Once again, as in the days of the Founding Fathers, America faces a stern test.
That test, as President Kennedy forthrightly depicted it in his State of the Union message, will determine "whether a nation organized and governed such as ours can endure".

It is well then that in this hour both of "national peril" and of "national opportunity" we can take counsel with the men who made the nation.
Incapable of self-delusion, the Founding Fathers found the crisis of their time to be equally grave, and yet they had confidence that America would surmount it and that a republic of free peoples would prosper and serve as an example to a world aching for liberty.

Seven Founders -- George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay -- determined the destinies of the new nation.
In certain respects, their task was incomparably greater than ours today, for there was nobody before them to show them the way.
As Madison commented to Jefferson in 1789, "We are in a wilderness without a single footstep to guide us.
Our successors will have an easier task".

They thought of themselves, to use Jefferson's words, as "the Argonauts" who had lived in "the Heroic Age".
Accordingly, they took special pains to preserve their papers as essential sources for posterity.
Their writings assume more than dramatic or patriotic interest because of their conviction that the struggle in which they were involved was neither selfish nor parochial but, rather, as Washington in his last wartime circular reminded his fellow countrymen, that "with our fate will the destiny of unborn millions be involved".

Strong men with strong opinions, frank to the point of being refreshingly indiscreet, the Founding Seven were essentially congenial minds, and their agreements with each other were more consequential than their differences.
Even though in most cases the completion of the definitive editions of their writings is still years off, enough documentation has already been assembled to warrant drawing a new composite profile of the leadership which performed the heroic dual feats of winning American independence and founding a new nation.

Before merging them into a common profile it is well to remember that their separate careers were extraordinary.
Certainly no other seven American statesmen from any later period achieved so much in so concentrated a span of years.

Eldest of the seven, Benjamin Franklin, a New Englander transplanted to Philadelphia, wrote the most dazzling success story in our history.
The young printer's apprentice achieved greatness in a half-dozen different fields, as editor and publisher, scientist, inventor, philanthropist and statesman.
Author of the Albany Plan Of Union, which, had it been adopted, might have avoided the Revolution, he fought the colonists' front-line battles in London, negotiated the treaty of alliance with France and the peace that ended the war, headed the state government of Pennsylvania, and exercised an important moderating influence at the Federal Convention.

On a military mission for his native Virginia the youthful George Washington touched off the French and Indian War, then guarded his colony's frontier as head of its militia.
Commanding the Continental Army for six long years of the Revolution, he was the indispensable factor in the ultimate victory.
Retiring to his beloved Mount Vernon, he returned to preside over the Federal Convention, and was the only man in history to be unanimously elected President.
During his two terms the Constitution was tested and found workable, strong national policies were inaugurated, and the traditions and powers of the Presidential office firmly fixed.

John Adams fashioned much of pre-Revolutionary radical ideology, wrote the constitution of his home state of Massachusetts, negotiated, with Franklin and Jay, the peace with Britain and served as our first Vice President and our second President.

His political opponent and lifetime friend, Thomas Jefferson, achieved immortality through his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, but equally notable were the legal and constitutional reforms he instituted in his native Virginia, his role as father of our territorial system, and his acquisition of the Louisiana Territory during his first term as President.

During the greater part of Jefferson's career he enjoyed the close collaboration of a fellow Virginian, James Madison, eight years his junior.
The active sponsor of Jefferson's measure for religious liberty in Virginia, Madison played the most influential single role in the drafting of the Constitution and in securing its ratification in Virginia, founded the first political party in American history, and, as Jefferson's Secretary of State and his successor in the Presidency, guided the nation through the troubled years of our second war with Britain.

If Franklin was an authentic genius, then Alexander Hamilton, with his exceptional precocity, consuming energy, and high ambition, was a political prodigy.
His revolutionary pamphlets, published when he was only 19, quickly brought him to the attention of the patriot leaders.
Principal author of "The Federalist", he swung New York over from opposition to the Constitution to ratification almost single-handedly.
His collaboration with Washington, begun when he was the general's aide during the Revolution, was resumed when he entered the first Cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury.
His bold fiscal program and his broad interpretation of the Constitution stand as durable contributions.

Less dazzling than Hamilton, less eloquent than Jefferson, John Jay commands an equally high rank among the Founding Fathers.
He served as president of the Continental Congress.
He played the leading role in negotiating the treaty with Great Britain that ended the Revolution, and directed America's foreign affairs throughout the Confederation period.
As first Chief Justice, his strong nationalist opinions anticipated John Marshall.
He ended his public career as a two-term governor of New York.

These Seven Founders constituted an intellectual and social elite, the most respectable and disinterested leadership any revolution ever confessed.
Their social status was achieved in some cases by birth, as with Washington, Jefferson and Jay;
in others by business and professional acumen, as with Franklin and Adams, or, in Hamilton's case, by an influential marriage.
Unlike so many of the power-starved intellectuals in underdeveloped nations of our own day, they commanded both prestige and influence before the Revolution started.

