‘Founding Partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics’
By H.W. Brands
Doubleday, 464 pages

By the end of George Washington’s first term as president, American democracy was in peril. So thought all the founding partisans in this timely, if well-worn, story that H.W. Brands refreshes in his lively narrative.

Thomas Jefferson treated Alexander Hamilton, his Federalist opponent and Cabinet colleague, as a closet monarchist bent on transforming the new democracy into a centralist state at the mercy of bankers and urban oligopolies.

James Madison, once one of one Washington’s closest advisors, entrusted with composing the president’s first term farewell address (before he decided on a second term), was alienated by Washington’s Federalist tendencies and his closeness to Hamilton.

After Washington’s retirement in 1797, John Adams’s enforcement of the Alien and Sedition Acts abridging free speech turned Jefferson, once a friend, against him. Hamilton, a member of Adams’s political party, could not abide his colleague’s officiousness. Adams rejected Hamilton, deeming him an immoral schemer publicly exposed as an adulterer.

Hamilton so disliked Adams that he was willing to countenance a Jefferson presidency in 1800. Better to see the country go to ruin under a leader who had at least some respect for democratic norms, even if he went way too far in relying on the popular will. Hamilton also sided with Jefferson because he believed that Aaron Burr, tied with Jefferson for the presidency in the electoral vote, was even more of a scoundrel than Jefferson.

Madison remained allied to Jefferson, but sometimes at the cost of reneging on the principles Madison had advocated during ratification of the Constitution — switching, for example, to a skepticism of large republics as a form of government that he had earlier favored, and supporting the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of 1798, later used as arguments for secession.

What made these founding partisans so paranoid? Whatever their differences, they knew democracy was a fragile form of government, and each of them believed that the people and their parties were susceptible to their leaders’ subversion of democratic principles in order to attain power.

Washington, who twice ran unopposed for the presidency — and who did not campaign, let alone scheme for the office — kept the lid on, so to speak, that was bound to pop off as soon as ambitious politicians with differences of opinion ran for the highest office.

What would happen after Washington retired from office vexed everyone. Anyone who succeeded “His Excellency,” as he was called, would seem a compromised candidate, and Adams, with no military experience and who had trouble accommodating political opponents, ensured continued partisanship.

As Mr. Brands shows, doubts about American political leadership coincided with skepticism about the Constitution — even by those, like Jefferson, who supported its ratification. An alarmed Jefferson wrote to Madison about the provision for the re-election of a president. There would be no removing a determined incumbent, Jefferson argued: “If once elected and at a second or third election out voted by one or two votes, he will pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government, be supported by the states voting for him.” 

Mr. Brands has a genius for plotting out real events; a novelist could hardly do better. After recounting so much political acrimony, so many suspicions about the motives of opposing parties and their adherents, near the end of book, a remarkable scene emerges in which partisanship gives way to the empathy of biography, when Margaret Smith arrives at Washington, the new national capital, with her Republican husband. 

Smith’s Federalist friends described Jefferson as an “ambitious and violent demagogue, coarse and vulgar in his manner, awkward and rude in appearance.” 

Then he came to her home unannounced, identifying himself as simply a gentleman who wanted to see her husband: “he turned toward me a countenance beaming with an expression of benevolence and with a manner and voice almost femininely soft and gentle, entered into conversation on the commonplace topics of the day, from which, before I was conscious of it, he had drawn me into observations of a more personal and interested nature.” 

She now believed her destiny was secure with such a sympathetic sensibility.

As usual, Mr. Brands makes no comment, for he knows it would be bootless to do so.  

Mr. Rollyson, author of “American Biography” is at work on “Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History.”