Sketches the moral and political sensibilities of the Founding Fathers: Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, and Madison along with Burr and Paine. Each of the core six was conscious of belonging to a new meritocracy, of setting an example for the Revolutionary generation. Washington and Jefferson receive the fullest historiographical treatment; Franklin’s portrait is most revealing. Paine and Burr are present to serve as counterpoints, as well to illustrate the code: even as the Founding Fathers proved themselves a brilliant cohort of elites, the 18th-century American aristocracy was ending, sped along by the example of these (largely) self-made men and their rhetorical appeals to the common man. That essay, which treats the story of the Revolutionary- and Federalist-era newspapers, also makes a telling explanation of the overheated, lugubrious prose so often found in the century’s polemics: the elites were talking amongst themselves, above the proletariat.