What if the supposed villains of America's founding were the unsung heroes of this country?
In Disgraced Founders, Andrew S. Trees moves five miscast founders to center stage in the drama of the American Revolution. Each character-driven chapter centers on a decisive moment when history might have turned out differently, and a now-unlikely figure could have risen to prominence in the Revolution.
- John Dickinson, the colonies' leading patriot voice before July 1776, opposed independence as premature, leading to a path of war and the loss of colonial American liberties. His reticence, distilled in his Olive Branch Petition of 1775, allowed John Adams to become the hero of the moment and earned Dickinson the label of coward.
- Nathanael Greene proved indispensable to winning the war in the South by fighting for allegiance as well as territory, but George Washington received the glory after the Battle of Yorktown.
- Robert Morris rejected appeals to revolutionary virtue and harnessed self-interest to restore national credit. However, the financial groundwork Morris laid for American economic stability was later credited to Alexander Hamilton.
- James Wilson fought to make the Constitution more democratic, but James Madison is remembered as the father of the founding charter and the instigator of the Bill of Rights.
- Melancton Smith outdebated Hamilton and brokered the compromise that brought New York into the Union, but history made Hamilton the hero and labeled Smith a turncoat.
In this retelling, Trees upends the familiar narrative of American independence by looking through the founders' eyes to glimpse not the inevitable triumph of unanimous idealism but a struggle over when to declare independence, how to mobilize a divided citizenry, and how to create a national government Americans would accept as legitimate.
Grounded in the latest scholarship and appealing to general interest readers, Disgraced Founders recovers a forgotten revolution and suggests a more expansive definition of patriotism, one that remains sharply relevant in our own polarized age.
Andrew S. Trees is associate professor and director of the Mansfield Institute at Roosevelt University. He has written widely on the American founding, including The Founding Fathers and the Politics of Character, and published two novels. He resides in Illinois.
