FOUNDING PARTISANS

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.