American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic by Joseph J. Ellis

The Barnes & Noble Review

Academic fashion determines the way whole generations are educated, and since the '60s, as historian Joseph Ellis slyly remarks, a "hegemonic narrative" has prevailed within the academy, in which race, class, and gender are the privileged categories and the Founding Fathers of the American Republic have all too often been dismissed as the deadest of dead white males -- "racists, classists, and sexists, a kind of rogues' gallery rather than a gallery of greats." Historians have focused their attention, instead, on America's dispossessed: slaves, women, and Native Americans.

But in the last few years, the cultural focus has returned to the Founding Fathers with the appearance of a number of hugely popular new books, including bestselling biographies of Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, and Washington. The Founders are back: back with a vengeance, thanks to writers like Ellis himself, whose elegant, balanced books on the Founding era and biographies of Jefferson, Adams, and Washington have done much to return the public's attention to this remarkable group of men and their accomplishments.

Part of the urgent new interest in the founders might be attributable to the attacks currently being made on their greatest achievements, the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The significance of habeas corpus, for instance, such a tortured issue today, can best be understood by going back to James Madison and the context within which he pressed for its enshrinement in the new nation's law. Another attraction is the way the Founders, brilliant men by any standards, shine by contrast with our present-day political leaders. As Henry Adams remarked way back in the 19th century, if you looked at all the American presidents panoramically, you would have to conclude that Darwin got it exactly backward.

The question that has always fascinated Ellis -- and so many other historians of the Founding era -- is, "How did they do it?" In American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic, Ellis states the case.

During the last quarter of the eighteenth century a former colony of Great Britain, generally regarded as a provincial and wholly peripheral outpost of Western Civilization, somehow managed to establish a set of ideas and institutions that, over the stretch of time, became the blueprint for political and economic success for the nation-state in the modern world…. [These institutions included] representative government bottomed on the principle of popular sovereignty, a market economy fueled by the energies of unfettered citizens, a secular state unaffiliated with any official religion, and the rule of law that presumed the equality of all citizens.

Posterity has generally deemed these achievements triumphs. But there were blunders at the Founding, too, disasters that might have been averted but were not, causing tragedy and all but tearing the Union to pieces. Most notable among these was the failure to end slavery, or at least to come up with a gradual scheme for emancipation, and the failure to create and enforce a fair settlement with the Native Americans. Ellis takes a close look at both the triumphs and the tragedies, showing us new facets of the familiar stories.

What makes Ellis's work so persuasive is his unwillingness to see the Founders in a simplistic light, either as ideal heroes or as racist villains. They were great men but undoubtedly flawed ones, and none of them has escaped with his reputation unstained. As Ellis remarks, "It is uncommon for the same men who make a revolution also to secure it," and the process of securing it involved compromises that some of the protagonists found nearly unbearable.

In a fascinating chapter on the creation and ratification of the Constitution, Ellis argues that the climax of that particular drama was not the Constitutional Convention of 1787 but the Virginia Ratifying Convention of 1788, which pitted a cast of titans against each other in a bitter fight over federal versus state authority. James Madison and George Washington, backed by Alexander Hamilton, argued in favor of a model in which federal authority would supersede that of the individual states, while George Mason and the great orator Patrick Henry fought for the principal of state sovereignty and a minimum of centralized power. The Henry-Madison debate in June 1788 was, Ellis claims, possibly "the most consequential debate in American history" -- even more so than the Lincoln-Douglas debates over slavery or the Darrow-Bryan one on evolution.

Eventually, the two sides were obliged to come to a compromise that pleased hardly anyone; in fact, Madison, at that time, felt that he had lost all the major battles and that "the principal of state sovereignty had been qualified but not killed, as he believed it should be." Ellis points out that the solution was a fruitful one in spite of itself, "making argument itself the answer by creating a framework in which federal and state authority engaged in an ongoing negotiation for supremacy, thereby making the Constitution, like history itself, an argument without end." Not quite entirely without end, perhaps; an end of sorts to aspects of the argument would certainly come on the battlefields of the Civil War.

The Antifederalist fear -- some have called it paranoia -- is worth considering. Its spokesmen, from Patrick Henry to its modern proponents, have argued that once in place, the federal government's "relentless expansion of arbitrary power was unstoppable, its tendency toward corruption was inevitable, and its appetite for despotism was unquenchable" -- an anti–Big Government position, in other words. For much of our country's history, this complaint came from the political right; now, though, it is gaining new adherents from the center and left, due to the Bush administration's unprecedented usurpation of power. The argument lives on, it seems.

