Founding Fathers

The Founding Fathers were the American statesmen and political writers who led the Thirteen Colonies to independence from Great Britain and framed the government of the United States between 1774 and 1791. The term commonly covers figures such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, along with dozens of delegates who sat in the Continental Congresses and the Constitutional Convention. The phrase itself was popularized much later, in a 1916 speech by Warren G. Harding.

The break with Britain began as coordinated resistance. The First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in September 1774 to answer the Coercive Acts that Parliament had passed after the Boston Tea Party. After fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord, the Second Continental Congress convened in May 1775, assumed direction of the war, and appointed Washington commander of the Continental Army. On July 4, 1776, Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, drafted chiefly by Jefferson, which set out a theory of government resting on consent and listed grievances against King George III.

The first national framework, the Articles of Confederation, was drafted in 1777 and ratified in 1781. It left most power with the states and gave Congress no authority to tax or regulate commerce. War debts, quarrels over trade between the states, and the armed unrest of Shays's Rebellion in Massachusetts in 1786 and 1787 convinced many leaders that the arrangement could not hold, and the states agreed to send delegates to revise it.

Instead of revising the Articles, the fifty-five delegates who gathered in Philadelphia from May to September 1787 wrote an entirely new charter. Washington presided; Madison kept the fullest notes and pressed the plan of a stronger central government. The convention balanced large and small states through the compromise that gave each state equal representation in the Senate and population-based representation in the House, and it divided authority among a legislature, an executive, and a judiciary. The delegates signed the Constitution on September 17, 1787.

Ratification was contested. To win support in New York, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay published the eighty-five essays known as The Federalist in 1787 and 1788, arguing for the new system against Anti-Federalist critics who feared a distant national power and the absence of a bill of rights. The Constitution took effect after the ninth state ratified in 1788, Washington was inaugurated as the first president in 1789, and the first Congress proposed the ten amendments, ratified in 1791, that became the Bill of Rights. Our catalog carries the text of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights together.

The founders drew on several intellectual traditions at once: the natural-rights arguments of John Locke, the separation-of-powers analysis of Montesquieu, the example of the Roman republic, and English common law. They did not agree among themselves. By the 1790s, Hamilton and his allies favored a strong federal government and close commercial ties with Britain, while Jefferson and Madison led an opposing faction wary of central power, and these divisions hardened into the first political parties. Many of the leading founders, including Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, owned enslaved people, and the Constitution they wrote counted enslaved persons as three-fifths of a person for representation and postponed any ban on the Atlantic slave trade until 1808.