Founding Partisans

Brands, a revelatory history of the shocking emergence of vicious political division at the birth of the United States. 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 fresh and lively narrative of the early years of the republic as the Founding Fathers fought one another with competing visions of what our nation would be. The first party, the Federalists, formed around Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and their efforts to overthrow the Articles of Confederation and make the federal government more robust. Their opponents