In two subsequent chapters, Ellis shows how both Madison and Jefferson changed their positions due to the exigencies of political life after 1788. The beginning of the two-party system in 1791 defied everyone's conceptions of what the Constitutional government was supposed to be about, and it was psychologically impossible for Washington and Adams, "the last of a classical breed" and instinctively nonpartisan, to conceive of themselves as party men. But Alexander Hamilton's new fiscal programs led Madison and Jefferson, the southern agrarians, to fear that the Republic was being taken over by a sinister conspiracy of northern bankers and money men: the federal government, they believed, was running amok. Thus was born the Republican Party, with Jefferson at its head and Madison as his right hand.

"Given [Madison's] role as the most prominent Federalist of all in 1787-88, for him to recognize the Antifederalists as the heroic predecessors of the Republicans was akin to having Martin Luther declare his ultimate allegiance to the Vatican," Ellis comments dryly. Jefferson, too, was now displaying protean qualities that would ultimately lead him to defy any sort of political classification. When it became evident, during his presidency, that Napoleon Bonaparte was considering offering the Louisiana Territory for sale, Jefferson displayed his willingness to act unconstitutionally if the occasion demanded. "Throughout the 1790s he had labeled the Federalists 'monarchists' and insisted that any energetic projection of executive power violated republican principles. Now, he had just performed the most aggressive executive action ever by an American president, a projection of executive authority that would stand the test of time as perhaps the boldest in American history. If one wished to acquire an empire, it turned out, one had to become an imperial president."

It is hard to see how the two principal tragedies of the Founding era could have been evaded. Ellis shows us how during his first presidential term Washington, encouraged by Secretary of War Henry Knox, tried hard to create and implement a fair deal for the Native Americans in accordance with the republican principles for which the revolution had been fought. "It would reflect honor on the new government," Knox wrote, "were a declarative Law to be passed that the Indian tribes possess the right of the soil of all lands…and that they are not to be divested thereof but in consequence of fair and bona fide purchases, made under the authority, or with the express approbation of the United States." Knox and Washington envisioned a series of Indian homelands east of the Mississippi, protected by the federal government, that would eventually become states, but for many reasons -- especially the unstoppable streams of white settlers pouring into the Indian territories -- their efforts ended in debacle. It was a debacle Washington took personally, Ellis tells us, "believing that his signature on the [failed] Treaty of New York was his pledge of honor, as well as the solemn word of the United States government. Both were now being exposed as worthless."

The issue of slavery was, of course, the single most divisive question that faced the Founders. It was almost foreordained that the Constitution would fail to settle it, since there was no possible settlement that the 13 states could have agreed on: the Union would have dissolved before it even existed. But the Founders' failure on this subject went beyond a mere politic silence. As a group they were simply unable to imagine a functional biracial society. The resultant fissures in the newborn Republic were more than evident to the founding generation, but these men chose to push the inevitable earthquake into the future. It is a difficult choice to approve -- but a different course of action would probably have doomed the nascent Republic.

The most interesting aspect of Ellis's take on the Founders and their work is his vision -- a correct one, I think -- of the Union and the Constitution they created as ever-evolving, non-monolithic entities. Ellis's characterization of the Constitution as "an argument without end" has proved to be a just one, as anyone can see by tuning in to the Senate proceedings on C-SPAN today. Showing us the founding era as a series of philosophical conflicts and painful compromises rather than the triumphal progress celebrated in school textbooks makes American history -- and the embattled American present -- more comprehensible, and infinitely more accessible. --Brooke Allen

Brooke Allen is the author of Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers; Twentieth-Century Attitudes; and Artistic License. She is a contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The New Criterion, The New Leader, The Hudson Review, The Nation, and more.

From the Publisher

From the prizewinning author of the best-selling Founding Brothers and American Sphinx, a masterly and highly ironic examination of the founding years of our country. The last quarter of the eighteenth century remains the most politically creative era in American history, when a dedicated and determined group of men undertook a bold experiment in political ideals. It was a time of triumphs; yet, as Joseph J. Ellis makes clear, it was also a time of tragedies—all of which contributed to the shaping of our burgeoning nation.

