by Joseph J. Ellis
Knopf, 304 pp., $26 The American Revolution was a much shakier affair — consisting of equal parts luck and chance — than we often remember it. Ellis examines the political crises of the young democracy of the 1790s (which he calls the most decisive decade of American history) by homing in on the various ways that John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr reacted to those crises. But to Ellis, Franklin is “unquestionably the oldest, and wisest, member of the revolutionary generation … the grandfather among the fathers,” and he shows up repeatedly throughout Founding Brothers as a man who “defied all the categories by inhabiting them all with such distinction and nonchalant grace.” Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary GenerationJoseph J. Ellis
This article appears in December 1 • 2000.