Washington's premonitory warnings against the degradations of faction are immediately recognizable in our 250th anniversary year, but they landed even harder at the time, and not just because of the pervasive sense of fragility. Even the most partisan of the 1790s factionalists believed (or at least hoped) that political parties would be a temporary unpleasantness to be discarded once the country and Constitution had been steered out of their initial crisis. Indeed, the so-called Era of Good Feelings, from 1815 to 1824, was marked by its lack of political competition, as the Federalists faded away and the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans held sway.

The Founders were unusually prescient and winningly world-weary when designing a government to restrain the many temptations of fallen man placed in proximity to power. But they did not quite understand that political parties—with all their truth-bending, soul-killing, pocket-lining corruption—would be a permanent feature of American politics. If they had, they'd have been even more depressed.

An Enlightenment, if You Can Keep It

The "most painful event of my life," Jefferson once remarked, was not when he had to flee Monticello to avoid British capture in 1781, or one his many 1790s political scraps, or even the 1802 newspaper scoop that he had fathered several children with a slave "concubine" named Sally Hemings, but rather when a masked mob of drunken, rioting students tore through his beloved University of Virginia on October 3, 1825, throwing bottles of urine through classroom windows, shouting "Down with European professors!" and beating one prof bloody with his own cane.

When confronting an all-student assembly the next day, Jefferson "was far too overcome with emotion and disappointment to speak. He burst into tears, so shaken that he had to sit down," wrote the historian Jared Cohen in Life After Power. "As tears flowed down the octogenarian's face, the wall of silence collapsed, and the guilty confessed." The ringleader turned out to be Jefferson's own great-nephew.

The Founding Fathers were Enlightenment men—schooled by the works of Scottish philosophers, thrilled by the possibilities of technological advancement, hopeful in the face of all contrary experience that man could be self-governing. With the possible exception of the much older Benjamin Franklin, no Founder came close to the Enlightenmentness of Jefferson. His hard-fought third-act founding of the University of Virginia was an ambitious attempt to pay forward the values of the American Revolution perpetually. "If a nation expects to be ignorant & free," he wrote, "it expects what never was & never will be."