![\"George](\"https:\/\/d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net\/img\/c800x450-w800-q60\/uploads\/2026\/05\/MAtt-800x450.jpg\")
<\/picture> <\/div>\nIn a special America 250 issue, <\/em>Reason takes a look back at our country’s founding people and ideas. Read more here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n As a big, even-numbered anniversary of the Declaration of Independence rumbled into view, an inner-circle Founding Father gazed upon the man claiming to be his worthy successor and shuddered with revulsion.<\/p>\n “I feel much alarmed at the prospect of seeing Gen. [Andrew] Jackson President,” Thomas Jefferson\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0Daniel Webster in 1824. “He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place. He has had very little respect for laws and constitutions….His passions are terrible. When I was president of the Senate, he was senator; and he could never speak on account of the rashness of his feelings. I have seen him attempt it repeatedly, and as often choke with rage….He is a dangerous man.”<\/p>\n People rightly marvel at the miracle that Jefferson and his longtime rival-turned-friend John Adams both perished on July 4, 1826. Less remembered is that the two otherwise ideologically and dispositionally opposed torchbearers for the flame of ’76 had each soured on the fruits of their precious Revolution.<\/p>\n “Oh my country,” Adams wrote in 1806 to Benjamin Rush. “How I mourn over thy follies and Vices, thine ignorance and imbecility, Thy contempt of Wisdom and Virtue and overweening Admiration of fools and Knaves!”<\/p>\n Founder disgruntlement was the rule, not the exception (and the exception to that rule was James Madison). “Those of them who lived on into the early decades of the nineteenth century expressed anxiety over what they had wrought,” wrote the historian Gordon Wood in\u00a0The Radicalism of the American Revolution<\/em>. “Although they tried to put as good a face as they could on what had happened, they were bewildered, uneasy, and in many cases deeply disillusioned.”<\/p>\n Added the historian Dennis C. Rasmussen in\u00a0Fears of a Setting Sun<\/em><\/a>, about the only book-length treatment of the subject: “Most<\/em>\u00a0of the other leading founders\u2014including figures such as Samuel Adams, Elbridge Gerry, Patrick Henry, John Jay, John Marshall, George Mason, James Monroe, Gouverneur Morris, Thomas Paine, and Benjamin Rush\u2014fell in the same camp.”<\/p>\n Some of the sources of their souring were one-offs: 18th century conditions that could not be replicated now, such as Napoleon marching through Europe, or just the concentrated creativity of the Founding itself. Others, though, resonate with the political anxieties of today.<\/p>\n In his\u00a0farewell address<\/a>, as throughout his presidency, George Washington famously cautioned against the corrupting degradations of political parties and regional blocs, at a time when three far more powerful European empires still had extensive designs on North America.<\/p>\n “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissention, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism,” Washington prophesized. “But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual: and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.”<\/p>\n This was both warning and complaint. Washington\u00a0hated<\/em>\u00a0the ugliness of 1790s politics, particularly (as in his second term) when gutter-press vituperations were aimed directly at the Father of Our Country. (His genteel way of putting it: “You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heartburnings which spring from these misrepresentations: they tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.”)<\/p>\n Yet the first president himself was not above the political and ideological fray, as indeed one could not be while building a federal government and executive branch from scratch. By selecting and siding with his insanely industrious treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, Washington helped spur the very reaction he found so loathsome. Launching a national bank, ramming weak treaties with England through Congress, mustering armies to put down rebellions\u2014these were greeted as traumatic events by the government\/finance\/England-fearing likes of Madison and Jefferson, who then (despite the latter serving as Washington’s first-term secretary of state!) unhelpfully laundered their objections through vicious commentary in the anti-Federalist press.<\/p>\n After his high-minded farewell address, post-presidential Washington pickled into more of a paranoid partisan, at least privately. In letters, he began referring to Jefferson’s Republicans as “the French Party” and “the curse of this country,” who were “stimulating a foreign nation to unfriendly acts, repugnant to our rights & dignity.”<\/p>\n The existence of history creates the illusion of inevitability, of retrospective certainty that things were always going to turn out like they did. But that’s not at all how the Founders experienced the 1790s. Engaged with history’s largest and most novel experiment in republican government and saddled with meager defenses against what felt like imminent war with either Britain or France (or both), the view at the top of American power was cloudy and fraught.