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Book: Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
Quotes of Book: Founding Brothers: The
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  1. Joseph J. Ellis _ Founding Brothers: The

    Only ten years after the passage and ratification of the Constitution, however, what were treasonable or seditious acts remained blurry and more problematic judgments without the historical sanction that only experience could provide. Lacking a consensus on what the American Revolution had intended and what the Constitution had settled, Federalists and Republicians alike were afloat in a sea of mutual accusations and partisan interpretations. The center could not hold necausemit did not exist.
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  2. Joseph J. Ellis _ Founding Brothers: The

    {T}he revolutionary generation found a way to contain the explosive energies of the debate in the form of an ongoing argument or dialogue that was eventually institutionalized and rendered safe by the creation of political parties."
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  3. Joseph J. Ellis _ Founding Brothers: The

    Throughout most of his life, Washington's physical vigor had been one of his most priceless assets. A notch below six feet four and slightly above two hundred pounds, he was a full head taller than his male contemporaries. {John Adams claimed that the reason Washington was invariably selected to lead every national effort was that he was always the tallest man in the room.} A detached description of his physical features would have made him sound like an ugly, misshapen oaf: pockmarked face, decayed teeth, oversized eye sockets, massive nose, heavy in the hips, gargantuan hands and feet. But somehow, when put together and set in motion, the full package conveyed sheer majesty. As one of his biographers put it, his body did not just occupy space; it seemed to organize the space around it. He dominated a room not just with his size, but with an almost electric presence. "He has so much martial dignity in his deportment," observed Benjamin Rush, "that there is not a king in Europe but would look like a valet de chambre by his side."10 Not only did bullets and shrapnel seem to veer away from his body in battle, not only did he once throw a stone over the Natural Bridge in the Shenandoah Valley, which was 215 feet high, not only was he generally regarded as the finest horseman in Virginia, the rider who led the pack in most fox hunts, he also possessed for most of his life a physical constitution that seemed immune to disease or injury. Other soldiers came down with frostbite after swimming ice-choked rivers. Other statesmen fell by the wayside, lacking the stamina to handle the relentless political pressure. Washington suffered none of these ailments. Adams said that Washington had "the gift of taciturnity," meaning he had an instinct for the eloquent silence. This same principle held true on the physical front. His medical record was eloquently empty.11
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  4. Joseph J. Ellis _ Founding Brothers: The

    First, the achievement of the revolutionary generation was a collective enterprise that succeeded because of the diversity of personalities and ideologies present in the mix. Their interactions and juxtapositions generated a dynamic form of balance and equilibrium, not because any of them was perfect or infallible, but because their mutual imperfections and fallibilities, as well as their eccentricities and excesses, checked each other in much the way that Madison in Federalist 10 claimed that multiple factions would do in a large republic.
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  5. Joseph J. Ellis _ Founding Brothers: The

    They are, from this period, to be considered as Actors on a most conspicuous Theatre, which seems to be peculiarly designated by Providence for the display of human greatness and felicity.
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  6. Joseph J. Ellis _ Founding Brothers: The

    The five Pillars of Aristocracy," he argued, "are Beauty, Wealth, Birth, Genius and Virtues. Any one of the three first, can at any time, over bear any one or both of the two last.
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  7. Joseph J. Ellis _ Founding Brothers: The

    The Adams presidency, in fact, might be the classic example of the historical truism that inherited circumstances define the parameters within which presidential leadership takes shape, that history shapes presidents, rather than vice versa.
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  8. Joseph J. Ellis _ Founding Brothers: The

    Though many historians have taken a compromise or split-the-different position over the ensuing years, the basic choice has remained constant, as historians have declared themselves Jeffersonian or Hamiltonians, committed individualists or dedicated nationalists, liberals or conservatives
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  9. Joseph J. Ellis _ Founding Brothers: The

    Upon learning that Washington intended to reject the mantle of emperor, no less an authority than George III allegedly observed, "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world." True to his word, on December 22, 1783, Washington surrendered his commission to the Congress, then meeting in Annapolis: "Having now finished the work assigned me," he announced, "I now retire from the great theater of action." In so doing, he became the supreme example of the leader who could be trusted with power because he was so ready to give it up.20
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  10. Joseph J. Ellis _ Founding Brothers: The

    the all-time master of exits wanted to make his final departure from the public stage the occasion for explaining his own version of what the American Revolution meant. Above all, it meant hanging together as a united people, much as the Continental Army had hung together once before, so that those who were making foreign policy into a divisive device in domestic politics, all in the name of America's revolutionary principles, were themselves inadvertently subverting the very cause they claimed to champion. He was stepping forward into the battle one final time, planting his standard squarely in the center of the field, inviting the troops to rally around him rather than wander off in romantic cavalry charges at the periphery, assuring them by his example that, if they could only hold the position he defined, they would again prevail."
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  11. Joseph J. Ellis _ Founding Brothers: The

    a lifelong disciple of Lord Chesterfield's maxim that a gentleman was free to do anything he pleased as long as he did it with style.
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  12. Joseph J. Ellis _ Founding Brothers: The

    Perhaps, in that eerily instinctive way in which he always grasped the difference between the essential and the peripheral, he literally felt in his bones that another term as president meant that he would die in office. By retiring when he did, he avoided that fate, which would have established a precedent that smacked of monarchical longevity by permitting biology to set the terminus of his tenure. Our obsession with the two-term precedent obscures the more elemental principle established by Washington's voluntary retirement-namely, that the office would routinely outlive the occupant, that the American presidency was fundamentally different from a European monarchy, that presidents, no matter how indispensable, were inherently disposable.
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