Founding Fathers of the United States

• 1. Introduction

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  The Founding Fathers of the United States left behind an unusually blunt confession. In 1811, John Adams wrote to a young admirer named Josiah Quincy III. He insisted, "I have no reason to believe We were better than you are." That humility sits oddly next to a term once used for men treated as demigods who built a nation out of thirteen scattered colonies.

  Historians have never agreed on exactly who deserves the title, or how many belong on the list. Some name only seven men singled out by a twentieth century historian. Others count fifty-five convention delegates, dozens of lesser known patriots, or the wives and organizers historians now call the Founding Mothers. Where did the term itself come from? Who beyond the famous few helped build the nation? And what did their vision of liberty still leave unfinished?

• 2. The Seven Key Founders

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  In 1973, historian Richard B. Morris singled out seven men as the nation's key founders. He judged them by what he called the triple tests of leadership, longevity, and statesmanship. Those seven were John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington. Of the seven, Washington was the man most closely identified as the Father of the United States.

  Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin sat together on the Committee of Five that the Second Continental Congress charged with drafting the Declaration of Independence. Franklin, Adams, and Jay later negotiated the 1783 Treaty of Paris, the agreement that ended the Revolutionary War and secured American independence. The state constitutions Jay and Adams had drafted for New York in 1777 and Massachusetts in 1780 shaped language that reappeared in the U.S. Constitution. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay together wrote the Federalist Papers to build support for ratifying that Constitution.

  Washington commanded the Continental Army through the war and later presided over the Constitutional Convention. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison went on to fill the first four presidencies in order. Adams and Jefferson also served as the nation's first two vice presidents. Jay became the first chief justice, Hamilton the first secretary of the treasury, and Jefferson the first secretary of state. Franklin, meanwhile, served as America's senior diplomat from the Revolution's opening through the signing of the Treaty of Paris.

  The list of seven, though, left out the sixteen convention delegates who attended in 1787 but never signed the Constitution at all.

• 3. Naming The Fathers

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  Senator Warren G. Harding introduced the phrase "Founding Fathers" in his keynote address at the 1916 Republican National Convention. He repeated it at his own inauguration on the 4th of March 1921. That speech made him the first president to use the term while in office.

  The word "fathers" itself had circulated for decades before Harding ever spoke it. In his 1805 inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson called early colonists "forefathers." John Quincy Adams, at his own inauguration in 1825, called the Constitution "the work of our forefathers" and thanked the "founders of the Union."

  John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on the same day, the 4th of July 1826. President John Quincy Adams honored them publicly as "Fathers" and "Founders of the Republic." The phrasing stayed in political use for decades. It surfaced at Martin Van Buren's 1837 inauguration and James Polk's in 1845. Abraham Lincoln used it in his 1860 Cooper Union speech and his 1863 Gettysburg Address. William McKinley used it again at his first inauguration in 1897.

  At a 1902 Washington's Birthday event in Brooklyn, lawyer James M. Beck delivered an address called "Founders of the Republic." He reminded the audience that "these fathers of the republic were for the most part young men."

  Beck's description of young founders reached far beyond Adams and Washington, toward men whose names rarely surface today.

• 4. Beyond The Signers

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  The National Archives calls the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights the nation's "Charters of Freedom." The Articles of Confederation, adopted in 1781 as the country's first constitution, counts as a founding document too. Fifty-five delegates attended the Constitutional Convention, but sixteen of them never signed the finished Constitution. Only three, Edmund Randolph, George Mason, and Elbridge Gerry, refused outright; the rest simply left early.

  Patrick Henry is remembered for the line, "Give me liberty or give me death!" He led Virginia's militia and served as the state's first governor from 1776 to 1779, then again as its sixth governor from 1784 to 1786.

  Henry Knox's earliest achievement was hauling more than 50 pieces of captured artillery from New York's Fort Ticonderoga. That haul helped Washington force British troops out of Boston in early 1776.

  The Marquis de Lafayette, a French general who joined the Continental Army, served without pay throughout the war. He even paid to outfit and supply his own ship for the American cause.

  Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense appeared in January 1776 and helped build public support for independence. John Adams still criticized Paine for failing to grasp the need for separation of powers.

  John Marshall served alongside George Washington at Valley Forge. He later became the first person to call Washington "the Father of his country." Adams then appointed him the fourth chief justice of the Supreme Court.

  Marshall's title for Washington borrowed language that women of the same era rarely received credit for shaping.

• 5. Founding Mothers And Patriots

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  Abigail Adams urged her husband John, while he worked in the Continental Congress, to "Remember the Ladies." She warned, "we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation." Mercy Otis Warren worked through the Revolution as a poet, playwright, and pamphleteer.

