BOOKS OF THE TIMES
BOOKS OF THE TIMES; In the Course of Human Events, Lady Luck Had a Role
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: November 14, 2000
The Revolutionary Generation
By Joseph J. Ellis
288 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.
In the wake of last week's unsettling events, we tend to look back nostalgically on the era of the founding fathers as one of farsighted judiciousness and providential wisdom. In retrospect, we tend to endow the American Revolution and the founding fathers' establishment of a representative government based on the principles of popular sovereignty with a certain air of inevitability. Tom Paine, after all, declared that it was simply a matter of common sense that an island could not rule a continent, and in the years since America's birth its political ideals have been emulated, with varying degrees of success, around the world.
Yet as the historian Joseph J. Ellis points out in his compelling new book, the achievement of the American Revolution was considerably more improbable at the time. ''The British army and navy constituted the most powerful military force in the world,'' he writes, and ''no republican government prior to the American Revolution, apart from a few Swiss cantons and Greek city-states, had ever survived for long, and none had ever been tried over a land mass as large as the 13 colonies.''
''No one present at the start knew how it would turn out in the end,'' he goes on. ''What in retrospect has the look of a foreordained unfolding of God's will was in reality an improvisational affair in which sheer chance, pure luck -- both good and bad -- and specific decisions made in the crucible of specific military and political crises determined the outcome.''
What Mr. Ellis proposes to do in his new book, ''Founding Brothers,'' is to look at some of the political crises that began to erupt in the 1790's, that crucial decade, following the Constitutional Convention, in which precedents for the new nation were established and the legacy of the Revolution was debated. He chooses to do this not in any systematic or comprehensive manner, but by focusing on a half-dozen political personages (John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr) and a handful of revealing episodes that would test their convictions and friendships.
This technique of course was unashamedly borrowed from Lytton Strachey's classic study, ''Eminent Victorians,'' in which the author said he rowed out over a ''great ocean of material'' and lowered into it ''a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen.'' In the case of ''Founding Brothers,'' it results in a lively and illuminating, if somewhat arbitrary book that leaves the reader with a visceral sense of a formative era in American life.
It is an era that Mr. Ellis describes as having ''no equal in American history'' in terms of ''shrill accusatory rhetoric, flamboyant displays of ideological intransigence, intense personal rivalries and hyperbolic claims of imminent catastrophe,'' an interesting and in some ways reassuring observation, given the bizarre and inconclusive fallout of last week's election.
Just why were the years following the constitutional settlement of 1787-88 so vociferous? To begin with, the states and geographic regions making up the new nation had no common history apart from the Revolution; and there was no national consensus on the legacy of the Revolution or the ramifications of the Constitution.
On one side were the Federalists (led by Hamilton, Washington and in a more qualified role, Adams), who saw ''the true spirit of '76 as the virtuous surrender of personal, state and sectional interests to the larger purposes of American nationhood, first embodied in the Continental Army and later in the newly established federal government.'' On the other side were republicans (led by Jefferson with an assist from Madison), who saw the Revolution as ''a liberation movement,'' and who regarded the Federalists' policies as a plot to steal the government from the American people.
These conflicting attitudes toward governance were exacerbated by the fact that the political culture of the day did not accommodate the notion of a legitimate opposition, that in Mr. Ellis's words, ''neither side possessed the verbal or mental capacity to regard the other as anything but treasonable.''
It was in this heightened atmosphere, Mr. Ellis notes, that Burr and Hamilton played out their fateful 1804 duel in New Jersey, a duel that resulted in Hamilton's death and the swift demise of Burr's reputation. It was in this heightened atmosphere that Jefferson vilified John Adams, sponsoring propaganda he knew to be based on lies against his old friend's administration. And it was in this heightened atmosphere that Washington, under fire in his second term as president for having made himself into ''a quasi-king,'' announced that he was retiring, thereby declaring ''that his deepest allegiances, like those of his critics, were thoroughly republican.''
So heated were the era's political tensions -- between advocates of federal and state sovereignty, between agrarian and commercial interests, between competing regional priorities -- that many of the country's leaders feared for the infant nation's survival. This is why, Mr. Ellis suggests, the Compromise of 1790 was engineered, allowing Hamilton's Federalist fiscal program to pass, while giving Southerners the assurance that the nation's new capital would be constructed on the Potomac River. And this is why the even more explosive question of slavery was simply taken off the table.
Although many of the nation's leaders agreed that slavery was antithetical to the egalitarian principles of the American Revolution, they concurred that it should be considered a taboo subject, at least for the time being. Given the secessionist threats of South Carolina and Georgia, Mr. Ellis writes, they believed that the question of abolition ''possessed the political potential to destroy the union'' -- a conviction that would be underscored seven decades later when postponement of the debate erupted into the Civil War.
Certainly it's easy for the reader to quibble with some of Mr. Ellis's conclusions. He argues, for instance, that ''one would be hard-pressed to discover a presidency more dominated by a single foreign policy problem and simultaneously more divided domestically over how to solve it'' than that of John Adams -- an observation that conveniently ignores the travails, say, that Lyndon B. Johnson suffered over Vietnam.
Despite such oversights, Mr. Ellis does an admirable job of conveying the mood of the young American republic, and he uses the skills honed in his last two books -- fiercely intelligent biographies of Adams (''Passionate Sage'') and Jefferson (''American Sphinx'') -- to give us some vivid portraits of the revolutionary generation. He has written a shrewd, insightful book, less a conventional work of history than a series of strobe-lighted snapshots of a historical era and its illustrious and less-than-illustrious leaders.
Photo: Joseph J. Ellis (Jim Gipe/Alfred A. Knopf)