A few good men
A Review by Gary L. McDowell

Ten days before his death on July 4, 1826, Thomas Jefferson wrote his last letter, declining the invitation to participate in the celebrations to be held in the nation's capital to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. That his health kept him from joining "the rejoicings of that day", marking the Declaration's place in urging all mankind to seek the "blessings and security of self-government", was a great disappointment. Nothing would have pleased him more, he said, than to have been once again in the company of that "host of worthies" with whom he had served in bringing about America's Independence.

When Jefferson's closest friend and collaborator, James Madison, sat down to write a preface to his notes on the debates of the constitutional convention of 1787, he remembered his colleagues similarly. "...(T)here never was a collection of men", he wrote, "who were more pure in their motives or more exclusively or anxiously devoted to the object committed to them, than were the members of the Federal Convention of 1787 to the object of devising...a constitutional system which should...best secure the permanent liberty and happiness of their country."

Jefferson and Madison have not been alone in their admiring assessment of their generation. Indeed, it would be hard to think of another era that produced such a collection of "worthies" as did late eighteenth-century America. At any moment in a nation's history such figures as Samuel Adams, John Adams, Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Richard Henry Lee, or Alexander Hamilton (in addition to Jefferson and Madison themselves) would have been individually stunning; that they all emerged at the same time, working together — or often against each other — in creating the American republic is simply astonishing.

In one sense, the American founding can be understood as the period bracketed by Jefferson's immortal Declaration and Madison's enduring Constitution, twelve years of high principle and low politics; of conflicting theories and conflicting personalities; of intrigue, cabal, faction, patriotism and statesmanship. In A Leap in the Dark, however, John Ferling (who has here proved himself the master narrator of this great political tale) shows that to understand the whole story one has to go back to the beginning, before the Declaration of Independence, when the first sparks of Revolutionary fervour began to glow. So, too, he insists, must one look beyond the ratification of the Constitution, for the true success of the American founding is in how the new government got up and running.

A Leap in the Dark begins in 1754 with the failed Albany Plan of Union among the colonies; it concludes with the inauguration of Thomas Jefferson as President in 1801, signalling the peaceful transfer of power between bitterly divided parties — albeit only after a protracted and acrimonious election that was finally decided by the House of Representatives after thirty-five deadlocked ballots. Over the course of this nearly half-century of struggle, two questions had come to dominate American politics: what was the proper relationship of the colonies, later states, to each other and thus to some sort of national union; and what was the true meaning of republican government, acknowledged by all to have been the reason the American Revolution was fought in the first place? In the end, the answers given have produced fundamental tensions that have defined the American constitutional order, between the claims of a centralized and powerful national government with an extensive commercial economy on the one hand, and a nation of sovereign states with a focus on local governance and civic virtue on the other.

A Leap in the Dark is popular history at its best. Ferling has drawn together the research of the leading historians and woven a masterful narrative that is written with grace and flair. This is an account loaded with facts but unburdened by them; the result is a book that never gets bogged down. A gifted biographer, the author interrupts his narrative to introduce the major figures as each comes on the stage, bringing the history of these times to life with vivid descriptions and artful analyses of the interplay of men, their interests and their ideas. Displaying the Revolutionary machinations of such colonial leaders as Samuel Adams alongside the "cataclysmic fecklessness" of Britain's leadership in dealing with the American problem, Ferling shows how the "commitment to independence came on gradually as the hearts and minds of the colonists were transformed by the events of the turbulent eleven years that began in 1765". And then, with their victory over the British — against all odds — the Americans were confronted by the fact that they were not at all of one mind about what should come next. With independence came the struggle for constitutional definition that would eventually pit Hamilton's Federalists and their extensive commercial republic against Jefferson's Republicans and their abiding commitment to states' rights, and the belief that, when it comes to government, less is better.

Although A Leap in the Dark concludes with Jefferson's elevation to the Presidency, the working out of America's fundamental philosophical tensions did not stop with that election. Nor is Ferling simply correct in asserting that the Jeffersonian view of the ideals of the Revolution finally won the great intellectual tug of war. Indeed, it is not too much to say that in the long run America would become much more Hamiltonian than Jeffersonian. A big, energetic national government and an economy of extraordinary power and reach would, in time, become the order of the day. And as America passed through the tragedy of the Civil War and the uncertainty of the Great Depression, there would be less and less of the possibility of the kind of America Jefferson thought most in tune with the principles of the American Revolution. Each crisis brought in its wake a greater centralization of power and a firmer consolidation of the states into a national union.

The virtues of this book (and they are many) do not eclipse its central weakness. For John Ferling, what is most important in understanding this period is not so much the ideas about government, economics and law but rather how those ideas were little more than the reflection of the "economic considerations" and "personal interests, especially their pecuniary considerations" of those who espoused them. Thus, for just one example, James Madison — arguably the most gifted political theorist and defender of republican government of his day or any other — is reduced by the author to one of the "elites" (a favourite and overworked word in the book), whose political arguments were designed simply "to defend his class and his section". Such a reduction of ideas to economic interests (not dissimilar to the old and largely discredited economic theory of Charles Beard) does no service to the intellectual vitality that truly characterized the creation of the American republic. It was a leap, as Jefferson himself insisted, that was illuminated by the philosophical glow of the Enlightenment.

Gary L. McDowell is Professor of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Richmond, Virginia.