Revolutionaries

In this remarkable book, the historian Jack Rakove offers a new and revealing perspective on the men who invented America. Much has been written about the military struggle that led to independence, but Rakove is far more concerned with the intellectual one: the competing views of politics, war, diplomacy, and society that shaped the very idea of an American nation. Spanning the most crucial decades of the country’s birth, from 1772 to 1792, Revolutionaries uses the stories of famous (and not so famous) men to capture—in a way no single biography ever could—the intensely creative period of the Republic’s founding. Each of his portraits brims with fascinating and fresh insights: Washington as a flawed tactician but expert manager, Jack Laurens as a slave trader’s son who developed a plan to recruit black soldiers, Jefferson as a powerful critic of Europe’s social order but a voracious consumer of its culture. Rakove shakes off accepted notions of these men as godlike visionaries. We see Madison, Hamilton, Adams, and others before they were fully formed leaders, before the Republic was effectively functioning. We catch them in the act of thinking—about when and how to break with Britain, how to wage a war that often seemed impossible to win, what exactly the Constitution should say—and in doing so we begin to understand, perhaps for the first time, how the country came to be and why the idea of America endures.