Over the weekend, I picked up a copy of Joseph J. Ellis's Pulitzer Prize winning book, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. It has been a fascinating read thus far and offers an insightful look into the most significant people and moments in American history.Here are a few random quotes (just from the Preface alone) that will give you an idea of the kind of thing you'll find in this book:
No event in American history which was so improbable at the time has seemed so inevitable in retrospect as the American Revolution.
The Civil War, for example, was a direct consequence of the decision to evade and delay the slavery question during the early years of the republic.
With the American Revolution, as with all revolutions, different factions came together in common cause to overthrow the reigning regime, then discovered in the aftermath of their triumph that they had fundamentally different and politically incompatible notions of what they intended.
Lincoln once said that America was founded on a proposition that was written by Jefferson in 1776. We are really founded on an argument about what that proposition means.
Why is it that there is a core of truth to the distinctive iconography of the American Revolution, which does not depict dramatic scenes of mass slaughter, but, instead, a gallery of well-dressed personalities in classical poses?
Politics, even at the highest level in the early republic, remained a face-to-face affair in which the contestants, even those who were locked in political battles to the death, were forced to negotiate the emotional affinities and shared intimacies produced by frequent personal interaction.
All the vanguard members of the revolutionary generation developed a keen sense of their historical significance even while they were still making the history on which their reputations would rest. They began posing for posterity, writing letters to us as much as to one another, especially toward the end of their respective careers. If they sometimes look like marble statues, that is how they wanted to look....If they sometimes behave like actors in a historical drama, that is often how they regarded themselves. In a very real sense, we are complicitous in their achievement, since we are the audience for which they were performing; knowing we would be watching helped to keep them on their best behavior.
