Joseph Ellis On The Founding Fathers

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George Washington

We have an intriguing interview with best-selling author and historian Joseph Ellis, whose latest book “The Quartet” has just been released in paperback.

Ellis writes that many Americans have a mistaken belief that the signing of the Declaration of Independence marked the beginning of our coming together as a nation. He argues that nothing could be further from the truth; that even after the Declaration was approved; most of the Founding Fathers favored allowing each of the 13 colonies to operate as independent nation-states bound only by the loosest of confederations. He points out that the colonists had just declared independence from a ruling monarch and the last thing they wanted was to be bound by another central ruling force.

In “The Quartet,” Ellis says it was four visionary leaders – George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison – who believed passionately in the need for the colonies to be bound together and led by a federal government. His book describes how the four outliers struggled at the Constitutional Convention to win over the skeptics and eventually convince them that their vision was essential to the success of the American experiment.