They set this in motion.

In addition. What people don't get this that the Founding Fathers disagreed on almost everything.

They COMPROMISED on most every thing.

They became political opponents. almost the 2nd after independence.

I should have add some of the reasons for compromise were good other not so good.

I also pretty much include anybody involved in the DoI and Constitution as "Founding Fathers."

To think they were saints would be naive in the extreme. Many of our conservative opponents have this naive kind of faith that our founding fathers were "great men." The tend to emphasize the "great" part and ignore the "men" part of the description.

Some of the compromises written into the Constitution were pretty odious, and we have yet to overcome their effects.

Certainly there were ambitious men who sought to carve out their own empires once freed from the shackles of Britain. A huge part of the resistance, especially in the North, was opposition to how the East India Company had such deep roots and entanglements in Parlieament. Some of our FF were most likely thinking about doing something similar here.

Ambitious? Yes. Ruthless? To a certain degree many of them were. Totally devoid of virtue? Not sure how we could even figure that out. Early American politics was pretty raucus and nasty.

Last edited Sat Jun 17, 2017, 12:08 PM - Edit history (1)

Just because they were politically disenfranchised at the time, doesn't mean that women were politically un-involved members of the founding generation. In fact, women were the primary organizers of the uber-effective anti-British boycotts that followed passage of the Stamp Act and the Townshend Acts.

Cokie Roberts wrote a book called "Founding Mothers," which I read years ago and recall as quite good. I'm sure there are other similar works out there too.

That spent most of their days drunk. That's who they were.

If you were white, educated, male landowners they would have been heroes. For me not so much.