<\/p>\n “Cries of treason entered virtually every political debate, fears of foreign plots abounded, and physical violence was lamentably commonplace,” Rasmussen wrote. Observed historian Joseph J. Ellis in\u00a0Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation<\/em><\/a>: “In terms of shrill accusatory rhetoric, flamboyant displays of ideological intransigence, intense personal rivalries, and hyperbolic claims of imminent catastrophe, [the 1790s] has no equal in American history. The political dialogue within the highest echelon of the revolutionary generation was a decade-long shouting match.”<\/p>\n Imagine cooperating enough from 1765 to 1791 to produce the hot-headedness of colonial rebellion, the magnificence of the Declaration, the long-shot heroism of defeating the world’s greatest navy, and the architectural inspiration of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, only to lapse almost immediately into the nastiest politics the country would ever see outside of the Civil War. Brilliant and energetic men went from blood brothers to sworn enemies overnight. It could not have been very easy on the nerves.<\/p>\n Washington’s premonitory warnings against the degradations of faction are immediately recognizable in our 250th anniversary year, but they landed even harder at the time, and not just because of the pervasive sense of fragility. Even the most partisan of the 1790s factionalists believed (or at least hoped) that political parties would be a temporary unpleasantness to be discarded once the country and Constitution had been steered out of their initial crisis. Indeed, the so-called Era of Good Feelings, from 1815 to 1824, was marked by its lack of political competition, as the Federalists faded away and the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans held sway.<\/p>\n The Founders were unusually prescient and winningly world-weary when designing a government to restrain the many temptations of fallen man placed in proximity to power. But they did not quite understand that political parties\u2014with all their truth-bending, soul-killing, pocket-lining corruption\u2014would be a permanent feature of American politics. If they had, they’d have been even more depressed.<\/p>\n The “most painful event of my life,” Jefferson once remarked, was not when he had to flee Monticello to avoid British capture in 1781, or one his many 1790s political scraps, or even the 1802 newspaper scoop that he had fathered several children with a slave “concubine” named Sally Hemings, but rather when a masked mob of drunken, rioting students tore through his beloved University of Virginia on October 3, 1825, throwing bottles of urine through classroom windows, shouting “Down with European professors!” and beating one prof bloody with his own cane.<\/p>\n When confronting an all-student assembly the next day, Jefferson “was far too overcome with emotion and disappointment to speak. He burst into tears, so shaken that he had to sit down,” wrote the historian Jared Cohen in\u00a0Life After Power<\/em><\/a>. “As tears flowed down the octogenarian’s face, the wall of silence collapsed, and the guilty confessed.” The ringleader turned out to be Jefferson’s own great-nephew.<\/p>\n The Founding Fathers were Enlightenment men\u2014schooled by the works of Scottish philosophers, thrilled by the possibilities of technological advancement, hopeful in the face of all contrary experience that man could be self-governing. With the possible exception of the much older Benjamin Franklin, no Founder came close to the Enlightenmentness of Jefferson. His hard-fought third-act founding of the University of Virginia was an ambitious attempt to pay forward the values of the American Revolution perpetually. “If a nation expects to be ignorant & free,” he wrote, “it expects what never was & never will be.”<\/p>\n That can-do revolutionary faith in future Americans, which Jefferson sustained more than anyone, rested on a paradox: The Founders were products of a moment that their own success hastened to a close. Washington, Jefferson, John Adams, and Hamilton may have all despised one another at various times in the 1790s, but they all agreed vociferously with the decidedly 18th century notion that disinterested, gentlemanly\u00a0virtue<\/em>\u00a0was foundational to any hope for the new republic’s success. “The Preservation of Liberty,” Adams wrote<\/a> as early as 1772, “depends upon the intellectual and moral Character of the People.”<\/p>\n Adams, the splenetic sourpuss, was first to declare defeat in the battle to moralize America. “There is So much Rascality, so much Venality and Corruption, so much Avarice and Ambition, such a Rage for Profit and Commerce among all Ranks and Degrees of Men even in America, that I sometimes doubt whether there is public Virtue enough to support a Republic,” he wrote in, well, 1776. Surely, the war created times that tried men’s souls\u2014the retreats, the privations, the intrigues, the impotent congressional squabbling. But the turbulent ’90s, capped by the brutal 1800 election, exposed the venality even among Adams’ gentlemanly co-revolutionaries, let alone the rabble. “Avarice, Ambition Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net,” he wrote as president in 1798. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People.”