The Problem with "Founding Father" Biographies

I.

The American founder biography is now, by my count, a publishing genre with its own conventions, its own clichés, and its own audience. The standard volume runs between six hundred and a thousand pages. It is published by Random House, Knopf, or Simon & Schuster, almost always at trade hardcover prices in the high thirties. It is reviewed politely in the Sunday papers and, if the subject is sufficiently marketable, optioned for a streaming series. It will sell between fifty thousand and three hundred thousand copies in its first year and will reappear in paperback eighteen months later with a slightly more flattering cover photograph of the author.

The genre's reigning conventions were set in roughly 1995 with the publication of Joseph Ellis's Passionate Sage, on John Adams in retirement, and Walter Isaacson's Kissinger, which was not about a founder but established the contemporary American great-man-biography template. David McCullough's John Adams, in 2001, made the form a phenomenon. Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton, in 2004, made it a cultural force. Lin-Manuel Miranda then made it a musical, and the genre has been living in the aftermath of that success ever since.

I have read most of these books. Many of them I admire. Some I love. And yet, looking back over the last quarter-century of founder biography as a body of work, I think we have a problem.

II. The flatness

The problem is not, exactly, that the books are too long. Some great biographies are long; Robert Caro's volumes on Lyndon Johnson are not concise. The problem is that the books are nearly unanimously, and increasingly, hagiographic — even when the author's stated intent is critical.

Consider Chernow on Hamilton. The book runs to seven hundred and thirty-one pages. It is meticulously researched, beautifully written, and almost entirely committed to the proposition that Hamilton was an unappreciated genius whose vision for the United States was largely correct and who was thwarted by less capable or less honorable men. The chapter on the Reynolds affair — Hamilton's adulterous affair with Maria Reynolds, which he confessed publicly in a self-justifying pamphlet to head off charges of financial corruption — is sympathetic. The chapter on the Quasi-War, in which Hamilton schemed to lead an army into the Floridas and possibly into Latin America, is sympathetic. The chapter on the Alien and Sedition Acts, which Hamilton supported, is sympathetic. The book's framing assumption is that Hamilton was right, and the reader is invited to share in the warmth of his rightness.

The Hamilton of Hamilton is a small step further in this direction. The musical takes the Chernow biography's already affectionate portrait and theatricalizes it. The result is a Hamilton who has been almost entirely unmoored from the historical figure — a person whose views on, say, the suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion or the desirability of an aristocratic Senate would surprise many of the people now wearing his face on t-shirts.

This is the central problem of the modern founder biography: it has calcified into hagiography even when its authors believe they are doing something else.

III. The market

The market explains a great deal of this. A biography that sells three hundred thousand copies is a biography that has produced a hero. American readers buy founder biographies, on the whole, because they want to spend eight or twelve hours in the company of someone they admire. They do not, on the whole, want to spend that time being shown the limits of their admiration. The books that try this — and there have been a few; Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello is the great recent example — tend to sell respectably and reviewably rather than spectacularly.

The market also explains the gender composition of the genre. There are very few biographies of the founders' wives, sisters, or daughters, and the ones that exist are routinely shelved in a different section of the bookstore. Cokie Roberts's Founding Mothers, an exception that proves the rule, is a popular work that is more often described as "delightful" than as "scholarly," a distinction that says more about its reception than about its content. The biographical attention given to the male founders, in dollars and pages, is at least a hundred to one against the attention given to the women and the enslaved people who lived among them.

This is not a problem we can solve by writing more biographies of Martha Washington or Sally Hemings, although those would be welcome. It is a structural problem with how American readers think about the founding. We think about it in terms of individual great men. The biography genre both reflects and reinforces that habit.

IV. The letters

What I find myself wanting, increasingly, is something else. Not the great-man biography. Not the corrective biography of an overlooked figure. Something more like a sustained reading of the founders the way the founders, on the whole, wrote about themselves — which is to say, in letters.

The founding generation was the last American political class to write at length, to each other, with the expectation that the letters would survive. Jefferson and Adams's correspondence in retirement — the famous one, between 1812 and 1826 — runs to about three hundred and eighty letters and is one of the great political conversations in any language. Madison wrote to Jefferson, and Jefferson to Madison, almost weekly for forty years; the collected correspondence is about seventeen hundred letters. Abigail Adams wrote to John during his diplomatic absences with an honesty about marriage, politics, and personal grievance that makes most modern memoirs look reticent.

To read these letters in bulk — really to read them, not to clip them for quotation — is to encounter a generation of Americans who were ambivalent about almost everything they did, furious at one another for long stretches, capable of sustained intellectual labor and of breathtaking pettiness in successive paragraphs. They argued about money. They worried about their children. They wrote about gout. They wrote about slavery, with varying degrees of evasion and self-justification, in ways that biographers tend to summarize but that the letters themselves preserve in unsettling detail.

A founder, in his letters, is a much smaller and stranger figure than a founder in a Chernow biography. He is also a much more useful figure for actually understanding what the founding was.

V. What it might look like

I do not propose that we stop writing biographies. Some are excellent, some will continue to be excellent, and a good biographer is doing important work. I propose, instead, that we stop treating biographies as the default access point to the founding.

What might it look like to teach the founding through letters instead? Imagine a course — or, for that matter, a book — built around six or eight extended correspondences. The Adams-Jefferson exchange. The Madison-Jefferson exchange. Hamilton's letters to Eliza, and to Angelica Schuyler Church. Abigail Adams's letters to Mercy Otis Warren. Frederick Douglass's letters to Gerrit Smith (a generation later, but inside the same correspondence culture). The letters of Phillis Wheatley.

A student or reader who worked through that material would come away with a fundamentally different picture of the founding than the one the biography genre provides. They would see a network of arguments rather than a sequence of great men. They would see the relationships, the rivalries, the long simmering disagreements that the biographies have to compress into single chapters. They would see, especially, the ambivalence — the genuine intellectual ambivalence about what they were doing — that the biographies tend to flatten into decisive forward motion.

They would also see how much of the founding was contingent. Letters preserve the moment before a decision was made, when the decision could still go the other way. Biographies almost always, by their structure, narrate backward from the outcome. The genre's basic gravitational pull is toward inevitability. Letters resist that pull.

VI. The honest book

If I were going to recommend a single book to a reader who wanted to understand the American founders without being recruited into hagiography, it would not be a biography. It would be the Library of America's two-volume edition of the Debate on the Constitution, the contemporary collected papers of Publius and his opponents, in the order they appeared in 1787 and 1788. It is about two thousand pages. It is not light reading. But it is honest reading — by which I mean reading that does not have its conclusion built in.

The biographies will continue to come. There is, I am told, a Henry Knox biography in the works, and at least two new Madison biographies under contract. They will be reviewed, and some of them will be excellent.

But the genre, as a genre, has done what it can do. We need a different relationship to the founding now. We need to read the founders the way the founders read each other — argumentatively, suspiciously, in the company of their letters and their opponents, with the assumption that they were figuring it out as they went and that they were often wrong.

That is a harder kind of reading. It is also, I think, the kind we owe them.