Gordon S. Wood Remains My Ace Guru on the Founders

The Idea of America is Gordon Woods' latest in a stream of wonderful writings on the American Revolution and all its pomps and works, so to speak. I carry around a paperback copy of his Revolutionary Characters in my backpack to avoid "People Magazine" if I am stranded waiting in a Doc's office or somewhere.

I also believe Ron Chernow and David Hackett Fischer are superb writers and can evoke the personality and the temporal environment of the Founders as well as anyone. David McCullough's John Adams and 1776 are both outstanding chronicles of great founders.

All in all, I've read about a dozen excellent histories of the French and Indian War, the Revolutionary War, the run-up to the Coinstitutional Convention, and biographies of several of the principals, including Chernow's two masterpieces on George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, perhaps my favorite Founder after "The Father of Our Country."

Woods and McCullough have more or less convinced me, along with Dumas Malone [though in Malone's case, unintentionally] that Thomas Jefferson is highly if not vastly over-rated. He was erected in the late Twenties and Thirties as a counterpart to the Republican icon of Hamilton and much froth has been ginned up on his behalf historically by hagiographical Democrats to buttress him as some sort of a "permanent revolutiony." He turns out to have been a man of questionable moral character, unable to pay his debts or free his slaves at death, as he so often promised. And his much vaunted statements on separation of Church and State have been blown out of proportion---he was perhaps as mc a believer as he was an agnostic, and one is left with the feeling thatg sometimes he himself was unsure of just what he DID believe.

Finally, I am getting a growing respect for James Madison, the diminuitive consumptive Archtitect of the Constitution, whom Chernow describes vividly in his biography of Washington as spending weeks at Mount Vernon lobbying the Great Man to accompany him to Philadelphia to induce a quorum of all thirteen colonies to send representatives to mend the awful Articles of Confederation---with the hidden agenda to do a complete redo of the Articles into a wholly new federal compact. Although both Madison and Jefferson suffered from less than glorious presidencies, neither had the horrific the otherwise great John Adams experienced, as he fought off the insanity of the XYZ affair.

Woods in his description of Hamilton in Revolutionary Characters mentions offhand that the crafty old fox Talleyrand counted Hamilton, whom he got to know well during his two-year-plus stay in America during the height of the Terror Phase of the French Revolution, as the greatest statesman of the Age, greater than Napoleon or Pitt. This judgment the old crippled bishop Talleyrand arrived at at the end of a long and eventful career. Sadly, Woods does not have a citation for this revealing remark.

With the exception of a few occasional lapses like that of Talleyrand's citation, Woods remains the dean of the new school of Revolutionary authors whose scholarship is giving us a much wider and greater understanding of the turbulent era of our country's bloody founding.