As different physically as the tall, angular Jefferson was from the chubby, rotund Adams, the seven were striking individualists.
Ardent, opinionated, even obstinate, they were amazingly articulate, wrote their own copy, and were masters of phrasemaking.

Capable of enduring friendships, they were also stout controversialists, who could write with a drop of vitriol on their pens.
John Adams dismissed John Dickinson, who voted against the Declaration of Independence, as "a certain great fortune and piddling genius".
Washington castigated his critic, General Conway, as being capable of "all the meanness of intrigue to gratify the absurd resentment of disappointed vanity".
And Hamilton, who felt it "a religious duty" to oppose Aaron Burr's political ambitions, would have been a better actuarial risk had he shown more literary restraint.

The Seven Founders were completely dedicated to the public service.
Madison once remarked: "My life has been so much a public one", a comment which fits the careers of the other six.
Franklin retired from editing and publishing at the age of 42, and for the next forty-two years devoted himself to public, scientific, and philanthropic interests.
Washington never had a chance to work for an extended stretch at the occupation he loved best, plantation management.
He served as Commander in Chief during the Revolution without compensation.

John Adams took to heart the advice given him by his legal mentor, Jeremiah Gridley, to "pursue the study of the law, rather than the gain of it".
In taking account of seventeen years of law practice, Adams concluded that "no lawyer in America ever did so much business as I did" and "for so little profit".
When the Revolution broke out, he, along with Jefferson and Jay, abandoned his career at the bar, with considerable financial sacrifice.

Hamilton, poorest of the seven, gave up a brilliant law practice to enter Washington's Cabinet.
While he was handling the multi-million-dollar funding operations of the Government he had to resort to borrowing small sums from friends.
"If you can conveniently let me have twenty dollars", he wrote one friend in 1791 when he was Secretary of the Treasury.

To support his large family Hamilton went back to the law after each spell of public service.
Talleyrand passed his New York law office one night on the way to a party.
Hamilton was bent over his desk, drafting a legal paper by the light of a candle.
The Frenchman was astonished.
"I have just come from viewing a man who had made the fortune of his country, but now is working all night in order to support his family", he reflected.

All seven combined ardent devotion to the cause of revolution with a profound respect for legality.
John Adams asserted in the Continental Congress' Declaration of Rights that the demands of the colonies were in accordance with their charters, the British Constitution and the common law, and Jefferson appealed in the Declaration of Independence "to the tribunal of the world" for support of a revolution justified by "the laws of nature and of nature's God".

They fought hard, but they were forgiving to former foes, and sought to prevent vindictive legislatures from confiscating Tory property in violation of the Treaty of 1783.

This sense of moderation and fairness is superbly exemplified in an exchange of letters between John Jay and a Tory refugee, Peter Van Schaack.
Jay had participated in the decision that exiled his old friend Van Schaack.
Yet when, at war's end, the ex-Tory made the first move to resume correspondence, Jay wrote him from Paris, where he was negotiating the peace settlement:

"As an independent American I considered all who were not for us, and you amongst the rest, as against us, yet be assured that John Jay never ceased to be the friend of Peter Van Schaack".

The latter in turn assured him that "were I arraigned at the bar, and you my judge, I should expect to stand or fall only by the merits of my cause".

All seven recognized that independence was but the first step toward building a nation.
"We have now a national character to establish", Washington wrote in 1783.
"Think continentally", Hamilton counseled the young nation.
This new force, love of country, super-imposed upon -- if not displacing -- affectionate ties to one's own state, was epitomized by Washington.
His first inaugural address speaks of "my country whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love".

All sought the fruition of that nationalism in a Federal Government with substantial powers.
Save Jefferson, all participated in the framing or ratification of the Federal Constitution.
They supported it, not as a perfect instrument, but as the best obtainable.
Historians have traditionally regarded the great debates of the Seventeen Nineties as polarizing the issues of centralized vs. limited government, with Hamilton and the nationalists supporting the former and Jefferson and Madison upholding the latter position.

The state's rights position was formulated by Jefferson and Madison in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolves, but in their later careers as heads of state the two proved themselves better Hamiltonians than Jeffersonians.
In purchasing Louisiana, Jefferson had to adopt Hamilton's broad construction of the Constitution, and so did Madison in advocating the rechartering of Hamilton's bank, which he had so strenuously opposed at its inception, and in adopting a Hamiltonian protective tariff.
Indeed, the old Jeffersonians were far more atune to the Hamilton-oriented Whigs than they were to the Jacksonian Democrats.

When, in 1832, the South Carolina nullifiers adopted the principle of state interposition which Madison had advanced in his old Virginia Resolve, they elicited no encouragement from that senior statesman.
In his political testament, "Advice To My Country", penned just before his death, Madison expressed the wish "that the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated.
Let the open enemy to it be regarded as a Pandora with her box opened;
and the disguised one, as the serpent creeping with his deadly wiles into Paradise".