Founding Friendship: Washington, Madison and the Creation of the American Republic

The friendships and political collaborations among America’s founding fathers have long been a source of fascination. In fact, scholars have generated a whole literature about the critical roles these collaborations played in the American Revolution, for example, the John Adams–Thomas Jefferson friendship that produced the Declaration of Independence, and that of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton that yielded the Federalist Papers, perhaps the greatest American political commentary ever written. Historians have also studied the James Madison–Thomas Jefferson collaboration that brought about, in the words of the documentary editor Julian Boyd, ‘the most extended, the most elevated, the most significant exchange of letters between any two men in the whole sweep of American history’. Yet all this scholarship  neglects the most important founding father of all: George Washington (1732-99).