Founding Partisans
Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics
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From bestselling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H.W. Brands, a revelatory history of the shocking emergence of vicious political division at the birth of the United States.
To the framers of the Constitution, political parties were a fatal threat to republican virtues. They had suffered the consequences of partisan politics in Britain before the American Revolution, and they wanted nothing similar for America. Yet parties emerged even before the Constitution was ratified, and they took firmer root in the following decade. In Founding Partisans, master historian H. W. Brands has crafted a fresh and lively narrative of the early years of the republic as the Founding Fathers fought one another with competing visions of what our nation would be.
The first party, the Federalists, formed around Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and their efforts to overthrow the Articles of Confederation and make the federal government more robust. Their opponents organized as the Antifederalists, who feared the corruption and encroachments on liberty that a strong central government would surely bring. The Antifederalists lost but regrouped under the new Constitution as the Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson, whose bruising contest against Federalist John Adams marked the climax of this turbulent chapter of American political history.
The country’s first years unfolded in a contentious spiral of ugly elections and blatant violations of the Constitution. Still, peaceful transfers of power continued, and the nascent country made its way towards global dominance, against all odds. Founding Partisans is a powerful reminder that fierce partisanship is a problem as old as the republic.
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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.
