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The Founders
A Biographical Guide

Today, the nation's founders seem more like bronze or marble statues than like flesh and blood human beings. With their powdered hair, they seem to come from another world.

Many of the founders were the first members of their family to attend college. Benjamin Franklin and George Washington were unusual in that they had not attended college. Many had a classical education.

His father was a Braintree, Mass., farmer and shoemaker. Although Adams was able to attend college, his two younger brothers did not, and became farmers.

In 1770, Adams defended the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre in a belief that they had a right to effective legal counsel. Adams obtained deathbed testimony from one of the five men mortally wounded by the British soldiers, who swore that the crowd, not the troops were to blame for the massacre.

Adams was the first Vice President (1789-1797) and second President (1797-1801) of the United States. Read his inaugural address: http://www.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby/inaugural/

As one of the chief organizers of protests against British imperial policies, Adams was, in Thomas Jefferson's words, "truly the man of the Revolution." A founder of the Sons of Liberty, the Boston-born Harvard-educated Adams was also a key instigator of protests against the Stamp Act and the Townsend Acts.

Adams's hatred of arbitrary royal authority had deep personal roots. His father had established a land bank in Massachusetts, which lent paper money backed by real estate. In 1741, wealthy merchants led by Thomas Hutchinson, fearful that the bills would be used to pay debts, called on Massachusetts' royal governor to declare the land bank illegal. When he did, Adams's father lost tremendous sums of money and never recovered financially.

He was a member of the First and Second Continental Congresses, signed the Declaration of Independence, and served as governor of Massachusetts (1794-1797).

His is one of the most remarkable success stories in American history. The 18th child of a Boston candle maker and soap maker, he was indentured to a much older brother, a printer, for a nine-year term, and was only supposed to receive wages the last year. He ran away. As a publisher in Philadelphia, he was so successful that he was able to retire at age 42 and devote the rest of his life to science and politics.

As a printer, he had owned slaves. But in later life, he became president of the world's first anti-slavery society.

Up until the early 1770s, Franklin was loyal to Britain. Yet by 1776, when he was 70 years old, he had become an ardent patriot. At the time of the Constitutional Convention, he was 81 years old and had to be carried on a sedan chair. His speeches had to be read by other delegates.

Born in the West Indies, Hamilton never developed the intense loyalty to a state that was common among Americans of the time. He understood banking and finance as none of the other founders did.

Although Thomas Jefferson and his followers successfully painted Hamilton as an elitist defender of a deferential social order and an admirer of monarchical Britain, in fact Hamilton offered a remarkably modern economic vision based on investment, industry, and expanded commerce. Most strikingly, it was an economic vision with no place for slavery. Before the 1790s, the American economy, North and South, was tied to a transatlantic system of slavery. A member of New York's first antislavery society, Hamilton wanted to reorient the American economy away from slavery and trade with the slave colonies of the Caribbean. 

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy hosted a White House dinner for America's Nobel Laureates. He told the assemblage that this was "probably the greatest concentration of talent and genius in this house except for those times when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

Jefferson was a man of many talents. He began his career as a lawyer, served in the Virginia House of Delegates, and subsequently became governor of Virginia, ambassador to France, secretary of state, vice president, and president. But when he wrote the epitaph that appears over his grave, he mentioned none of these public offices. He simply stated that he was the author of the Declaration of Independence and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom and the father of the University of Virginia.

An architect, inventor, philosopher, planter, and scientist, he was convinced that the yeoman farmer, who labors in the earth, provides the backbone of republican society. A stalwart defender of political, intellectual, and religious freedom, he took as his inspiration, the motto on his family crest: "Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." A child of the Enlightenment, he popularized the idea that the success of republican society depended on an informed citizenry and that government should create a system of state-supported education to nurture a meritocracy based on talent and ability.

Jefferson was an extremely complex man, and his life is filled with many inconsistencies. An idealist who repeatedly denounced slavery as a curse and expressed his willingness to support any feasible plan to eradicate the institution, he owned 200 slaves when he wrote the Declaration of Independence and freed only five slaves at the time of his death.

Yet Jefferson remains this country's most eloquent exponent of democratic principles. Abraham Lincoln said that his words will always "be a rebuke and stumbling block to… tyranny and oppression."