From the first shots fired at Lexington to the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the negotiations for the Louisiana Purchase, Ellis guides us through the decisive issues of the nation’s founding, and illuminates the emerging philosophies, shifting alliances, and personal and political foibles of our now iconic leaders—Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and Adams. He casts an incisive eye on the founders’ achievements, arguing that the American Revolution was, paradoxically, an evolution—and that part of what made it so extraordinary was the gradual pace at which it occurred. He shows us why the fact that it was brought about by a group, rather than by a single individual, distinguished it from the bloodier revolutions of other countries, and ultimately played a key role in determining its success. He explains how the idea of a strong federal government, championed by Washington, was eventually embraced by the American people, the majority of whom had to be won over, as they feared an absolute power reminiscent of the British Empire. And he details the emergence of the two-party system—then apolitical novelty—which today stands as the founders’ most enduring legacy.

But Ellis is equally incisive about their failures, and he makes clear how their inability to abolish slavery and to reach a just settlement with the Native Americans has played an equally important role in shaping our national character. He demonstrates how these misjudgments, now so abundantly evident, were not necessarily inevitable. We learn of the negotiations between Henry Knox and Alexander McGillivray, the most talented Indian statesman of his time, which began in good faith and ended in disaster. And we come to understand how a political solution to slavery required the kind of robust federal power that the Jeffersonians viewed as a betrayal of their most deeply held principles.

With eloquence and insight, Ellis strips the mythic veneer of the revolutionary generation to reveal men both human and inspired, possessed of both brilliance and blindness. American Creation is a book that delineates an era of flawed greatness, at a time when understanding our origins is more important than ever.

The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley

This book consists of seven essays (none of which has been previously published in its current form) and a brief afterword in which Ellis continues his exploration of the reality, as opposed to the mythology, of the founding. It can be argued, of course, that in the past there is no "reality," no final truth, only what historians and others choose to make it, but historians can explore that past free of hagiography on the one hand or, on the other, the ideological biases that color so much of what passes for scholarly history these days. Ellis, who teaches history at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, gives the founders their full due but insists that they made serious mistakes—they failed to end slavery, "or at least to adopt a gradual emancipation scheme that put it on the road to extinction," and they failed "to implement a just and generous settlement with the Native Americans"—and that blind luck gave them a mighty assist.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

Mr. Ellis's new book, American Creation, is very much a bookend to Founding Brothers, another series of meditations upon the Revolutionary generation and its triumphs and failures in inventing the United States of America…Although this book is highly discursive and at times unfocused, it is animated by Mr. Ellis's consummate familiarity with his subject matter and his ability—on dazzling display in his books on John Adams (Passionate Sage), Thomas Jefferson (American Sphinx) and George Washington (His Excellency)—to show how character informs decision making and how friendships and rivalries among the founders shaped the birth of the infant nation…It is Mr. Ellis's achievement in this volume that he once again leaves us with a keen appreciation of the good fortune America had in having the right men in the right places at the right times…

The New York Times Book Review - Jon Meacham

If…I were to note the familiar contradictions of the birth of the nation—chiefly the triumph of liberty, but only for propertied white men—and say that Ellis has written an entertaining account of, as his subtitle has it, the "triumphs and tragedies" of the founding, there would not be much new for me to say, or for you to read, either in this review or in Ellis's book. It is difficult to imagine an educated American who does not know that the Revolution was selective and that the Revolutionaries, many of them slaveholders who were complicit in the bloodthirsty treatment of Indians, were flawed and imperfect. But Ellis rescues his enterprise by going beyond the familiar critique of the founding to explore a point that remains underappreciated: that America was constructed to foster arguments, not to settle them…Ellis shares the founders' tragic sensibility, finding redemption in seeking the good rather than in achieving the perfect. The wisdom of the American founding lies in the recognition that the former is possible, and the latter is not.

Publishers Weekly

This subtle, brilliant examination of the period between the War of Independence and the Louisiana Purchase puts Pulitzer-winner Ellis (Founding Brothers) among the finest of America's narrative historians. Six stories, each centering on a significant creative achievement or failure, combine to portray often flawed men and their efforts to lay the republic's foundation. Set against the extraordinary establishment of "the most liberal nation-state in the history of Western Civilization... in the most extensive and richly endowed plot of ground on the planet" are the terrible costs of victory, including the perpetuation of slavery and the cruel oppression of Native Americans. Ellis blames the founders' failures on their decision to opt for an evolutionary revolution, not a risky severance with tradition (as would happen, murderously, in France, which necessitated compromises, like retaining slavery). Despite the injustices and brutalities that resulted, Ellis argues, "this deferral strategy" was "a profound insight rooted in a realistic appraisal of how enduring social change best happens." Ellis's lucid, illuminating and ironic prose will make this a holiday season hit. (Nov. 5)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Kirkus Reviews

