Keeping It in the Family, Post-DNA

Abstract

Why Founding brothers? Aside from one late (1813) reference by John Adams to a Revolutionary band of brothers, no language of brotherhood, or actual kinship, informed the political events or the personal relations Ellis describes in his new book. Ellis chooses the fraternal metaphor less for its literal meaning or its importance to contemporaries than for its resonances: commonality, rivalry, reconciliation. And, perhaps, for what it is not: the language of paternity. In the wake of what Ellis had disparagingly called the JeffersonHemings even before the release of DNA evidence linking the two families (and which actually became a televised miniseries in 2000), founding fatherhood came to have distressingly specific meanings. Brotherhood keeps those meanings at bay, in the wake of the literal, as well as literary, bastardization of Jefferson's image.' Ellis is entitled to his evasion of popular Founding Fathers rhetoric, for he has regularly begun his books by ridiculing founding-father worship and by stressing ambivalence, paradox, and irony in both the lives of America's revolutionaries and in Americans' subsequent memories of them. In Founding Brothers he once again defends his method of character study as more appropriate and realistic: founders will become and accessible through case studies in the sense of urgency and improvisation with which they acted (pp. 8, 17). Ellis hopes to make the great statesmen more human by stressing the stunning improbability of their achievement: the American Revolution and a successful, if gradual, transition to nationhood (p. 6). The contingent, fragile nature of the early republic means that the critical period, or the crucial decade, of American nationhood was less the 1780s, as John Fiske had it, than the 1790s, and here Ellis follows recent syntheses of the high politics of the decade, such as Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick's The Age of Federalism (1993) and James Roger Sharp's American Politics in the Early Republic (1993).2 During the period between constitutional ratification and the Revolution of 1800, the great dialogues of the Revolutionary era continued, as