I have to agree with those who put Jefferson as their least favorite. Jefferson was a brilliant man who was a failure in virtually every respect. He bankrupted himself because he had no business acumen when it came to running a plantation, he proposed the idea of nullification with sowed the seeds of the American Civil War and essentially undermined the concept of a unified country, as Governor of Virginia during the American Civil War his leadership abilities were abominable and he more or less admitted so himself. Most of his Presidential policies were terrible, the Embargo Acts were disastrous, for example.
Jefferson basically did two good things in his life, he wrote the Declaration of Independence and he founded the University of Virginia. As a leader he was a miserable failure, he was terrible at getting things done and his political philosophy was horrendous. He had no vision for the future, his belief that America should be a vast nation of small farmers was out of line with what was clearly the movement of history at the time, and his philosophies on States having the right to nullify laws they dislike as well as his advocacy for political violence can very seriously be considered the philosophical basis for most of the later problems between the South and the Union at large.
I don’t think I can pick a favorite, as there’s many who I really like. George Wythe I respect for his principles, George Washington I respect for being extremely cool under fire, even at the worst moments of the Revolution he was a rock, conveying confidence and stability. Alexander Hamilton wasn’t particularly popular in his time and is often disparaged by leftists today, but without Alexander Hamilton there is little chance the United States would have succeeded, he was an incredibly practical man, and without his practical ideas at the treasury and for the economy at large it’s hard to see how the U.S. wouldn’t have fallen into disaster.
John Adams the Founding Father was great, John Adams the President less so. The idea that it was Franklin who did all the work in France is ludicrous, Franklin was a lazy sod and the idea that his partying got real work done is outlandish. Adams did the work of two or three diplomats while in France, even securing a loan from the Netherlands. Franklin sat on his ass and enjoyed the luxuries of life in France. Franklin had vaguely disastrous desires while over in France, he wanted to negotiate with Great Britain through France and thus give the French power over the shape of post-war America. Most likely these pro-French sympathies (to the detriment of America itself) are why the French pressed for Franklin to become part of the delegation (it was originally just Adams) whereas they recognized Adams was a no-bullshit kind of guy who was there to get things done, not make the United States a puppet to the French. Ultimately Adams won out as him and Jay overruled Franklin’s desire to negotiate peace through the French, instead they negotiated a peace with incredibly favorable terms directly with the British.
My **favorites ** are **Franklin ** and Adams. They forged the young nation. They did the real work to get France to help us.
**Franklin ** was a real genius, a person you started institutions that lasted to this day. He was an inventor and our first celebrity, but he was a celebrity for his scientific endeavors.
**Adams ** was a rarity, a man of high principals, yes, he was a bit of a stick in the mud, but he was frugal and wise with money, his and his countries. He cajoled, talked, and persuaded the colonies into action. He put forth Washington as the General to ensure Virginia would join in the New England Rebellion. He was the first man of power in the US to actively work to end slavery.
My least favorite is the grossly overrated Jefferson. He was always in debt from his own ways. He was a silly peacock, left nothing for his family and lucked into the Louisiana Purchase. He failed to follow Washington’s lead and free his slaves upon his death. His great accomplishment was pulling together a lot of others ideas into one grand document. For this, I acknowledge him a great writer, but otherwise where was the genius?
Martin Hyde, I posted my reply without reading most of the thread, I see I agree with much of what you said, but on Franklin, to be fair, the international respect that Franklin was held in, did open doors for the US and specifically Adams. Adams did do most of the work, but he very possibly would not have been able to without someone like Franklin.
He was at the forefront of pressing for religious freedom and separation of church and state. When a new Constitution was proposed, he pressed for a Bill of Rights.
As president, he had the vision and foresight to pull off the Louisiana Purchase in the face of opposition from the Federalists, and then he mounted the Lewis and Clark expedition.
These seem to me like unfair criticisms borne of hindsight. Essentially, you’re criticizing him for failing to forsee the industrial revolution and the US Civil War.
That was a typo, I did not genuinely believe Jefferson was alive during the ACW. I meant to say, “American Revolutionary War” you can believe what you want, though. If you’re more satisfied in thinking that someone who has lived in Virginia most of their adult life and had Virginia history pounded into their head repeatedly as a child and has studied it extensively as an adult was under the belief that Thomas Jefferson was governor of Virginia during the ACW, then by all means think that.