Pulitzer-winner Ellis (History/Mt. Holyoke Coll.; His Excellency: George Washington, 2004, etc.) tells six stories, each revealing the genius and the shortcomings of the Founders. Though he covers roughly the same historical period as Jay Winik's recent, magisterial The Great Upheaval (2007), Ellis focuses almost exclusively on Americans, highlighting select issues and events that shaped the young republic and continue to inform its character today. Rejecting caricatures of the Founders as either demigods or demons, he presents them as talented but flawed, enmeshed in and attempting desperately to control difficulties where their blindspots sometimes proved greater than their brilliance. They knew, for example, that the policy of removing Indians from their lands and the institution of African slavery were incompatible with the revolution's republican values, but they were unable to summon the will and the courage required to put a stop to either. Ellis examines both failures in chapters devoted to the doomed 1789 treaty with the Creek Nation and an especially thought-provoking discussion of the Louisiana Purchase, where, he maintains, the United States missed the last, best opportunity to resolve the slavery issue peacefully. Other passages deal with the Founders' high achievement: how ardent separationists shrewdly prepared the country for a slow-motion revolution, how they diplomatically and militarily prosecuted the first successful colonial war for independence in modern times, how they ingeniously constructed a government that located sovereignty in multiple, overlapping sources, how they-even against the noble conventions of the 18th century-absorbed the emergence of politicalparties to channel the ongoing debate about the country's future. Through these stories, each tied to a roughly specific moment in time (e.g., the Valley Forge winter, the 1788 Virginia Ratifying Convention), Ellis examines a well-known-but rarely better understood-cast of characters (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Paine, Franklin and others), shuffling them to the back or foreground, demonstrating how their varied talents came into play for good or ill depending on the issue at hand. Sharply conceived and smoothly executed-a worthy addition to Ellis's already well-advanced project of lucidly explaining the nation's early history to his countrymen. First printing of 650,000. Agent: John Taylor (Ike) Williams/Kneerim & Williams

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Chapter One: The Year

If permitted the historical license to stretch the definition of a year, then the fifteen months between the shots fired at Lexington and Concord in April of 1775 and the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in July of 1776 can justifiably claim to be both the most consequential and the strangest year in American history. It was consequential because the rationale for American independence and the political agenda for an independent American republic first became explicit at this time. It was strange because while men were dying, whole towns being burned to the ground, women being raped, captured spies and traitors being executed, the official posture of what called itself “The United Colonies of North America” remained abiding loyalty to the British Crown.[1]

Whether the American colonists were living a lie, an illusion, or a calculated procrastination is a good question. But when Thomas Jefferson finally got around to drafting the Declaration of Independence in June of 1776, one sentence enjoyed special resonance as an accurate characterization of the past year: “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” This was Jefferson’s lyrical way of describing the quite remarkable feat of making an explosion happen in slow motion.

After all, prudence does not ordinarily make its way onto any list of revolutionary virtues. The very ideaof a cautious revolutionary would seem, on the face of it, a contradiction in terms. The standard story of most revolutions features a cast of desperate characters with impulsive temperaments, utopian visions, a surefire sense of where history is headed, and an unquenchable urge to get there fast. Indeed, tarrying along the way is usually regarded as counterrevolutionary.

If that is what the standard story of a revolution requires, then one of two conclusions about the American Revolution follows naturally: either it was not really a revolution at all but merely (or perhaps not so merely) a war for colonial independence, the first of its kind in the modern world, to be sure, but not a fundamental shift in the social order that left the world changed forever. Or else it was a strange kind of revolution that did not fit the standard pattern because many of its most prominent leaders were convinced that the pace of change must be slowed down and the most radical of the revolutionary promises deferred. The result is another contradiction, or perhaps a paradox: namely, an evolutionary revolution.

In short, the decision to secede from the British Empire was accompanied by a truly revolutionary agenda for the infant American republic. But the most prominent leaders, John Adams chief among them, insisted on the deferral of the revolutionary agenda and, in some instances, its postponement into the distant future. Instead of regarding this gradualist approach as a moral and political failure, a conclusion that historians on the left regard as, shall we say, self-evident, the argument offered here is just the opposite. In my judgment the calculated decision to make the American Revolution happen in slow motion was a creative act of statesmanship that allowed the United States to avoid the bloody and chaotic fate of subsequent revolutionary movements in France, Russia, and China.

