Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790)
Often referred to as “The First American,” Franklin was a genius
of
incomparable breadth. The fifteenth among seventeen children of a
working class Boston family (his father was a soap and candle maker),
young Ben was forced to quit school at ten and was almost entirely
self-educated. At 12, he began working as an apprentice printer under
his abrasive older brother James. At 17, after being accused of libel
for printing a series of his own satirical writings, Franklin set off,
practically penniless, for Philadelphia where his staggering array of
latent talents soon began to unfold: Printer. Writer. Inventor.
Satirist. Humorist. Philosopher. Scientist. Businessman. Teacher.
Mentor. Postmaster. Inventor of the lightning rod, bifocal glasses, the
odometer, the flexible catheter, the Franklin stove, etc. Father of
electro-physics. Mapper of Atlantic Trade Currents. In his spare time
he taught swimming, played the violin, harp, guitar, and invented the
glass harmonica (an instrument that became so popular that Mozart,
Beethoven, Donizetti, Strauss and Saint-Saëns all composed works for
it.)
A voracious reader and life long bibliophile, he taught himself Greek,
Latin, French, Spanish and Italian. He formed important Junto political
reading groups, as well as the first American Philosophical Society,
the first public lending library and the first volunteer fire
department.
More pertinent to his credentials as a founder, Franklin organized the
Albany Convention in 1754 where his “Albany Plan of Union” put
forth
the first plan of confederation for the American Colonies. As
Ambassador to England, he became the patron of Tom Paine and sponsored
Paine’s emigration to Philadelphia, where they both became prime
movers
of the Revolution. As a key member of the Continental Congress, he was
on the committee that produced the Declaration of Independence. Later,
from 1776-1785, he served as Ambassador to France where (in addition to
being a resident scientist, philosopher and socialite) he secured vital
French support for the Revolution, as well as providing a letter of
introduction for the Marquis de Lafayette to George Washington.
In his “dotage,” Franklin was a staunch advocate for public
education,
peace ambassador to England, author of his famous “Autobiography,”
father of the University of Pennsylvania, president of the Pennsylvania
Abolitionist Society, and, at 81, the oldest delegate at the
Constitutional Convention.
George Washington (1732 - 1799)
George Washington was a farmer, soldier, surveyor, land-speculator,
plantation owner, Freemason, politician, patriot, general, mediator,
and, without opposition, was selected to be First President of the
United States.
The familiar image of Washington as humorless, stern and conservative
belies the fact that he had a great love of theater and splendid
attire. Tall and handsome, he cut a grand figure and always did his
best to stand out from the crowd. Washington started poor and married
rich---the widowed Martha Custis from one of Virginia’s wealthiest
plantation families. While Martha brought two children to the marriage,
Washington fathered no children of his own. He was a man of great
ambition for both wealth and reputation.
He was largely self-educated and self-cultivated. Of the six founders
included here, Washington alone lacked brilliance as a thinker, writer
and wit. His verbal disposition was taciturn, his word-style prosaic
and clunky. Without question he is most quoted from his Farewell
Address which, while undoubtedly expressing his thoughts and feelings,
was proofread by Jefferson and Madison and extensively edited by
Hamilton.
The following quotes offer some insight into the scarceness of
Washington quotations:
“It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.”
---Washington, letter to his niece, Harriet Washington, October 30,
1791
“It is best to be silent, for there is nothing more certain than that
it is at all times more easy to make enemies than friends.”
---Washington to his adopted grandson, quoted by Ron Chernow,
Alexander Hamilton, p. 279
“To persevere in one’s duty and be silent is the best answer to
calumny.”
---Washington, letter to William Livingston, December 7, 1779
“A slender acquaintance with the world must convince every man that
actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of his
friends.”
---Washington, letter to John Sullivan, dated December 15, 1779
Washington’s greatness was less for his words than for his
leadership,
courage and steadfast loyalty to liberty and union. While he was the
largest slave-holder and slave-trader of the founders, Washington
eventually came to regret slavery and was the only slave-owning founder
to set his slaves free at his death (and provide for the education of
their children as well).
