To the framers of the Constitution, political parties were a fatal threat to republican virtues. They had suffered the consequences of partisan politics in Britain before the American Revolution, and they wanted nothing similar for America. Yet parties emerged even before the Constitution was ratified, and they took firmer root in the following decade. In Founding Partisans, master historian H. W. Brands has crafted a narrative of the early years of the republic as the Founding Fathers fought one another with competing visions of what our nation would be.
Brands’s book is an engaging examination of the early period of the country’s history. But a reader cannot help but believe that this volume is intended to help Americans navigate the current brawl of politics ... This is a work of history, and Brands’s book illuminates the chinks in the American political system as much as the suppleness of it.