  Crispus Attucks, believed to have both Native American and African ancestry, became the first of five men killed in the Boston Massacre of 1770. He was thus the first person to die in the cause of American independence. John Adams later wrote that "on that night the foundations of American independence was laid."

  Cato, an enslaved man, spied alongside his owner, Hercules Mulligan, carrying intelligence through British-held territory. That intelligence was credited with saving George Washington's life on at least two occasions. Cato won his freedom in 1778.

  Paul Revere was a Sons of Liberty member who helped stage the Boston Tea Party. He also rode as one of three horsemen who warned militia forces of the British march toward Lexington and Concord. Naval captain John Paul Jones, when the British demanded his surrender, answered simply, "I have not yet begun to fight."

  Haym Salomon worked alongside Robert Morris as a chief financier of the Revolution. He also spied for the Continental Army while managing those finances.

  Salomon's financial networks sat far from the courtrooms and state assemblies where most named founders built their careers.

• 6. Who The Founders Were

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  Most of the Founding Fathers traced their ancestry to England, though others descended from Scottish, Welsh, Irish, or Caribbean lines. Some had roots among the early Dutch settlers of New Netherland, New York's colonial predecessor. Others descended from French Huguenots who had fled religious persecution in France.

  Nearly all the signers of the Declaration, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution were native born. The average founder's age was 43. Benjamin Franklin, born in 1706, was the oldest of the group, while only a handful of founders were still in their twenties.

  More than a third of the founders attended or graduated from colleges in the American colonies. Others studied abroad, mostly in England or Scotland. Six of the colonial era's nine colleges produced founders as graduates, including William and Mary, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Pennsylvania, and Yale. Alexander Hamilton and James Monroe attended Columbia and William and Mary, respectively, without graduating.

  Roughly half the founders worked as lawyers, a sixth as planters or farmers, and another sixth as merchants. Ten, including Benjamin Rush and Joseph Warren, practiced medicine. Of the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention, 28 were Anglican, 21 belonged to other Protestant denominations, and three were Catholic.

  Historian David L. Holmes had to reconstruct many of these beliefs from letters and second-hand accounts, since founders including Jefferson avoided discussing faith in public.

• 7. Religious Liberty

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  Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry, and George Mason helped write Virginia's 1776 Declaration of Rights, an early working model of religious freedom. For a decade before that, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Lutherans had petitioned against the Church of England's efforts to suppress rival worship in Virginia.

  Jefferson left the Continental Congress to fight that battle at home. He eventually managed to repeal several laws that punished people for holding different religious beliefs. He argued that public funds should never support an established church, and that civil rights should never depend on religious doctrine.

  Article VI of the Constitution, ratified in 1788, bars any religious test for holding public office. The Bill of Rights then affirmed freedom of religion and freedom of speech. The 14th Amendment of 1868 later extended that same protection against state governments.

  Washington, himself a local Church of England leader, reassured worried Baptists in writing. He told them, "certainly, I would never have placed my signature to it," referring to the Constitution's protection of their liberties. He gave Jewish congregations a similar assurance, arguing that America's religious revolution set an example the rest of the world could follow.

  The same Jefferson who fought for Virginia's religious freedom held people in slavery throughout his life.

• 8. The Contradiction Of Slavery

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  Historian Annette Gordon-Reed studied Jefferson, who held some 600 people in slavery at a time. She wrote that other founders also held slaves, but "no other founder drafted the charter for American freedom." Forty-one of the 56 signers of the Declaration owned slaves, including George Washington, who freed his own slaves only through his will.

  Jay and Hamilton led a successful fight, beginning in 1777, to outlaw the international slave trade within New York. Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration condemned the king for waging "cruel war against human nature itself" in the slave trade. Congress cut the clause.

  Benjamin Rush published a pamphlet in 1773 arguing that Africans were not intellectually or morally inferior. He called any apparent evidence otherwise a "perverted expression" of slavery itself. The Continental Association banned Patriots from taking part in the slave trade at all. In the Rhode Island Assembly, Esek Hopkins introduced one of the colonies' earliest anti-slavery laws in 1769.

  John Jay founded the New York Manumission Society in 1785. As governor of New York in 1798, he signed an abolition law that fully ended forced labor in the state by 1827. The Constitution avoided the word "slavery" outright, but Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 counted "three-fifths of all other Persons" toward representation and direct taxes.

  Virginia's 1782 manumission law let owners free slaves by will or deed, and thousands of Virginia's slaves were freed as a result. Jefferson's 1784 proposal to ban slavery in the western territories failed in Congress by a single vote. Congress instead banned slavery only north of the Ohio River, under the Northwest Ordinance. By 1800, every state except South Carolina had banned the international slave trade on its own.

  In 1807, President Jefferson signed a federal ban on that international trade nationwide, even as the domestic slave trade kept expanding into the Louisiana Territory.