“Founders” is a term that we typically use to refer to just a few men–usually the first four Presidents of the United States, plus Ben Franklin and–nowadays–Alexander Hamilton. We think of them as typical representatives of their age, which produced civic saints of wisdom and service to the new nation. 

We don’t usually think about the other Founders, all those men and women who created the institutions, the politics, and the culture of the new republic–from Richard Allen to Judith Sargent Murray to John Jay. And we certainly don’t consider that an age which considered people like Washington to be heroic had points of contrast–the “many unscrupulous figures who violated the era’s expectation of public virtue and advanced their own interests at the expense of others.” Think of them as America’s Founding Scoundrels, whose plots and cons ended up shaping the nation sometimes as much as did the plans and hard work of the institution-builders. 

 David Head and Timothy J. Hemmis are the co-editors of a new book A Republic of Scoundrels: The Schemers, Intriguers, and Adventurers Who Created a New Nation. Timothy Hemmis is an associate professor of history at Texas A&M University Central Texas, where his teaching focuses on Early American History and American Military History. David Head is history professor at the University of Central Florida, and the author of A Crisis of Peace: George Washington, the Newburgh Conspiracy, and the Fate of the American Revolution, which he and I discussed in Episode 145 of the podcast.

 

For Further Investigation

I've previously on the podcast talked with Lorri Glover about "Founders as Fathers"; and we've also discussed the legal history of treason in the American Revolution with Carlton Larson. The following resources have all been suggested by David and Tim.

The best place to read founders' mail is Founders Online

William C. Davis, The Rogue Republic: How Would-Be Patriots Waged the Shortest Revolution in American History, (Boston, 2011).

Edward Everett Hale, “The Man without a Country,” The Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1863, 665–679.

Andro Linklater, An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson (New York, 2009).

Shira Lurie, The American Liberty Pole: Popular Politics and the Struggle for Democracy in the Early Republic (Charlottesville, VA, 2023).

J. K. Martin, Benedict Arnold, Revolutionary Hero: An American Hero Reconsidered (New York, 1997).

David Narrett, Adventurism and Empire: The Struggle for Mastery in the Louisiana–Florida Borderlands, 1762–1803 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015)