Meet the Founders

We chose these founders for a reason, and it was not because they were famous.

It was because they represented the radical wing of the American revolution: the skeptics, the agitators, the pamphleteer who wrote in plain English because he wanted everyone to understand the argument, the organizer who spent decades building the networks that made collective action possible, the polymath who never stopped being curious, and the legislative architects who built the constitutional walls against theocracy. These were not the men of compromise and moderation. They were the reason the revolution was about ideas.

Benjamin Franklin

1706–1790

Printer. Inventor. Diplomat. Satirist. America's original argument that intelligence and irreverence are not in conflict.

Benjamin Franklin was born the tenth son of a soap and candle maker in Boston, and he became, through nothing but intellect, industry, and an absolute refusal to be limited by his origins, one of the most consequential figures of the 18th century.

He founded the first public lending library in America, in Philadelphia in 1731, because he believed that access to knowledge should not be a privilege of the wealthy. He organized the first volunteer fire department. He co-founded Pennsylvania Hospital, the first public hospital in the American colonies. He invented the lightning rod, bifocals, and the flexible urinary catheter. He mapped the Gulf Stream. He established the postal system. He ran a newspaper and used it to skewer the pretensions of the powerful in language that was funny enough to be enjoyed by the people it criticized.

Politically, he was a deist who distrusted organized religion and believed that the measure of a moral life was its social utility — what he called "doing good to men." He was a religious skeptic who attended no church and considered virtue and civic service to be their own justification. Later in life, he became an active abolitionist, presiding over the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and submitting one of the first anti-slavery petitions to Congress in 1790, just weeks before his death.

At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he was 81 years old, so infirm that he had to be carried to sessions in a sedan chair. He stayed for all of it anyway, because the work wasn't done.

Franklin believed in merit over privilege, in reason over dogma, in humor as a tool for truth-telling, and in the idea that the purpose of a government was to make the lives of its citizens better, not to enrich the few at the expense of the many.

Connected Roasts: Woke AF, Sweet Rebellion, United We Brew

Thomas Paine

1737–1809

The Founders' Founder. Too radical for everyone, which means history eventually had to come back and admit he was right.

Thomas Paine arrived in Philadelphia from England in 1774 with a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin and nothing else. Two years later, he published Common Sense, a 47-page pamphlet that sold 500,000 copies in a country of 2.5 million people and made the case for American independence in the clearest, most direct language anyone had yet managed.

Franklin had given him a chance. Paine took the continent.

Common Sense was followed by The American Crisis, a series of essays that Washington had read aloud to his troops at Valley Forge. Then by Rights of Man, which argued that the French Revolution was a legitimate extension of the American one. Then by The Age of Reason, which argued, with similar force and similar disregard for the comfort of his readers, that organized religion was a tool of political control and that genuine faith had nothing to do with institutions that claimed to speak for God.

Paine also wrote Agrarian Justice in 1797, a short pamphlet that proposed a sovereign wealth fund, funded by a tax on land value, that would pay every citizen a lump sum upon reaching adulthood and an annual payment in old age. He called it compensation for the dispossession of the commons. We would recognize it today as a universal basic income.

He died in 1809, broke, nearly friendless, and widely reviled. Six people attended his funeral. He had been too anti-slavery for the southern founders, too anti-monarchy for those who wanted to make Washington a king, too anti-religion for those who needed the church's support, and too committed to economic justice for those who preferred to leave property arrangements as they were.

He was also almost entirely right, which history has gradually acknowledged.

Connected Roasts: United We Brew, No Kings

Samuel Adams

1722–1803

The organizer. The one who actually built the revolution, while everyone else was writing about it.

Samuel Adams failed at almost everything before he found his vocation. He inherited his father's malting business and ran it into the ground. He worked as a tax collector and was chronically underpaid, possibly because he was too sympathetic to the people who couldn't pay. He was not a great orator. He was not a military commander. He was not a diplomat.

He was an organizer, and in that role, he was transformatively effective.

Adams built the Committees of Correspondence, a network of communication that connected colonial political leaders across geographic and factional lines and created the organizational infrastructure for collective action before such action was widely considered possible. He cultivated the Sons of Liberty, the grassroots network of tradespeople and artisans who formed the social base of the revolutionary movement. He ran the Green Dragon Tavern in Boston as something between a community center and a revolutionary headquarters — a place where the working people of Boston came to drink, argue, and plan.

The Boston Tea Party was not a spontaneous outbreak of colonial frustration. It was a planned operation, executed by people Adams had organized and coordinated over years. When 116 men boarded three ships in Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773, they did so because Samuel Adams had spent years making sure that when the moment came, there would be people ready to act.

His animating conviction was that political power belongs to the people who are governed, not to the class of people who happen to hold power at any given moment. He was suspicious of wealth, hostile to aristocracy, and consistently more concerned with the rights of ordinary people than with the comfort of elites.

He was also, appropriately, a brewer by trade. We consider this a feature.

Connected Roasts: The People's Roast, 1773 Reserve

Jefferson and Madison

Thomas Jefferson, 1743–1826 / James Madison, 1751–1836

The architects of the wall. The men who built the legal barrier between government and religion, and whose complicated legacies demand honesty as much as acknowledgment.

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison are paired on this page because their most important shared achievement is also one of the most consistently misunderstood pieces of the American founding.

In 1786, Jefferson wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and Madison shepherded it through the Virginia legislature. It established, for the first time in any American jurisdiction, that the government of a civil society had no business enforcing religious belief, no right to compel attendance or financial support of any church, and no legitimate authority over the private opinions of its citizens in matters of faith. Jefferson considered it one of the three greatest achievements of his life.

The First Amendment's establishment clause, written largely by Madison, was built on the Virginia Statute's foundation. Jefferson, in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, described it as building "a wall of separation between Church and State" — a phrase that became the definitive description of the principle.

This was not hostility to religion. It was the institutional lesson of centuries of European history: that when governments enforce theological conformity, the result is persecution, violence, and the erosion of exactly the civic freedom that genuine faith, properly understood, should support. Madison said it plainly: "The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries."

Their legacies are complicated. Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal and enslaved over 600 people during his lifetime. Madison designed a constitutional architecture for republican government while ensuring that architecture protected the institution of slavery. These are not footnotes. They are central contradictions that the country is still working through.

We include them here because their work on religious freedom is too important to let the complications erase, and because honesty about the full record — the achievements and the failures — is the only version of history worth taking seriously.

Connected Roast: Secular Grounds