R. B. Bernstein

A short biography of Thomas Jefferson covers such topics as his life as a Virginia gentleman, his passionate belief in democracy, his defense of slavery, his relationship with Sally Hemings, and his contributions to America as a writer, inventor, and party leader.

Thomas Jefferson

This concise and elegant book reintroduces us to the history that shaped the founding fathers, the history that they made, and what history has made of them. It gives the reader a context within which to explore the world of the founding fathers and their complex and still-controversial achievements and legacies.

The Founding Fathers Reconsidered

Here is a vividly written and compact overview of the brilliant, flawed, and quarrelsome group of lawyers, politicians, merchants, military men, and clergy known as the "Founding Fathers"--who got as close to the ideal of the Platonic "philosopher-kings" as American or world history has ever seen. In The Founding Fathers Reconsidered, R. B. Bernstein reveals Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and the other founders not as shining demigods but as imperfect human beings--people much like us--who nevertheless achieved political greatness. They emerge here as men who sought to transcend their intellectual world even as they were bound by its limits, men who strove to lead the new nation even as they had to defer to the great body of the people and learn with them the possibilities and limitations of politics. Bernstein deftly traces the dynamic forces that molded these men and their contemporaries as British colonists in North America and as intellectual citizens of the Atlantic civilization's Age of Enlightenment. He analyzes the American Revolution, the framing and adoption of state and federal constitutions, and the key concepts and problems--among them independence, federalism, equality, slavery, and the separation of church and state--that both shaped and circumscribed the founders' achievements as the United States sought its place in the world.

The Education of John Adams is the first biography of John Adams by a biographer with legal training. It examines his origins in colonial Massachusetts, his education, and his struggle to choose a career and define a place for himself in colonial society. It explores the flowering of his legal career and the impact that law had on him and his understanding of himself; his growing involvement with the American Revolution as polemicist, as lawyer, as congressional delegate, and as diplomat; and his commitment to defining and expounding ideas about constitutionalism and how it should work as the body of ideas shaping the new United States. The book traces his part in launching the government of the United States under the U.S. Constitution; his service as the nation's first vice president and second president; and his retirement years, during which he was first a vexed and rejected ex-president and then became the revered Sage of Braintree. It describes the relationships that sustained him - with his wife, the brilliant and eloquent Abigail Adams; with his children; with such allies and supporters as Benjamin Rush and John Marshall; with such sometime friends and sometime adversaries as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson; and with such foes as Alexander Hamilton and Timothy Pickering. Bernstein establishes Adams as a key figure in the evolution of American constitutional theory and practice. This is the first biography to examine Adams's conflicted and hesitant ideas about slavery and race in the American context, raising serious questions about his mythic status as a friend of human equality and a foe of slavery. This book's foundation is the record left by Adams himself-- in diaries, letters, essays, pamphlets, and books. The Education of John Adams concludes by re-examining the often-debated question of the relevance of Adams's thought to our own time.

The Education of John Adams

Richard B. Bernstein

""Let us dare to read, think, speak and write...." In 1765, John Adams, a twenty-nine-year-old Massachusetts lawyer, pondered the crisis engulfing Great Britain and its North American colonies. In his view, the dispute's focus was how the British Empire was to be governed under the unwritten English constitution. To address that problem, Adams drafted a pamphlet, "A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law." He likened Britain's abuse of its authority over the colonists to the enslavement of medieval Europe by kings and lords allied with the Roman Catholic Church. Juxtaposing dangers past and present, he warned that a new tyranny was on the horizon, but, he added, the colonists had means to resist it. Knowledge of American rights under the English constitution, he maintained, would bolster American resistance: "This spirit [of liberty], however, without knowledge, would be little better than a brutal rage. Let us tenderly and kindly cherish, therefore, the means of knowledge. Let us dare to read, think, speak and write." 1 Adams's exhortation to his readers illuminated his life, his part in the American Revolution, and his role in the evolution of American constitutionalism. In the American Revolution, the Founding Fathers fought in different ways and using different means. Adams marshaled words and arguments in the American revolutionary cause. As lawyer, politician, legislator, constitution-maker, diplomat, and executive, he mobilized legal and historical knowledge for the greater good, drawing on the best of the past to save the future: Let every order and degree among the people rouse their attention and animate their resolution. Let them all become attentive to the grounds and principles of government, ecclesiastical and civil. Let us study the law of nature; search into the spirit of the British constitution; read the histories of ancient ages; contemplate the great examples of Greece and Rome; set before us the conduct of our own British ancestors, who have defended for us the inherent rights of mankind against foreign and domestic tyrants and usurpers, against arbitrary kings and cruel priests, in short, against the gates of earth and hell. Adams lived with books at his elbow and a pen in his hand. Insatiably curious about the world around him, he educated himself and sought to teach his contemporaries and posterity what he had learned. These lifelong processes of learning and teaching constitute the education of John Adams. 2 Previous studies of Adams use one of two competing approaches to Adams, neither capturing his life's complexity or significance. Dazzled by his colorful personality, his self-awareness, and his revealing himself on paper, most biographers stress Adams's character, some reducing his constitutional and political advocacy and analysis to mere products of his internal conflicts. 3 The competing biographical school spotlights him as a constitutional and political thinker, rooted in an intellectual tradition extending from Greece and Rome to the Enlightenment - but pushing his nonpolitical life into the background.4 Deciding between character without ideas (reducing Adams to an idiosyncratic volcano but ignoring his intellectual depth) and ideas without character (seeing Adams as a learned intellectual but shortchanging his humanity) is a false choice. Juxtaposing his ideas with his character, this book sets him within intersecting contexts - personal, regional, lawyerly, political, and intellectual - that shaped his vision of the world and of his place in it. 5 Setting Adams in context deepens our understanding of his life's personal dimension. Adams's resentments, explosions of temper, and paroxysms of vanity become more comprehensible when we grasp why he felt and expressed himself that way. His outbursts, voicing his sense of his virtues and failings, had roots in and resonated with his intellectual and cultural contexts. Given, for example, that he and his contemporaries saw fame as this world's just reward for service to the public good, and that his sense of fame resonated with the moral heritage of his Calvinist roots, he had reasons to take personally efforts to denigrate his labors. Those seeking to deny him fame, he thought, were trying to take away what he had earned. By denigrating him, they rejected the worth of his labors and his arguments. 6 His battles with Benjamin Franklin, with Alexander Hamilton, and with Thomas Jefferson were clashes of personality and of principled intellectual disputes about political theory and practice."--

R. B. Bernstein

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