The Founding Fathers have long been considered in the public imagination as the creators of the modern democratic system. Like their educated, political-minded European contemporaries, these men supplemented their formal education with outside reading borrowed from libraries such as the New York Society Library, the oldest library in New York City (founded in 1754). Thousands of entries in its ledgers dating to the eighteenth-century track the lending histories of books read before, during, and after the American Revolution. Through examination of these recently digitized ledger pages from 1789-1792 and 1799-1805, available at the New York Society Library, the books that 42 of the first American Congressmen chose to read there shed light on who these men were, both politically and personally, in relation to the world around them. By visualizing data and analyzing the relationships present between these men and literature that they read, this project explores how the Founding Fathers revolutionary beliefs were influenced by their continual education and reading habits at the New York Society Library. As the ledgers show, the Founding Fathers were more than the American political icons that they have come to embody.