And so, within a very strange year of full-scale war occurring alongside political reticence, we find an equally strange pattern emerging that will establish the uniquely judicious framework within which the American Revolution proceeded. John Adams, the major figure in the Continental Congress, and George Washington, the commander in chief of the Continental Army, are the chief players in this unusual story. Thomas Paine, who fits the more conventional revolutionary pattern perfectly, turns out to be the exception rather than the rule, temporarily indispensable but ultimately disposable. The great creative achievement embodied in the leadership of Adams and Washington at this propitious moment was to assure that the American Revolution moved forward, to borrow a modern phrase, with all deliberate speed.



HINDSIGHTS

When John Adams looked back from retirement on his experience thirty years earlier in the Second Continental Congress, two recollections nudged out all the other memories. The first was a bit awkward to acknowledge publicly, but since Adams believed that truth should always trump modesty (especially false modesty), he laid down his personal marker on the proceedings: “I was incessantly employed through the Whole Fall, Winter and Spring of 1775 and 1776 during their Sittings and on Committees on mornings and Evenings,” he recalled, “and unquestionably did more business than any other Member of that house.”[2]

The second recollection had the effect of making the first impossible to verify. No true history of that fateful time would ever be written, Adams insisted, because the most important conversations occurred “out of doors” in local taverns and coffeehouses. What’s more, the official record of the deliberations imposed a misleading gloss of coherence over the congressional proceedings, concealing the messy confusion that reigned supreme for all the delegates, himself included. Any coherent narrative of the deliberations must necessarily falsify the way it really was for all the participants, who were improvising without a script in a historical drama without a known conclusion.[3]

Adams was making a serious, perhaps even a profound, point: namely, that retrospective history—that is, history viewed with the benefit of hindsight—is invariably neater and tidier than history as experienced by those making it. But since hindsight is the only interpretive tool historians have at their disposal, we must run the risk of deploying it here, enjoying the clairvoyance that Adams and his fellow delegates were denied in order to establish the political context of the imperial crisis that they, albeit lacking our prescient perch, were confronting in the late spring and summer of 1775.

Why was there an imperial crisis? The answer of the moment was that British troops had gunned down ninety-five American patriots at Lexington and Concord. Adams was not sure whether this blood-letting would become the opening shot in a war for American independence. He was sure that it represented another escalation in what had become a twelve-year argument about the proper place of the American colonies within a reconfigured British Empire. The Adams version of that dispute was highly partisan. In effect, a corrupt British government had arbitrarily decided to impose new taxes and political restrictions on its loyal American subjects as part of a conspiratorial plot to deprive them of their traditional rights as Englishmen. The carnage at Lexington and Concord, then, was the logical and inevitable culmination of a conscious British scheme to transform loyal subjects into abject slaves.[4]

Hindsight permits a more detached and ultimately ironic version of the imperial story. In 1763, as a result of its stupendous victory in the French and Indian War, Great Britain found itself a newly arrived world power with a vast empire in the eastern third of North America. Previously, British governance of their thirteen coastal colonies had been a lackadaisical affair, with royal governors largely beholden to local legislatures, which controlled the power of the purse. Enforcement of the trade regulations purportedly required by the Navigation Acts was equally blithe in spirit. Now, however, the sheer scale of its recently acquired American empire, plus the sudden recognition that governance of its expanded domain required more management than a few secretaries and clerks in Whitehall could muster, forced a major overhaul of this accidental empire into something more appropriately imperial. What looked to Adams like a sinister plot to enslave the American colonists was viewed from London as a sensible plan to make the British Empire worthy of its name.[5]

There then ensued a decade of parliamentary legislation—the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, the Coercive Acts—all designed to fold the colonies into the empire by placing them within the authority of Parliament, which represented the collective interests of all British citizens everywhere. The colonists, of course, contested that claim, Adams leading the way by arguing that American interests were not represented in Parliament, but rather in the respective colonial legislatures, which alone could justifiably speak for American interests because they alone were duly elected to do so.[6]

Knowing as we do the world-changing events about to transpire—a seven-and-a-half-year war in which more Americans were killed or wounded proportionally than in any subsequent conflict save the Civil War, in which the British lost their entire empire in North America except for Canada—it seems strange that such a massive movement of the historical templates could be caused by such a minor, merely constitutional, difference of opinion. In retrospect, the core problem blocking a sensible resolution was the British presumption—fully as self-evident to them as the truths that Jefferson was soon to hurl at “a candid world”—that imperial sovereignty must be singular. For George III and his chief minister, Lord North, it was akin to an axiom of political physics, a veritable Newtonian principle of political theory, that there must be one sovereign source of governance. To suggest otherwise was tantamount to arguing there was not one but many gods.

