Lives of the Founders

In “An Incautious Man”, historian Melanie Miller provides a succinct but sophisticated recounting of the life of one of our lesser-known but most engaging Founding Fathers: Gouverneur Morris. One of George Washington's "surrogate sons," Morris played a profound role in ensuring the success of the American Revolution and the creation of the Constitution. Miller provides readers a look behind the closed doors of the Constitutional Convention, where Morris's crystalline but passionate eloquence gave the debate a vitality that remains both enthralling and keenly meaningful for those of us whose lives have been decisively shaped by the results of that deliberation. In 1792, Morris replaced Thomas Jefferson as the American minister to France. His experience there during the Terror is unparalleled in diplomatic history. As Miller tells it, Morris's time in France is a story of conspiracy to help the king escape, of friends imprisoned and murdered, of seized ships and complex problems that had no precedent in the young nation's history. Upon his return to the U.S., Morris served a brief stint in the Senate before going on to secure the building of the Erie Canal and to direct the design of the Manhattan network of streets we know today.

Next only to Continental army commander General George Washington, Nathanael Greene was the most important American general of the War for Independence. Self-taught but extraordinarily capable, Greene won few battles. But his campaign that won the South for the revolutionary cause was the most brilliant and daring of the entire war. In “Rise and Fight Again”, award-winning military historian Spencer Tucker tells the story of Greene's rise from relative obscurity to military prominence at the tender age of thirty-two. He reveals Greene to have been a strict disciplinarian who insisted on rigorous training but was also deeply concerned for the welfare of his men. Tucker also shows that Greene was by nature a problem-solver who recognized talent and knew how to harness it effectively. Indeed, although Greene was the youngest general in his army, Washington assigned him the herculean task of serving as its quartermaster general. Greene proved so effective in this demanding assignment that in October 1780 he was given command of the Southern Department. Taking charge of a sharply depleted, dispirited force lacking all manner of military equipment and even clothing, Greene refused to be drawn into pitched battles save on favorable terms. He rebuilt the Southern army in less than a year and adopted daring tactics that defied conventional military wisdom but recaptured from British control most of the Carolinas and Georgia. Greene has rarely been accorded his earned place in the history of the American founding, in part because of his early death in 1786, when he was just forty-three. But with Tucker's brief but masterful biography, Greene finally gets his due.

The Anti-Federalist Luther Martin of Maryland is known to us, if he is known at all, as the wild man of the Constitutional Convention: a verbose, frequently drunken radical who annoyed the hell out of James Madison, George Washington, Gouverneur Morris, and the other giants responsible for the creation of the Constitution in Philadelphia that summer of 1787. In Bill Kauffman's rollicking account of his turbulent life and times, Martin is still something of a fitfully charming reprobate, but he is also a prophetic voice, warning his heedless contemporaries and his amnesiac posterity that the Constitution, whatever its devisers' intentions, would come to be used as a blueprint for centralized government and a militaristic foreign policy. In Martin's view, the Constitution was the tool of a counterrevolution aimed at reducing the states to ciphers and at fortifying a national government whose powers to tax and coerce would be frightening. Martin delivered the most forceful and sustained attack on the Constitution ever levied, a critique that modern readers might find jarringly relevant. And Martin's post-convention career, though clouded by drink and scandal, found him as defense counsel in two of the great trials of the age: the Senate trial of the impeached Supreme Court justice Samuel Chase and the treason trial of his friend Aaron Burr. Kauffman's “Luther Martin” is a brilliant and passionate polemicist, a stubborn and admirable defender of a decentralized republic who fights for the principles of 1776 all the way to the last ditch and last drop. In remembering this forgotten founder, we remember also the principles that once animated many of the earliest, and many later, American patriots.