There’s nothing Jefferson did in Virginia that wasn’t pretty much already happening anyway. His legislative reforms were widely supported and he certainly didn’t cook them up by himself. This is akin to saying we declared independence because Jefferson wrote the declaration, that isn’t the case. It’s the case that Jefferson’s laws got passed in Virginia because public opinion and general political thought was already moving in that direction, just like we declared independence because the politicians had already decided to do so, not because Jefferson wrote the document.
The idea that he couldn’t foresee problems between the States was ludicrous. A huge part of the work involved in creating the United States Constitution was in working out all the conflicts between the States, to insure that individual States wouldn’t just decide to break away. It was a very real possibility to the Founding Fathers that not all of the thirteen would actually buy into this whole “United States” concept, many of them had barely bought into the loose affiliation of the Articles of Confederation.
One of the key reasons the Constitution was created was because the national government was completely at the mercy of the State governments and thus had great difficulty getting anything done. At various times during the Revolutionary War, when the national government needed something, the State governments basically said “no.” Imagine a country where, during World War II one of the largest States like New York or Texas had the authority to refuse to send men or support for the war effort, that was the very real situation under the Articles of Confederation and a key reason why, when Federal law and State law conflicts, Federal law had to take precedence under the Constitution. Jefferson’s nullification idea completely undermined that, completely. It’s a very, very good thing that Jefferson wasn’t part of the constitutional convention as he would have been a very negative force in its creation.
The industrial revolution was already starting during Jefferson’s life. And even aside from the industrial revolution his idea about America being a nation of farmers was ludicrous considering tons of Americans made their money through shipping, carpentry, textiles, et cetera. America had a vibrant economy that wasn’t solely based on agriculture during Jefferson’s own life, and before the revolution.
I actually really like Franklin. He was a brilliant man like Jefferson, but unlike Jefferson he didn’t really have a lot of negative qualities. I think his presence in France was important in that it smoothed over ruffled feathers, Adams was anything but conciliatory in a lot of ways. However I do feel Franklin at times but America’s interests, at least in the peace negotiations that were happening in France, after his desire to make nice with the many friends he had in French society.
I agree with this completely. We even named our son Benjamin for the lovely ould sod. Adams had some serious problems as president, but as Founding Father, he was first-rate.
I think you sell Jefferson way too short. Sure, he had serious shortcomings, but he was brilliant, persuasive, inventive, adventurous, and ahead of his times in many ways. As a person, he wasn’t so great–as a founding father, he was pretty spectacular.
I don’t have all that much good to say about Alexander Hamilton though.
I cannot reconcile Jefferson’s knowledge and beliefs with his actions. Here was a man that did know better and yet still kept slaves and never released them*. There are no excuses for him in my opinion.
I have little respect for a man that could waste money so extravagantly, a man that often betrayed his good friend Adams in papers.
His policies were short sighted, as President. His time as ambassador seem strangely without any real results. His credit as a scientist and Renaissance man pale in comparison to Franklin, but perhaps here I am being unfair. I suppose few compare well to Franklin in this area.
This is a great thread, and I’m really enjoying it, but I’d be hard pressed to single out a favorite. (It might depend on whose biography I’d read most recently.) They were all a pretty impressive group of guys. (Well, except for maybe Aaron Burr.)
(sigh This is the kind of sentence that led me to start this thread.)
Haven’t met the Squid. There was a Goat hanging around my desk earlier, but, well, it was nearly lunchtime and I was hungry and. . .<shuffles feet guiltily>.
I’m going to say that my favorite is George Washington, for the reasons that TV time listed. An incredible man, and a legacy that is often regarded as being too good to be true. And still seems to stand up to the scrutiny. He’s not without flaws, of course, nor the genius that Franklin was, for example, but extraordinary all the same.
For least favorite, I’m inclined towards Alexander Hamilton. But even there I have to acknowledge that his legacy is still important to the country.
Martin Hyde I disagree with your assessment of Franklin. If you’re not invited to the parties there is no work to do. Franklin was able to hobnob with the social elite in their natural element, something that Adams was distinctly incapable of doing. I won’t say that Adams was not a capable man in his own right, but I doubt he would have gotten anywhere with the French without Franklin there with him. The late night salons are where social relationships are built, not in quibbling sessions over semantic legalities. This is not to say the quibbling sessions are unimportant, they just don’t engender a sense of camaraderie. Franklin was clearly the charismatic driving force. There is an undercurrent in American culture where we are led to respect a fastidious man like Adams, but in the end it is the flamboyant charismatic that gets the door open so that the diligent curmudgeon even has anything to do.