<\/p>\n Jefferson had created a tantalizing aspiration with his self-evident truth that all men are created equal. Madison and company conjured the radical framework that government would derive not from God, not from the aristocracy, but from the\u00a0people<\/em>. They were democratizing civic engagement further than they themselves were willing to go, and not just in regard to slaves, free black people, Indians, and women.<\/p>\n Consider the case of Adams’s fellow Bostonian, Paul Revere. Famous now as the “midnight rider” who warned patriot leaders about the incoming British, Revere was much more than that\u2014a skilled tradesman, shrewd propagandist (responsible for the inflammatory engraving of the Boston Massacre), gunpowder mill owner, serial entrepreneur, and nexus between virtually all of the rebel groups in colonial Boston. Yet because this quintessentially self-made American man came from a modest family and left school at age 13, he was never seriously considered for an officer’s commission in the Revolutionary War and was routinely excluded from high-level planning confabs with higher-society locals like Johns Adams and Hancock.<\/p>\n The Founders were self-made, sure: Only eight of the 99 signatories of the Declaration had a college-educated parent. But unlike Revere, they were self-made\u00a0gentlemen<\/em>. No grubby merchants, they; rather, retired geniuses (Franklin) or lordly, innovative planters (Washington, Jefferson). It should be no surprise that they found themselves appalled by the manners of the post-Revolutionary generation.<\/p>\n “In the end many of their enlightened hopes and their kind of elitist leadership were done in by the very democratic and egalitarian forces they had unleashed with their Revolution,” Wood concluded in\u00a0Revolutionary Characters<\/em><\/a>. “It was not a world the founders wanted or expected; indeed, those who lived long enough into the nineteenth century to experience its full democratic force were deeply disillusioned by what they had wrought. Still, they had helped create this popular world, for it was rooted in the vital principle that none of them, Federalists included, ever could deny: the people. In the end, nothing illustrates better the transforming power of the American Revolution than the way its intellectual and political leaders, that remarkable group of men, contributed to their own demise.”<\/p>\n Beginning not long after the Bicentennial of 1976, the Founders have taken a sustained beating by historians and commentators for their bewildering inability, on either structural or personal levels, to apply the logic of the Declaration to the abolition of slavery. This mythology-puncturing work in some ways culminated with The 1619 Project, which posited that year’s introduction of chattel slavery as the truer and much darker “origin story” of America.<\/p>\n It didn’t have to be thus, a fact that surely gnawed at the consciences of increasingly grumpy ex-Founders in the 19th century.<\/p>\n “All the prominent leaders thought that the liberal principles of the Revolution would eventually destroy the institution of slavery,” Wood wrote in\u00a0Revolutionary Characters<\/em>. “When even southerners like Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and Henry Laurens publicly deplored the injustice of slavery, from ‘that moment,’ declared the New York physician and abolitionist E.H. Smith in 1798, ‘the slow, but certain, death-wound was inflicted upon it.’ Of course such predictions could have not been more wrong.”<\/p>\n The problem, aside from a glaring lack of motivated urgency, was how to get there. Per Rasmussen: “It was so vexing not just because it was such an immense moral evil\u2014a point that struck nearly all of them as obvious\u2014but also because it seemed to them so intractable, at least for the time being, and because the practice was concentrated so much more heavily in the South than in the North, thereby creating a major rift in the union in terms of practice and (eventually) principle.”<\/p>\n Slaveholder Jefferson included an anti-slavery bullet point in the original Declaration, but Congress excised it to appease Southern states, including his native Virginia. He proposed in the Articles of Confederation era a law banning future slavery in the entire American West; it lost by a single vote. He wrote in his 1785 classic\u00a0Notes on the State of Virginia<\/em><\/a>\u00a0one of the single best lines articulating the Founders’ sense of guilt for the peculiar institution: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice can’t sleep for ever.” Yet he opposed efforts at outright emancipation over racist fears that the freed hordes could not live peacefully among white people.<\/p>\n Americans will forever wrestle over Jefferson, because his accomplishments were so staggering, his faults so maddening, and his words so noble and everlasting. He can’t be fully reconciled, because\u00a0we<\/em>\u00a0can’t be fully reconciled.