Roger G. Kennedy, Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson: A Study in Character (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, n.p.). Pp. 476. isbn o 19 513055 3.
Stuart Leibiger, Founding Friendship : George Washington, James Madison, and the Creation of the American Republic (Charlottesville, VA and London: University Press of Virginia, 1999, $35.00).
This review first appeared in the Journal of American Studies 35, no. 2 (August 2001), 355-356.
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Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson: A Study in Character
Roger G. Kennedy
Founding Friendship: George Washington, James Madison, and the Creation of the American Republic
Stuart Leibiger
Reviewed by Michael A. McDonnell, University of Sydney
Together with the current media frenzy surrounding the Sally Hemings-Thomas Jefferson controversy, these two books help show that veneration for, or at least an obsessive interest in, the "founding fathers" is alive and well, both in the academic and public spheres. But, whereas the debate over Jefferson's relationship with Hemings, for all its faults and heated claims, has helped open a wider discussion on issues of race and gender in the early Republic, these two books are grounded firmly in the past and keep their focus solely on the "Great Men" themselves. Both books are concerned with the lives, and more especially the characters and relationships, of and between some of the principle, if not most prominent, Founding Fathers. Both tread very familiar historical ground, though each attempts to weave a previously unknown, or unappreciated strand in the supposedly well-known story. Both are disappointing, though for different reasons. Rather curiously, Roger Kennedy, in his attempt to rehabilitate the "reputation" of Aaron Burr, resorts to a level of character-bashing that could make his book required reading for presidential hopefuls today. In the absence of any decent archival materials on Burr (his correspondence was largely lost at sea, with his daughter), Kennedy pieces together a heap of anecdotal and circumstantial evidence in defense of Burr and his alleged failings, whilst at the same time amassing enough of the same kind of evidence to suggest that both Hamilton and Jefferson were as equally flawed, if not more so, than Burr. The most common example of the kind of evidence used is the author's constant comparisons of the characters of various acquaintances and friends of the protagonists of the story. On this score, Burr apparently comes out ahead, as he does on most of the assessments designed by the author. The bottom line Burr was not really so bad, especially when compared to Jefferson and Hamilton, who have both benefited from over-inflated reputations which have, in the main, been constructed by themselves. At the very least, given that Burr, Hamilton and Jefferson was written with a wider public audience in mind, it might have been expected that the book would make for an enjoyable and even exciting read. On the contrary, over the 400 plus pages, and from the opening section, the book rambles slowly back and forth between the protagonists and over time, with anecdotal digressions marring the clarity of the story still further. The book follows the author's intellectual odyssey rather too closely, and the reader is made to suffer through the inevitable contradictions, repetitions, and digressions that Kennedy's approach entails. Judicious editing, and a more careful organisation would have helped immensely. Kennedy's book certainly is convincing on the point that Burr's reputation does indeed warrant some rehabilitation; that this book is the final and convincing word on that point is much further from certain. Founding Friendship, on the other hand, seems to err too much on the side of careful organisation, and Stuart Leibiger's assumption that the Madison-Washington collaboration has been "neglected" by historians is a rather less convincing starting premise. Attempting to reconstruct the relationship between Madison and Washington and establish its importance to the early Republic, Stuart Leibiger felt compelled to follow the two Virginians from their first documented thoughts of each other, in 1775, through to their bitter estrangement and the death of Washington. Leibiger, well-versed in "friendship theory," is rather overly interested in charting the phases of their friendship from "unfamiliar or peripheral" to "effective" to "intimate" and through its subsequent decline. He does this to answer "important" questions that historians have supposedly missed. These include: "what did each man get out of the relationship? Were they equal partners... whom was the friendship more important? Did each man perceive their interaction in the same way? What can we learn about these men by studying their friendship?" This might all be very important, but for a book that purports to be about the "most indispensable collaboration in the creation of the American Republic," these questions provide a flawed basis upon which to prove the thesis. Because of this focus, and especially the time taken to document the budding relationship, Leibiger fails to convince on what he feels was at least as important, the impact the relationship had on the events of the 1780s and 1790s. Madison undoubtedly played a role in helping Washington establish an appropriate presidential etiquette; and their relationship seems indispensable in the founding of Washington D.C. on the banks of the Potomac. Yet beyond the interesting point that Madison and Washington seemed to have collaborated well and for good practical reasons at a critical point in the creation of the American Republic, the book adds little to what has already been said about the events and ideas of this period. The author acknowledges as much when he notes in his introduction that "many" Madison scholars have acknowledged the existence and impact of the friendship. In the end, both these books remain unconvincing because they both suffer from the authors' excessive interest in the personal lives of the "founding” fathers." Interestingly, whereas Kennedy's book gets mired in the effort to document every indiscretion and comment that might throw some discredit on the characters of his protagonists, Leibiger's book is marred by a blithe lack of awareness of or interest in the character flaws of his principal actors. In the process, both books also virtually ignore the rest of the population who were there at the founding as well, and upon whom most of the scholarship of the last thirty years has been focused. Fortunately, we have had this scholarship and the descendants of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson to remind us that biographers of the "founding fathers" ignore them at their peril.