United States Founding Fathers of Confederation

The Founding Fathers of the United States are those individuals of the Thirteen Colonies in North America who led the American Revolution against the authority of the British Crown in word and deed and contributed to the establishment of the United States of America.[2]

Historian Richard B. Morris in 1973 identified the following seven figures as the key Founding Fathers: John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington. Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin were members of the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay were authors of The Federalist Papers, advocating ratification of the Constitution. Jay, Adams and Franklin negotiated the Treaty of Paris (1783) that would end the American Revolutionary War. Washington was Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army and was President of the Constitutional Convention. Washington, Jay and Franklin are considered the Founding Fathers of U.S. Intelligence by the CIA.[6] All held additional important roles in the early government of the United States, with Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison serving as President. Four of these seven - Washington, Jay, Hamilton and Madison - did not sign the Declaration of Independence.[7]

The term Founding Fathers is sometimes used to refer to the Signers of the embossed version of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It is not to be confused with the term Framers; the Framers are defined by the National Archives as those 55 individuals who were appointed to be delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention and took part in drafting the proposed Constitution of the United States. Of the 55 Framers, only 39 were signers of the Constitution. Two further groupings of Founding Founders include: 1) those who signed the Continental Association, a trade ban and one of the colonists' first collective volleys protesting British control and the Intolerable Acts in 1774 or 2) those who signed the Articles of Confederation, the first U.S. constitutional document.

The phrase "Founding Fathers" is a twentieth-century appellation, first coined by Warren G. Harding in 1916. In the 19th century, they were referred to as simply, the "Fathers". Some historians have begun to eschew the limiting Great Man theory associated with the term "Founding Fathers" and apply it to a broader group of people, that includes not only Morris' "Seven" or the Signers or the Framers but also all those, no matter their race or gender, who, whether as politicians, jurists, statesmen, soldiers, diplomats, or ordinary citizens, took part in winning U.S. independence and creating the United States of America