Founding Partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics

Brands, H. W.

ISBN 10: 0593469038 / ISBN 13: 9780593469033

Published by Random House, 2024

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 18401706009

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Founding Partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics
• Publisher: Random House
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593469038
• ISBN 13: 9780593469033
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

From bestselling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H.W. Brands, a revelatory history of the shocking emergence of vicious political division at the birth of the United States.

To the framers of the Constitution, political parties were a fatal threat to republican virtues. They had suffered the consequences of partisan politics in Britain before the American Revolution, and they wanted nothing similar for America. Yet parties emerged even before the Constitution was ratified, and they took firmer root in the following decade. In Founding Partisans, master historian H. W. Brands has crafted a fresh and lively narrative of the early years of the republic as the Founding Fathers fought one another with competing visions of what our nation would be.

The first party, the Federalists, formed around Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and their efforts to overthrow the Articles of Confederation and make the federal government more robust. Their opponents organized as the Antifederalists, who feared the corruption and encroachments on liberty that a strong central government would surely bring. The Antifederalists lost but regrouped under the new Constitution as the Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson, whose bruising contest against Federalist John Adams marked the climax of this turbulent chapter of American political history. 

The country’s first years unfolded in a contentious spiral of ugly elections and blatant violations of the Constitution. Still, peaceful transfers of power continued, and the nascent country made its way towards global dominance, against all odds. Founding Partisans is a powerful reminder that fierce partisanship is a problem as old as the republic.

About the Author

H. W. BRANDS holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written more than a dozen biographies and histories, including The General vs. the President, a New York Times bestseller, and Our First Civil War, his most recent book. Two of his biographies, The First American and Traitor to His Class, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.