Although one of the Library of Congress' building was recently named after him, there is no memorial to James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution," in our nation's capital. Yet no delegate to the Constitutional Convention had a greater impact on our system of government. As a member of the first Congress, he introduced the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

He short in stature ("no bigger than a snowflake," observed a contemporary), and had weak speaking voice. Secretly, he suffered from epilepsy. Nevertheless, he dominated the Constitutional Convention. As the principal author of the Virginia Plan, he set the terms of debate. The plan's essential feature, including the separation of powers among branches of government, enumerated powers, and federal supremacy over foreign affairs and interstate commerce, were eventually adopted. His notes, published after his death in 1836, give us the only daily account of what happened at the Constitutional Convention.

Before the convention, he had studied the history of the Greek city-states, the Roman empire, and the nations of Europe. Convinced that the American Revolution was degenerating into chaos, he persuaded Washington to leave his retirement at Mount Vernon to go to Philadelphia.

Unlike Jefferson, he had little faith in the essential goodness of humanity. The separation of powers among different branches of government was necessary because politicians could not be trusted. "If men were angels," he wrote, "no government would be necessary." In the Federalist Papers, a series of newspaper essays in defense of the Constitution that remain guides to the framers' intentions, he argued that liberty could best be assured in an extended republic. A large nation made up of many interest groups does not permit a single faction to dominate the rest. "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition," he said.

William Pierce, a Georgia delegate, said of Madison: "He blends together the profound politician with the scholar. In the management of every great question, he evidently took the lead in the convention, and tho' he cannot be called an orator, he is a most agreeable, eloquent and convincing speaker."

His life mirrored the history of the new nation. At 29 he was the youngest member of the Continental Congress. At 36, he served as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. Later he served two terms in the House of Representatives, formed the Democratic-Republican party that Thomas Jefferson to the presidency, served eight years as secretary, and was elected the fourth president in 1809.

A wealthy Philadelphia merchant, he was superintendent of finance in the Confederation Congress. He persuaded the Confederation Congress to charter a Bank of the North America, to provide a secure source of credit, but failed to persuade Congress to impose a 5 percent duty on imports, which would have allowed the Confederation to repay its war debts.

"I know not," John Adams wrote in 1806, "whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Thomas Paine." After enduring many failures in his native England, Paine, whose father was a Quaker, arrived in Philadelphia in 1774, bearing invaluable letters of introduction from Benjamin Franklin.

By far the Revolution's most powerful pamphleteer, Paine was the author of Common Sense, which sold 150,000 copies after it was published in January 1776. A powerful attack on monarchy and hereditary privilege, it also demanded a complete break with Britain and the establishment of a strong federal union.

Our nation's capital, a state, and a soaring obelisk represent monuments to George Washington. He gained an international reputation when he surrendered his sword to Congress after he resigned as commander-in-chief in 1783 at age 52 to tend Mount Vernon, his 6700 acre plantation along the Potomac.

Even during his lifetime, Washington was considered as much a monument as a man. To Americans of the revolutionary and early national period, he personified republican virtue. A superb horseman, dignified in appearance, standing well over six feet tall, he looked like a military hero. But it was his character that elicited particular admiration.

Compared to many of the nation's founders, his background was far more limited. He never attended college nor did he ever visit Europe. Until he took command of the revolutionary army besieging British troops in Boston, he had never traveled north to New England, and until he became President, he had never gone south to the Carolinas or Georgia. A frontiersman and a surveyor, he made his reputation in the wilderness that lay across the Appalachian Mountains. As a general, he possessed great political skills, and was able to hold the Continental Army together in the face of severe challenges.

Acutely aware of his reputation for republic virtue, Washington was extremely careful about how he behaved in public. The Constitution posed a genuine quandary for Washington. He very much hoped for a stronger national government than the Articles of Confederation could provide, but he also feared that he public might question his motives for participating in the convention. The following quotation reveals his thoughts on this subject:

A thought...has lately run through my mind.... It is, whether my non-attendance in this Convention will not be considered as dereliction to Republicanism, nay more, whether other motives may not (however injuriously) be ascribed to me for not exerting myself on this occasion?

In the end, Washington agreed to serve as president of the Constitutional Convention, and his popularity and prestige helped to secure the Constitution's ratification.

Jefferson wrote in 1814: "His mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first order.... He was incapable of fear, meeting personal dangers with the calmest unconcern. Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence, never acting until every circumstance, ever consideration, was maturely weighed....

Vice President Adams proposed that Washington be given a title to fit the dignity of his office: "His Highness, the President of the United States and Protector of their Liberties." But Washington preferred a simple title: "Mr. President."