“Joseph J. Ellis has emerged as an eloquent champion and brilliant practitioner of the old-fashioned art of biography.” as said by Forrest McDonald in The New York Times Book Review. Joseph J. Ellis was the author of 9 books and a leading scholar of American history. He won the pulitzer prize for his book “Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation” and won the national book award for a biography of Thomas Jefferson titled, “American sphinx”. Ellis has taught at many different colleges, including the Williams College, University of Massachusetts, Mount Holyoke College, and the United States Military academy at West point. Ellis has also written essays and book reviews, many of which …show more content…
Ellis begins this chapter by telling the most common version of the story, which says that Hamilton and Burr met on the plains of Weehawken, NJ, stood ten paces apart, and shot at each other in accordance with the code duello. In this duel Hamilton was mortally wounded, and died the next day; Burr, although uninjured, was unable to regain political popularity afterwards. However, after this Ellis goes on to tell a more elaborated version of the story. I believe Ellis does this in order to show the reader just how much one small issue can divide the populace, as he describes the way that people fought over whose side - Hamilton’s or Burr’s - was true. In the next couple of chapters Ellis discussed various instances in which people questioned the government, and the ways they chose to fix it, whether right or wrong. In chapter two he discusses a dinner which Thomas Jefferson held, trying to implement Hamilton's financial plan, and to decide where the US capitol would be. However, that dinner turned out to be a huge mistake for Jefferson. In chapter three Joseph Ellis discusses one problem which threatened to tear apart the union - the issue of slavery. Because of this issue many of the states threatened to secede from the union, and many did in