. . . Americans have a “universal interest” in “those Patriots to whom we owe that memorable Act [the signing of the Declaration of Independence] and all its glorious consequences.” —John Trumbull to Thomas Jefferson, December 1817
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The Founders’ achievements often cloud their personalities. Consequently, more than two centuries after the Founding era, the Founders are shrouded in myth. To their contemporaries they were ordinary men and women. Subsequent assessments of the Founders too often focus on their achievements. The result is a partial appraisal of them as individuals with personalities, talents, foibles, and defects.
Some of the Founders were very cautious in their assessments; others could not resist being brutally frank. Some, like Washington, rarely gossiped; while others, like John Adams, could not stop communicating the “Tittle Tatle” of the day. Some Founders used their private correspondence to vent off steam. Some avoided introspection, while others, like both John and Abigail Adams, seemed almost obsessed with assessing their own qualities. In essence, the Founders themselves become the joint biographers of each other, or better yet, they become their own autobiographers.
An exhaustive database has been created from a variety of sources that, to date, has entries for 606 people, with 5,751 separate entries and over 660,000 words. The complete database can be accessed at the bottom of this page.
Directly below, you will find selections highlighting fifteen major figures from the Founding Period. These selections have been culled from The Founders on the Founders: Word Portraits from the American Revolutionary Era, edited by John P. Kaminski, and published by the University of Virginia Press, 2008.