Fears of a Setting Solar: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders

The stunning story of how George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson got here to despair for the way forward for the nation that they had created

Individuals seldom deify their Founding Fathers any longer, however they do nonetheless are likely to venerate the Structure and the republican authorities that the founders created. Strikingly, the founders themselves have been far much less assured in what that they had wrought, significantly by the top of their lives. The truth is, most of them―together with George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson―got here to deem America’s constitutional experiment an utter failure that was unlikely to final past their very own era. Fears of a Setting Solar is the primary e book to inform the fascinating and too-little-known story of the founders’ disillusionment.

As Dennis Rasmussen reveals, the founders’ pessimism had a wide range of sources: Washington misplaced his religion in America’s political system above all due to the rise of partisanship, Hamilton as a result of he felt that the federal authorities was too weak, Adams as a result of he believed that the individuals lacked civic advantage, and Jefferson due to sectional divisions laid naked by the unfold of slavery. The one main founder who retained his religion in America’s constitutional order to the top was James Madison, and the e book additionally explores why he remained comparatively optimistic when so a lot of his compatriots didn’t. As a lot as Individuals at present might fear about their nation’s future, Rasmussen reveals, the founders confronted even graver issues and harbored even deeper misgivings.

A vividly written account of a chapter of American historical past that has acquired too little consideration, Fears of a Setting Solar will change the way in which that you simply take a look at the American founding, the Structure, and certainly america itself.