Most accounts of the founding generation focus only on the activities of the "big three"—Washington, Jefferson, and Madison—but Boles incorporates the key contributions of these other four important figures to the political and legal structures that govern the United States to this day. At the same time, Boles is clear-eyed about the Revolutionary generation’s problems and their fading from the scene, inaugurating the beginnings of Virginia’s political decline in the early nineteenth century. In so doing, Boles provides the crucial Virginian piece to the ongoing reevaluation of the United States’ founding moment.