Secrets of the Founding Fathers

Gordon Wood’s new book.

Gordon Wood, one of the preeminent historians of the American Revolution, implies a question with the title of his new book, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (Penguin, $25.95). Different from whom? One another? Their contemporaries? Politicians today? You and me? The answer turns out to be all of the above, but the biggest difference Wood uncovers is the one between the Founders and our anachronistic misconceptions of them.

Men who accomplish great things tend, in death, to ossify into legend. This is perhaps truest of the Founding Fathers, who barely survived into the nineteenth century with their personalities intact. But the celebratory myth of the Founders actually obscures their accomplishment. It would be easy for gods to establish a nation; much more impressive is that a group of mortals kicked off a worldwide democratic revolution. That’s why popular historians in the last half century have gone to such great pains to remind us of the characters behind the Gilbert Stuart oils and résumés replete with firsts—John Adams’s martyred irascibility, for example, or Ben Franklin’s folksy wit. But attempts to humanize the Founders in recent years have often veered into vilification. The most common target, of course, has been Thomas Jefferson, the slaveowner who wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

Wood, while recognizing his subjects’ faults, debunks the would-be debunkers, or at least those who use modern standards to damn the country’s eighteenth-century architects. America today is vastly different from the era the Founders lived in, he explains, and our rules don’t apply to their lives. As he writes in a chapter about James Madison, “We have to keep in mind that Madison was not speaking to us or to the ages. His world was not our world; indeed, our world would have appalled him. Thus, in our efforts to relate his very time-bound thinking to our present predicaments, we run the risk of seriously distorting his world and what he was trying to do.”

The most potent motif in Revolutionary Characters is the reminder to look at the Founders with an eighteenth-century, not twenty-first-century, eye. They operated in the Age of Enlightenment, when people believed politeness would hold society together. In the 1700s public service was a duty of virtuous gentlemen, whose wealth presumably allowed them to rule without bias, and whose educations brought them closer to the truth. The high-minded elite monopolized politics in Revolutionary America, but in the new nation a man who cultivated himself with proper schooling and good manners could rise to gentility regardless of his family’s station. Nearly all the founders earned their high social status rather than inheriting it.

Wood devotes around 20 pages each to Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Madison, Adams, Thomas Paine, and Aaron Burr, distilling the qualities that distinguished each man from the hoi polloi, other gentlemen, and his fellow Founders. Revolutionary Characters focuses more on their temperaments and political philosophies than on their life stories. The chapter on Adams scarcely even mentions his presidency; instead it elucidates his oft-misunderstood belief in the need for a government that represented both the aristocracy and the masses.

Elsewhere in the book, Wood rebukes modern interest groups that adopt a Founder as their icon but conveniently ignore half of his convictions. New Dealers built a monument to Jefferson, champion of the common man; they forgot that he abhorred big government. Turn-of-the-century businessmen and twentieth-century Republicans made the national-bank proponent Hamilton their mascot, disregarding his ambition to turn the U.S. government into a monolithic tax-and-spend fiscal state. Wood also illuminates Washington’s obsessive protection of his reputation, Franklin’s ambition, elitism, and long-lived loyalty to the crown, Burr’s singleminded money-grubbing, Madison’s hope that the spread of republican government would end war forever, Jefferson’s belief that sociability and commerce would bind people and nations together in peace, and Paine’s work as America’s first social critic.

Paine, with his forceful, direct writing, roused the common man to fervid interest in politics. In so doing he fueled the Founders’ massive revolution, which would in just a few decades render them all obsolete and unrepeatable. As Wood explains, the Founding Fathers differed from today’s politicians because they didn’t have to appeal to public opinion. Assuming that the gentry was their audience, they didn’t bother to hide the native elitism in their writing and debates; while they trusted the people’s sovereign power, they also thought the masses needed a disinterested, learned aristocracy to lead them. Campaigning for votes fell beyond unnecessary; it was unseemly. Public service was the gentleman’s duty, his burden, something one accepted, not sought. The Founders assumed that republican politics, led by a virtuous gentry, would escape that sort of base vote-grubbing.

But popular democracy and egalitarianism, once unleashed, flourished in a way the Founders never predicted. Educated or not, the populace was eager to participate in government; soon pamphleteers and newspapers were jettisoning their high-flown prose to attract a larger readership. Politicians like Andrew Jackson came to dominate high office by flaunting their backwoods values and decrying the pedantic arrogance of the elite. Jefferson, in his last years, was dismayed by what he saw as a coarsening of the political process; suddenly ideas mattered less than pandering to the lowest common denominator. But he, as much as anyone, had brought it about. When Jefferson and his peers created their new world, they left no place for themselves.

—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.