Who Are Your Favorite Founders?

Alex Adrianson / July 03, 2010

In this fourth installment of our series highlighting the thoughts of conservative and libertarian leaders on American Independence and the Founding, we asked: What Founder is either your favorite or one who you think deserves more credit for his or her contributions to America? (This series will conclude with one more post tomorrow morning.)

John J. Miller, National Political Reporter for National Review: John Adams. He was colorful and cantankerous, had the best wife, and lived through the entire arc of America’s founding period. He started out as an anti-tax activist in Boston in the 1760s, threw himself into the radical politics of independence in the 1770s, and influenced the drafting of the Constitution in the 1780s. His presidency in the 1790s is not widely hailed as a success, but how many other presidents can say they whipped the French in a naval war? During a quarter century of retirement, he watched the growth of the early republic with a measure of well-deserved pride and died, almost providentially, on July 4, 1826—exactly half a century after he signed the Declaration of Independence. It can be a mistake to project the politics of the 21st century onto those of the Founding era, and Adams could be a complicated man. Yet it’s also possible to claim him as the Founding generation’s great conservative thinker. “Should I let loose my imagination into futurity, I could imagine that I foresee changes and revolutions such as eye hath not seen nor ear heard,” he once wrote. “I cannot see any better principle at present than to make as little innovation as possible; keep things going as well as we can in the present train.” (more…)