:The Founding Fathers and the Politics of Character.

Abstract

Political life in the early American republic often looked more like a court without a king than the classical polities idealized by the founders. Instead of the eloquent Cicero or the incorruptible Cato, the new nation's capitols seemed to be populated by courtiers, poseurs, and political operators on par with the capitols of Europe. To the chagrin of the likes of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, by 1800, calumny and the odious spirit of party seemed to have overtaken classical virtue as the defining traits of national politics. In this elegantly composed study, Andrew S. Trees explores four founders' efforts to reconcile this new, contentious political world with their classical ideals. But, following the lead of Joanne Freeman, Trees looks neither to ideology nor to the myriad policy imbroglios of the era to illuminate this dissonant moment in American politics. Instead, he focuses on a single aspect of the founders' premodern system of values: namely the notion of character, by which Trees seems to mean the exterior display of merit. It was to character, Trees argues, that the idealistic founders looked for a way through the cruel, often personal politics of the 1790s.