John Adams (1735 - 1826)
John Adams came from old Puritan stock and grew up in rural Braintree,
Massachusetts. Largely self-taught, Adams was an avid reader. He balked
at early grooming for the clergy, and instead entered the law and
sought out an urban, cosmopolitan life. His marriage to Abigail Smith
was likely the most successful marriage of all the founders, not only
for themselves but as parents; their children including John Quincy
Adams, Sixth President of the United States. (Abigail Adams, in her own
right, was an intelligent, forward-thinking woman who had early
feminist tendencies and refused to be excluded from the affairs of the
nation.)
Adams was a strong proponent of both individual justice and public
order. These two prongs occasionally tangled him into antithetical
positions; notably in regard to Adams’ monarchal tendencies and in
his
responsibility for the Alien & Sedition Acts. On the other hand, an
example of these two propensities working together was apparent in
Adams’ legal representation of British troops after the Boston
Massacre, which Adams legally viewed as understandable self-defense
against a vicious mob despite his personal outrage against the
occupying Redcoats.
During the Continental Congress, Adams was easily its most
indefatigable member: he served on ninety committees and chaired
twenty-four!---and was also one of the committee of five that produced
the Declaration of Independence (with Jefferson, Franklin, Philip
Livingstone and Roger Sherman). Following the war, he became leader of
the Massachusetts Whigs and main author of the Massachusetts Constitution.
He served as ambassador to England, France and the Netherlands, and was
the first Vice-President and Second President of the United States.
Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826)
Jefferson was born of plantation wealth in rural Virginia. While he
never lost his love and respect for agrarian life, his obvious
brilliance led him to excellence in science, mathematics, language,
architecture, history, philosophy, writing and, intermittently,
political leadership. Author of the Declaration of Independence,
ambassador to France, member of the House of Burgesses and the
Continental Congress, he reluctantly became the leader of the
Republican (later Democratic-Republican) party, and served two terms as
Third President of the United States. In 1780, he joined Benjamin
Franklin's American Philosophical Society and served as the
society’s
president from 1797 to 1815.
“Jefferson's interests included archeology, a discipline then in its
infancy. He has sometimes been called the "father of archeology" in
recognition of his role in developing excavation techniques. When
exploring an Indian burial mound on his Virginia estate in 1784,
Jefferson avoided the common practice of simply digging downwards until
something turned up. Instead, he cut a wedge out of the mound so that
he could walk into it, look at the layers of occupation, and draw
conclusions from them.”
---Wikipedia
“Jefferson was a human kaleidoscope; the elements of his thought and
character assume different patterns and shadows from encounter to
encounter, crisis to crisis, moment to moment. It is no wonder that
generations of scholars have confessed bewilderment.”
---R. B. Bernstein, Thomas Jefferson, p. xv
“For two weeks after his inauguration, Jefferson stayed at his
boardinghouse near the Capitol and supped at the common table. Once in
the White House, the folksy president (who had been a fashion plate in
Paris) galloped through Washington on horseback, dispensed with wigs
and powdered hair, shuffled around in his slippers, fed his pet
mockingbird, and answered the doorbell himself. . .Only Jefferson
could have turned frumpy clothing into a resonant political
statement.”
---Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, p. 646
In 1962, at a dinner for 49 Nobel laureates, President John F. Kennedy
remarked that the event was "the most extraordinary collection of
talent, of human knowledge, that has ever gathered at the White House,
with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."
For his tomb, Jefferson chose this epitaph: “Here was buried Thomas
Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the
statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and father of the University
of Virginia.”
