Wealth & Money Quote by Stephen Ambrose

Ambrose’s line punctures the feel-good pageant version of the Founding Fathers by refusing the easiest narrative glue: friendship. Washington and Jefferson get bundled together in American memory as co-stars in a single revolutionary drama, their shared Virginia pedigree standing in for intimacy. Ambrose yanks that assumption away. Two men can occupy the same class, the same state, the same mythic pantheon, and still not like each other, not trust each other, not move in the same emotional orbit.

The intent is corrective, but it’s also a power move: it re-centers politics as a world of alliances, reputations, and rivalries rather than personal warmth. “Rich Virginia planters” is doing double duty. It signals common interests (land, slavery, local hierarchy) while hinting at the cramped social ecosystem of the Tidewater elite, where proximity doesn’t guarantee affinity. In that context, “never friends” reads as a diagnosis of temperament and ideology: Washington’s guarded, martial sense of order versus Jefferson’s more doctrinal, party-building approach that later attached itself to opposition against Washington’s administration.

Subtext: the early republic wasn’t a family; it was a coalition under stress. The Revolution required coordination, not closeness, and the presidency intensified suspicion rather than camaraderie. Ambrose, writing for a public trained on marble-statue sentimentality, is also telling us how history actually works: not as a chain of heroic handshakes, but as a succession of uneasy collaborations where class sameness can coexist with deep political divergence.