The Founding Fathers and the Politics of Character.

The Founding Fathers and the Politics of Character. By Andrew S. Trees. (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, c. 2004. Pp. xviii, 208. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-691-12236-9; cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0-691-11552-4.)

Andrew S. Trees believes that the efforts of the Founding Fathers to shape their individual characters reflect their political ideas on the nature of the government they were creating. He looks at four of the founders, along with a specific text written by each of them, and sums up the basis of each of their characters in a single word: friendship for Jefferson, honor for Hamilton, virtue for Adams, and justice for Madison.

Trees proposes that for Thomas Jefferson friendship was the essential basis for political relationships. His creation of a political party reflected the importance that Jefferson placed on "affective bonds" (p. 5). Jefferson's politics thus blurred the line between his private and public lives. Trees, however, says little of Jefferson's personal life (no Sally Hemings here). Jefferson's idealization of friendship, according to Trees, resulted in a polarization of the political process as Jefferson and his companions excluded individuals outside the circle of their friendship.

In contrast to Jefferson, Hamilton's sense of honor assumed that the private life of individuals is irrelevant. As a result, Hamilton's elitist sense of honor led him to make decisions that compromised his political agenda (e.g., in the Reynolds affair and Hamilton's criticism of President John Adams) and ultimately led him to his fatal duel with Aaron Burr.

For John Adams any worldly success was a sign of a lack of virtue, and, conversely, a failure to obtain popularity, professional advancement, or material comfort was proof of virtue. Trees portrays Adams as sitting uneasily between the republican tradition and the democratic spirit of his times. Adams generally distrusted people, but he believed that good government could help to shape a virtuous citizenry. Adams distrusted aristocratic, disinterested statesmen, advocating instead a professional class of salaried political leaders, who should be awarded titles indicative of their rank.

James Madison's concept of justice depended on impartial objectivity, rejecting personal attachments, party factions, and local interests. This is evident in his work on the U.S. Constitution and in his continuing concerns over its interpretation. Madison rejected the idea of "original intent," insisting that the state ratifying conventions were a better guide to its basic principles. Nevertheless Madison worried that Constitutional interpretation would always be plagued by the ambiguity of language and by linguistic change.

In a final chapter on George Washington, Trees argues that Mason Locke Weems's influential biography of Washington, originally published in 1800, reflected the decline of the eighteenth-century notion of character and its replacement by an idealization of private life. Trees sees this transition as part of the shift from politics of character to politics of party.

One could quibble about many of Trees's ideas and conclusions, but the book offers some interesting insights into the motives of the Founding Fathers and the culture of the early republic. Trees's analysis of the character of the Founding Fathers, however, would have profited from greater attention to the origins of the ideas he discusses in his subjects' personal lives and in their readings and to how these ideas changed over time in the dynamic world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Trees does include brief discussions of his subjects' ideas relating to race, class, and gender, but these inclusions seem like afterthoughts and are not integrated into the lives and thoughts of the subjects.

ALEXANDER O. BOULTON

Villa Julie College