Chernow Essay: The Feuding Fathers

[Elmore Furth]

When strict constructionist conservatives complain about judicial activism and refer to the intent of the founding fathers, they really ignore the reality of the post-revolutionary period -- even then, these guys were slugging it out intellectually and making it up as they went along. There was no pure consensus. The founding fathers tried to create the best compromise they could and spun off into factions that persist to the current day. These attempts at compromise and illusions of ideological purity continue to be a thread of current political activity that will probably persist until the end of our republic.

Americans lament the partisan venom of today's politics, but for sheer verbal savagery, the country's founders were in a league of their own. Ron Chernow on the Revolutionary origins of divisive discourse.

However hard it may be to picture the founders resorting to rough-and-tumble tactics, there was nothing genteel about politics at the nation's outset. For sheer verbal savagery, the founding era may have surpassed anything seen today. Despite their erudition, integrity, and philosophical genius, the founders were fiery men who expressed their beliefs with unusual vehemence. They inhabited a combative world in which the rabble-rousing Thomas Paine, an early admirer of George Washington, could denounce the first president in an open letter as "treacherous in private friendship…and a hypocrite in public life." Paine even wondered aloud whether Washington was "an apostate or an imposter; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any."

The two men also traded blows in the press, with Jefferson drafting surrogates to attack Hamilton, while the latter responded with his own anonymous essays. When Hamilton published a vigorous defense of Washington's neutrality proclamation in 1793, Jefferson urged Madison to thrash the treasury secretary in the press. "For God's sake, my dear Sir, take up your pen, select the most striking heresies, and cut him to pieces in the face of the public." When Madison rose to the challenge, he sneered in print that the only people who could read Hamilton's essays with pleasure were "foreigners and degenerate citizens among us."

Other journalists dredged up moldy tales of his supposed missteps in the French and Indian War and derided him as an inept general during the Revolutionary War. In his later, anti-Washington incarnation, Thomas Paine gave the laurels for wartime victory against the British to Gen. Horatio Gates. "You slept away your time in the field till the finances of the country were completely exhausted," Paine taunted Washington, "and you had but little share in the glory of the event." Had America relied on Washington's "cold and unmilitary conduct," Paine insisted, the commander-in-chief "would in all probability have lost America."

The Feuding Fathers

[JDPriestly]

1. So true! That is one of a number of reasons that the originalists

are just trying to fool us.

[lovemydog]

2. I love these kinds

of articles / essays. Thanks for sharing. The notion that they all got along and shared the exact same ideas is a myth. I think the idea was that they'd try and build a country that would benefit from the tensions inherent in vigorous debate. The results are mixed. But overall, I think, pretty good.