Cogliano on A Revolutionary Friendship, 17 Feb.

Back in 2020, I looked at the trend of dual (and occasional treble) biographies of major Founders.

These books use the friendship, rivalry, or simple collaboration of two early American politicians as a lens, using that relationship to produce a more focused view of the Founding period.

The occasion for those musings was the publication of Stephen Knott and Tony Williams’s Washington and Hamilton: The Alliance that Forged America.

Starting with that book, one could move by degrees of separation from Hamilton to Madison (Jay Cost, The Price of Greatness: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and the Creation of American Oligarchy) to Jefferson (Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, Madison and Jefferson) to Lafayette (Tom Chaffin, Revolutionary Brothers: Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Friendship that Helped Forge Two Nations) and back to Washington (David A. Clary, Adopted Son: Washington, Lafayette, and the Friendship that Saved the Revolution).

I’m sure more examples of this trend have appeared since 2000. But this posting is prompted by a book coming out this month: A Revolutionary Friendship: Washington, Jefferson, and the American Republic by Francis D. Cogliano.

Some authors have looked at Washington and Jefferson together before, emphasizing the antagonism of the two men (e.g., Thomas Fleming, The Great Divide: The Conflict Between Washington and Jefferson that Defined a Nation).

As Cogliano explains on The Whiskey Rebellion podcast, which he produces with colleague David Silkenat, the two Presidents were friendly and productive for most of their careers, falling out only after Jefferson’s 24 Apr 1796 letter to Philip Mazzei became public.

Frank Cogliano is a Massachusetts native, a professor and dean at the University of Edinburgh, and the outgoing interim director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello.

That institution will celebrate the publication of A Revolutionary Friendship this Saturday, 17 February. Although that book launch is sold out, it will be livestreamed for anyone interested on Facebook, YouTube, and Monticello’s own website starting at 4:30 P.M.

Cogliano will be joined in conversation about his book by Annette Gordon-Reed, Peter Onuf, and Monticello’s new president, Jane Kamensky.