thesis of founding brothers?

Question

i am horrendously puzzled by this book, and i have to read it for AP US History extra credit.

i don't really understand this book, and although i know that the thesis is in the preface, i don't really know which sentence it is. is the thesis that the United states is not as much of a foregone conclusion as it is today? or is it that the tension between states rights and centralized federal power has never gone away since the very beginning, and that it is this tension that truly represents the federal intent?

although that there were voices back then urging prospective patriots to regard american independence as an early version of the manifest destiny, it was clearly unsuccessful. so, should people rule together and not have power concentrated on one place? thomas paine said that an island cannot rule a continent.

i am so puzzled.

please help!

thank you.

Answer 1

I think (hope) you'll find your answer in the following clips --

"the shape and character of the political institutions [of the new republic] were determined by a relatively small number of leaders who knew each other, who collaborated and collided with one another in patterns that replicated at the level of personality and ideology the principle of checks and balances embedded structurally in the Constitution. . . . They created the American republic, then held it together throughout the volatile and vulnerable early years. . . "

"There are two long-established ways to tell the story, both expressions of the political factions and ideological camps of the revolutionary era itself." [p. 13]

"With the American Revolution, as with all revolutions, different factions came together in common cause to overthrow the reigning regime, then discovered in the aftermath of their triumph that they had fundamentally different and politically incompatible notions of what they intended. In the dizzying events that comprises the political history of the 1790s, the full range of their disagreements was exposed and their different agenda for the United States collided head-on. . . .

"What distinguishes the American Revolution from most, if not all, subsequent revolutions worthy of the name is that in the battle for supremacy, for the "true meaning" of the Revolution, neither side completely triumphed. . . . the 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 . . . . the key point is that the debate was not resolved so much as built into the fabric or our national identity."
[pp. 15-16]

[He introduces this set of stories of the 'eight most prominent political leaders of the early republic', as featuring several common themes, of which he lists four, beginning thus:]
"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."
[p.17]

NOTE the importance of the PERSONAL interactions of these key players in making it all "work" (success was NOT 'inevitable', as Ellis argues at the beginning of his introduction)
_____________________

Perhaps the following clip from a posted book review will help put these pieces together:

The anchor of the book is the relationships between the most prominent members of the Revolutionary Generation. . . . and the ways these relationships played out at crucial moments in the early history of the country. Ellis's thesis is that the American Revolution was held together ultimately as much by personal bonds as by political ideology, that in fact personal bonds were sometimes all that stood between stability and the violent storms that conflicting ideologies can produce. In this, the American Revolution differed from its successors, the French and Russian Revolutions, in which personal bonds were severed or nonexistent in the first place, and in Ellis's words, where the revolutions "devour[ed] their own." . . . **
http://www.dealtime.com/xPR-Founding_Brothers_The_Revolutionary_Generation_by_Joseph_J_Ellis~RD-32342707844


**note that most of this is based on the clip I included from p. 15 above