James Madison (1751 - 1836)
Madison was the runt of the Founders, not only because he was younger
than all but Hamilton, but also because he was barely over five feet, a
hundred pounds, and always in delicate health. Born to a wealthy
plantation owner, Madison had neither a disposition for business nor
clergy. Shy with both women and men, he became a bookworm, his
prodigious intellect turning him into a formidable scholar and legal
historian.
The twin catalysts of intensive college study and the rising campus
tumult over the incipient Revolution brought Madison out of his shell
and into public life where, mentored by George Mason and Thomas
Jefferson, his keen mind and writing style quickly brought him to the
fore. Unsuited to a soldier’s life, Madison nonetheless diligently
supported the Revolution behind the scenes as a member of Virginia
House of Burgesses, where he also later became principal author of
Virginia’s Constitution (from which the U.S. Constitution was largely
taken).
Teaming with (later rival) Alexander Hamilton, Madison co-organized
the Constitutional Convention and co-authored (with Hamilton and some
input by John Jay) the greatly influential Federalist Papers. Madison
also served as meticulous scribe of the Convention, as well as one of
its most active voices for combining republican principles with a
strong federal union. Later (with Jefferson), Madison co-founded the
Democratic-Republican Party and served two terms as Fourth President of
the United States.
Despite Madison’s size and frailty, he lived to be the last surviving
signer of the U.S. Constitution.
Alexander Hamilton (1755 - 1804)
Washington’s aide-de-camp in battle when he was only 21, Hamilton
was
a prodigy in every respect: socially adept, born to battle, a brilliant
thinker and writer; early-on Washington’s most trusted advisor,
co-author of the Federalist Papers, the earliest and most vehement voice
for a federal union. Born out of wedlock in 1755 on the Danish island
of St. Croix, his mother was a “fallen woman,” his father a
ne’re-do-well
drifter of an aristocratic Scottish family. Ron Chernow, in Alexander
Hamilton (p. 26), portrays the early plight of Hamilton (and his
brother James) this way:
“Let us pause briefly to tally the grim catalogue of disasters
that
had befallen these two boys between 1765 and 1769: their father had
vanished, their mother had died, their cousin and supposed protector
had committed bloody suicide, and their aunt, uncle and grandmother had
all died. James, sixteen and Alexander, fourteen, were now left alone,
largely friendless and penniless. At every step in their rootless,
topsy-turvy existence, they had been surrounded by failed, broken,
embittered people. Their short lives had been shadowed by a stupefying
sequence of bankruptcies, marital separations, deaths, scandals and
disinheritance. Such repeated shocks must have stripped Alexander
Hamilton of any sense that life was fair, that he existed in a benign
universe, or that he could ever count on help from anyone. That this
abominable childhood produced such a strong, productive, self-reliant
human being---that this fatherless adolescent could have ended up a
founding father of a country he had not yet even seen---seems little
short of miraculous.”
Says biographer Chernow (Alexander Hamilton, p. 640): “Hamilton was a
quintessentially urban man, who preferred to commune with books, not
running brooks. The other founders---Washington, Jefferson, Madison,
Adams---had plantations or substantial farms from which they had drawn
financial and spiritual sustenance, while Hamilton had remained a city
dweller, harnessed to his work.”
Hamilton’s genius, fortitude and self-confidence was often mixed
with
his distrust of altruism and democracy, deep belief in self-interest
and ambition, his unsteady perches between loyalty and betrayal, honor
and corruption, public service and personal power, republicanism and
monarchy. After stomping out of the Constitution Convention (because
his draft version had been rejected), he returned to assist in the
writing of the final draft, then went on to become the First Secretary of the
Treasury, architect of the national banking system, leader and voice of the
Federalist Party.
There are wholly legitimate reasons for calling him the “Father of
American Capitalism,” as well as the “Father of the American Party
System.”
Hamilton was caught between great forces his entire life, from his
Dickensian childhood, through his Horatio Alger youth and loving but
scandalously unfaithful marriage, to his boom-to-bust tragic end when
he was killed in a duel at the hand of former Vice-President Aaron
Burr.
