Johnson misses the boat in other ways, too. He describes Washington as someone born to greatness, gushing about his commanding presence, his magnificent physique, graceful dancing abilities, "impeccable English ancestry" and so forth. But what he overlooks is Washington's status as an outsider. He was the product of an intensely provincial society, a bit like Galway, Ireland, or the Outer Hebrides, only many times more remote. This explains his severe self-discipline, his almost masklike reserve and the curious maxims he was continually copying into his notebook as a youth, things like "Kill no vermin, as fleas, lice, ticks etc. in the sight of others" and "Sing not to yourself with a humming noise nor drum with your fingers and feet." A young gentleman coming of age in London or Paris would have had an abundance of real-life models on which to base his behavior. But Washington, growing up 3,000 miles away on the edge of the wilderness, did not, which is why he had to make do with advice books and plays like Addison's Cato, the tale of a reluctant Roman general who longs for the simple farming life. They were among the few sources he had for information on how to comport himself, so he made the most of them.

Provincialism was not entirely a weakness, however. As with the Corsican-born Napoleon, growing up on the periphery gave him a certain perspective that others lacked, a better appreciation of the big picture. This is what explains Washington's growing sense of nationalism and the strategic vision that allowed him to turn his enemy's weaknesses to his own advantage. Johnson writes that Washington "fought the war over nine of the thirteen states and got to know large parts of the country with painful intimacy but also with a glowing regard for their potential." True, but it was his sense of their potential that led him to take on the revolutionary command in the first place. Johnson, moreover, gives little idea of the lengths he was prepared to go to in carrying out his ideas. Not only did Washington ally himself throughout the 1790s with Alexander Hamilton, the brilliant young Northern dynamo whose efforts at fostering industrial growth directly threatened the interests of the Southern plantocracy, but when war with Napoleonic France seemed imminent in 1798, he insisted that Hamilton be among those in charge of military defense. This was tantamount to a declaration of war on his fellow landowners. If Bonaparte had invaded, he would most likely have done so via Virginia, where he probably could have counted on a warm welcome from planters who were heavily pro-French. By putting Hamilton in command, Washington was preparing to unleash the slaveholding South's bête noire on his own state. Johnson describes Washington as a man who united his country but gives no indication that he was also prepared to divide it.

Hitchens is a much more sophisticated political observer, with a juicier topic to boot. Unlike Washington, Jefferson did not shield himself behind an impenetrable visage. He was not the least bit opaque. Rather, he comes across as a clear candidate for the psychiatrist's couch: self-pitying, twitchily neurotic, all but crippled by his gaping psychological wounds. Hitchens tries hard to be fair but continually stumbles across yawning contradictions and outright lies that cause him to throw up his hands in despair. During the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, for instance, he notes that Jefferson tried to insert a paragraph charging George III with first foisting slavery on a reluctant South and then encouraging blacks "to purchase that liberty of which he had deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them." Slavery's real victims, apparently, were not the black people groaning under the lash but the white people applying it. When the paragraph was deleted, Jefferson blamed "Georgia and South Carolina, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves," and then "our northern brethren," who "had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others." It seems never to have occurred to him that it was cut simply because it was absurd and would have made the Continental Congress a laughingstock.

Similarly, when Daniel Shays led a rebellion by indebted farmers in western Massachusetts in 1786-87, Jefferson was the picture of revolutionary insouciance. "The tree of liberty must from time to time be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants," he offered (the same words, by the way, that Timothy McVeigh had emblazoned on his T-shirt when arrested after the Oklahoma City bombing). But when slaves rose in revolt in Saint-Domingue (now known as Haiti) in 1791, Jefferson was beside himself with fear: "Never was so deep a tragedy presented to the feelings of man.... It is high time we should foresee the bloody scenes which our children certainly, and possibly ourselves (south of the Potomac) will have to wade through, & try to avert them." Revolutionary violence was no big deal as long as the revolutionaries in question were white. Laying out his plans years later for the University of Virginia, Jefferson vowed that it would "be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth where it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it." At the same time, Hitchens observes, he made sure that antislavery ideas would be kept at a distance.

One could go on, and indeed Hitchens does for close to 200 pages. His book is a sign of a growing re-evaluation of the Founders that is itself a delayed response to the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and '60s. For years, left-leaning intellectuals have viewed the Revolutionary period through simple-minded populist lenses, with Hamilton as the leader of (hiss! boo!) finance capital and Jefferson as the champion of (hooray!) the common man. But we now know that the only common people Jefferson championed were rural whites, while his ultimate loyalty was to the slaveholding elite. He was a provincial, but rather than rising above it à la Washington, he surrendered to it completely. To quote Hitchens, he was a devotee of "Virginia First" who extolled states' rights, defined democracy in exclusively local terms and disparaged national consolidation as inherently tyrannical.

One of the strengths of Hitchens's book is the balanced view he takes of Hamilton. Although he describes Hamilton as "conservative," a well-nigh meaningless term in this context, he clearly prefers his "mercantile modernism" to Jefferson's reactionary agrarianism. America faced three compelling tasks in the 1790s: It had to strengthen the national government and hence national democracy; it had to do something about what Henry Adams would later call "a cancerous disease of negro slavery"; and it had to modernize the economy. Hamilton was the only one with even a remote idea of how to advance on all three fronts, while Jefferson was an obstacle to each. Jefferson's program would have destroyed the new republic if implemented in full. In fact, it nearly did destroy it when Southern firebrands carried his ideas to their logical conclusion in 1860-65.

"It may still be argued," Hitchens observes, "that Jefferson was a Dixiecrat avant la lettre." His 1799 Kentucky Resolution calling on the states to nullify federal laws they considered unconstitutional became "the great political prop of the pro-slavery faction," while his secessionist mutterings in response to a series of domestic improvements proposed by John Quincy Adams in 1826 "helped create the moral basis for the states' rights ideology of John Calhoun." Hitchens gives credit where credit is due. Jefferson took vigorous action to punish the Barbary corsairs of North Africa who had taken Americans prisoner and were holding them for ransom, although he notes that Jefferson was able to do so only because the Federalists had overridden his and James Madison's objections in creating a small but formidable navy in the 1790s. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 was also a triumph. Yet here, too, Hitchens observes that in devising a rationale for such an unprecedented exercise in federal power, Jefferson, the original strict constructionist, had to resort to the sort of fancy constitutional footwork that he had previously denounced.

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