<\/p>\n Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy’s 2000 book,\u00a0An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean<\/em><\/a>, suggests an additional context worth considering. There were not 13 British colonies in 1776 America, O’Shaughnessy reminds us; there were 26, including the wealthy sugar islands of the West Indies. These plantation economies had\u00a0much<\/em>\u00a0more in common, commercially and culturally, with the American South than either did with the Northeast: huge cash crops, constant maritime exchange, and massive slave populations (90 percent in Jamaica, 60 percent in South Carolina and Georgia, 40 percent in Virginia). With the last came boundless human cruelty, widespread disease, and a thrumming fear of armed revolt.<\/p>\n Terror at the prospect of slave rebellions\u2014such as Tacky’s Revolt in Jamaica, which began in 1760, lasted a year and a half, and took 500 lives\u2014helped bind the West Indies closer to the bosom of Mother England, positively begging to quarter more British troops. Partly as a result, the 13 mainland American colonies were the only ones to revolt.<\/p>\n We can and should look upon Jefferson’s slavery blind spot as the ultimate revolutionary failure, a sin utterly unoriginal from an otherwise extraordinary man. But we may also ask ourselves why the South nevertheless rebelled when the West Indies did not and how a man of this time and place came to pen what Frederick Douglass would call the “promissory note” of true American emancipation. The world’s first abolitionist society opened its doors in 1775 Philadelphia. As with issues of democratic participation, the Founders helped create a world they were not yet ready to live in.<\/p>\n The Missouri Compromise of 1820, effectively dividing slavery and anti-slavery between North and South, became the single greatest source of 19th century policy disillusionment among the Founding Fathers. Jefferson was squarely on the wrong side of the issue, advocating openly for slavery in Missouri and convincing himself that expanding the institution westward would somehow lead more rapidly to its dissolution (a delusion he shared with Madison and President James Monroe). “The preceding generation sacrificed themselves to establish their posterity in independent self-government,” Jefferson complained in an 1820 letter, “which their successors seem disposed to throw away for an abstract proposition.”<\/p>\n Adams, like other Founders in the abolitionist North, held the opposite view, albeit with equally pessimistic predictions. “I know it is high treason to express a doubt of the perpetual duration of our vast American Empire,” he wrote to Jefferson in 1819. Yet he worried presciently that the issue might “rend this mighty Fabric in twain.”<\/p>\n The Beatles’ recording career<\/a> (1962\u20131970) lasted just about as long as the Revolutionary War (1775\u20131783). Both astonishing bursts of creativity changed the world in ways that still reverberate today, and likely will 250 years hence.<\/p>\n Everybody has their favorite Founder, just like everyone has their favorite Beatle. (I started off with Jefferson and moved to Washington; John has only recently been matched by Paul.) But in the fullness of time and especially of gratitude, another and hopefully more mature insight emerges: It was the chemical reaction of these impossibly talented and energetic men bouncing off one another at a particularly fortuitous moment in time that generated liberations, creative energies, and endless new pursuits of happiness, far beyond what any of them could have dreamed.<\/p>\n Did the Founders’ comity devolve into fantastical recriminations in the 1790s? Check out the 1970s Beatles sometime. You will see constant lawsuits, declamatory interviews, vicious attack songs, and the occasional baffled whimper about how the good times went so bad. We can choose our own heroes and villains of these stories, but we can also spare a touch of empathy. Imagine for a moment that you were part of a small group that changed the world so thoroughly and uniquely, and then the music suddenly stopped. “I don’t believe in BEATLES,” John spat in his 1970 song “God” before sighing, “I just believe in me.”<\/p>\n The Founders soured on the Revolution for reasons both prosaic and profound. But surely some of the expressed disillusionment was a blinking inarticulateness in trying to process a series of events too awesome for human emotions or words.<\/p>\n Just before the country’s 50th anniversary, and therefore their deaths, Adams and Jefferson, embittered both, were asked to provide some memorial words. Staying heroically in character, the irascible Adams hissed, “I will give you INDEPENDENCE FOREVER.”<\/p>\n Jefferson, in what was his last public statement, ditched his late-breaking grumpiness for that good ol’ American can-do: “All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”<\/p>\n The post Disillusioned Revolutionaries: Many Founders Died in Despair About the American Experiment<\/a> appeared first on Reason.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" America’s Founders helped create a world they were not yet ready to live in. …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":""},"categories":[19,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128441"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128441\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/3rdcitynews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/d2eehagpk5cl65.cloudfront.net\/img\/q60\/uploads\/2026\/05\/america-250-300x300.png\")
<\/a>Politics Ain’t Beanbag<\/h1>\n
An Enlightenment, if You Can Keep It<\/h1>\n
Unoriginal Sin<\/h1>\n
I Don’t Believe in Beatles<\/h1>\n