American Dialogue: The Founders and Us

by Joseph J. Ellis

This explanation anticipated the argument of Arnold Toynbee in A Study of History (abridged edition, 1954) that leadership appears only in societies undergoing great crises. Although historians of the Civil War might contest the claim, the American Revolution is arguably the greatest political crisis in American history. If it had failed, Washington would have remained an inconsequential Virginia squire, Adams an obscure country lawyer. This crisis explanation also reminds us that Jefferson’s felicitous words in the Declaration, “our lives, our fortune, and our sacred honor,” were an accurate description of the all-or-nothing risk the leaders of the movement for independence were required to run.

Adair called attention to the fact that the revolutionary generation came of age at a moment in Western history when the prospect of everlasting life in a Christian version of the hereafter was becoming problematic, so that living on in the memory of succeeding generations became the only assured afterlife.

On the one hand, this meant that politics was open to a whole class of talented men (women were still unimaginable as leaders outside the family) who would have languished in obscurity in Europe or Great Britain because they lacked the proper bloodlines. There was still a discernible social hierarchy in America, but compared to all other advanced societies at that time, the United States afforded an unprecedented opportunity for movement from bottom to top. As a result, when the revolutionary crisis arrived, it could draw upon the latent talent from a segment of the population never before allowed access.

While popular opinion was hardly irrelevant, it was regarded as flighty, shortsighted, and easily manipulated. The ultimate allegiance of the founders was not to “the people” but to “the public,” which was the long-term interest of the citizenry that they, the founders, were obligated to serve regardless of the short-term political consequences.

While there is much to admire in the founders, the distinctive brand of leadership they provided is impossible to duplicate because—and this is deeply ironic—we inhabit a democratic America that they made possible but that then made them impossible.

Diversity made dialogue unavoidable. If left alone, Jefferson would have carried the infant nation perilously close to anarchy. Hamilton would have erred on the side of autocracy. The collision of convictions not only enriched the intellectual ferment, it also replicated the checks and balances embedded in the Constitution with a human version of the same balancing principle.