’t end with ratification; Federalists like Adams still “distrusted democracy,” unlike Democratic-Republican Jefferson, his bitter opponent in the 1800 election. Though Brands doesn’t provide much that is new here, his talent for summary and his ability to convey history to general readers shine. Revolutionary War buffs will relish this.
October 1, 2023
An astute historian chronicles the less-than-harmonious beginnings of the American republic. Brands, author of The Last Campaign and many other acclaimed, bestselling books of U.S. history, adds to his sterling reputation with this comprehensive account of the intense political partisanship and personal animus among the Founding Fathers. Despite their best intentions and stated aims, this partisanship predated the Constitution and shaped the competing visions and sometimes shifting alliances of the Federalists and Antifederalists during the debates over its ratification and the Bill of Rights. Brands thoroughly describes how partisanship undergirded and informed the most significant events in the life of the nascent nation: the maneuvering of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison surrounding the Constitutional Convention and scuttling the Articles of Confederation; Hamilton's forceful rallying of the Federalists to support a powerful centralized government; Antifederalist claims that the Constitution not only usurped the power of the states, but was perhaps drafted illegally; George Washington's methods for dealing with disagreements within his Cabinet; the influence of the French Revolution on Thomas Jefferson and American neutrality; Hamilton's insistence on the establishment of a national bank and the outcry against it from purist republicans who distrusted the financial class; the peculiar personality of John Adams and his bizarre term as president; and the crumbling of a once-congenial relationship between Adams and Jefferson and their brutal presidential contest of 1800. Brands employs his agreeable approach of largely permitting the principals to tell the story while deftly weaving his own balanced analysis within an enlightening, contextually clear narrative. The result is a cogent history of how partisanship and faction shaped the early U.S. and a valuable repository of some of the most important speeches, letters, and declarations produced by serious men who wrestled with serious ideas. An essential book for understanding the foundation of American partisanship.
COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
November 1, 2023
The colonies' struggle for independence having finally been won, it appeared obvious that the Articles of Confederation, which loosely and tentatively bound together the nascent nation, were not up to the task of sustaining a sovereign government. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and other former colonials had to determine the direction the country would take. Historian Brands (Our First Civil War, 2021) assesses the delegates from the 13 states to the Constitutional Convention, revealing how they had to represent their home states' interests and yet learn to consider the future of a new nation. Brands' storytelling prowess preserves the debaters' individual personalities and clearly constructs the grand narrative of the Convention's crafting of one of the political world's greatest documents. It's tempting to read the country's present struggles back into these seminal events in U.S. history. But although the conflicts of these now nearly mythical statesmen are not unlike the quarrels among today's legislators, the more deliberate pace of their debates, not to mention their high-minded language, make the eighteenth century seem even more distant.
COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.