If they could only have jettisoned that assumption, a workable solution to the imperial crisis was staring them right in the face. Indeed it was proposed by the First Continental Congress in 1774 and would be proposed several times again by the Second Continental Congress throughout 1775 and up to July of 1776. The solution was shared sovereignty, whereby the American colonies remained within the British Empire as loyal subjects of the Crown but retained control over their own domestic affairs. A version of this creative solution, called federalism, became the basis for the American constitutional settlement in 1787–88. A century later the same principle became the organizing feature of the British Commonwealth. Our dalliance with hindsight, then, ends with two overlapping conclusions: first, the American Revolution was eminently avoidable; second, the imaginative failure of the British ministry in 1775–76 constitutes perhaps the greatest blunder in the history of British statecraft.[7]



NOTES
[1] Three previous studies of this awkward year that strike me as first rate are Allen French, The First Year of the American Revolution (Boston, 1934); Thomas Fleming, 1776: Year of Illusions (New York, 1975); and, more recently, David McCullough, 1776 (New York, 2005).
[2] AD 3:355.
[3] The quotation is from Adams to Benjamin Rush, 17 August 1812, in John A. Schutz and Douglass Adair, eds., The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805-1813 (San Marino, Calif.: 1966). I have assessed the Adams posture toward all straight-line narratives of the American Revolution in Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York: 2001), 215-81. On Adams's role in the Continental Congress, the semifictional account by Catherine Drinker Bowen, John Adams and the American Revolution (Boston, 1950), still manages to capture the context most imaginatively.
[4] Adams is almost a textbook example of the revolutionary mentality first identified by Bernard Bailyn in Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967).
[5] The first historian to insist on viewing the American Revolution from the British perspective was Lawrence H. Gipson, who summarized his multivolume account in The Coming of the Revolution, 1763-1775 (New York, 1954). The most recent version of this imperial interpretation is Theodore Draper, A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution (New York, 1996).
[6] On the role of the colonial assemblies, the authoritative work is Jack P. Greene, The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in Southern Royal Colonies, 1689-1776 (Chapel Hill, 1963).
[7] My conclusion here is harsh, but I find it inescapable. See, for example, Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, The Fall of the First British Empire (Baltimore, 1982). On the British side of the story, equally derogatory, see Stanley Weintraub, Iron Tears: America's Battle for Freedom, Britain's Quagmire, 1775-83 (New York, 2005).

Read a Sample Chapter

American Creation
Triumphs and Tragedies in the Founding of the Republic

---

By Joseph J. Ellis
Vintage
Copyright © 2008 Joseph J. Ellis
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780307276452

---

Chapter One: The Year

If permitted the historical license to stretch the definition of a year, then the fifteen months between the shots fired at Lexington and Concord in April of 1775 and the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in July of 1776 can justifiably claim to be both the most consequential and the strangest year in American history. It was consequential because the rationale for American independence and the political agenda for an independent American republic first became explicit at this time. It was strange because while men were dying, whole towns being burned to the ground, women being raped, captured spies and traitors being executed, the official posture of what called itself “The United Colonies of North America” remained abiding loyalty to the British Crown.[1]

Whether the American colonists were living a lie, an illusion, or a calculated procrastination is a good question. But when Thomas Jefferson finally got around to drafting the Declaration of Independence in June of 1776, one sentence enjoyed special resonance as an accurate characterization of the past year: “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should notbe changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” This was Jefferson’s lyrical way of describing the quite remarkable feat of making an explosion happen in slow motion.

After all, prudence does not ordinarily make its way onto any list of revolutionary virtues. The very idea of a cautious revolutionary would seem, on the face of it, a contradiction in terms. The standard story of most revolutions features a cast of desperate characters with impulsive temperaments, utopian visions, a surefire sense of where history is headed, and an unquenchable urge to get there fast. Indeed, tarrying along the way is usually regarded as counterrevolutionary.

If that is what the standard story of a revolution requires, then one of two conclusions about the American Revolution follows naturally: either it was not really a revolution at all but merely (or perhaps not so merely) a war for colonial independence, the first of its kind in the modern world, to be sure, but not a fundamental shift in the social order that left the world changed forever. Or else it was a strange kind of revolution that did not fit the standard pattern because many of its most prominent leaders were convinced that the pace of change must be slowed down and the most radical of the revolutionary promises deferred. The result is another contradiction, or perhaps a paradox: namely, an evolutionary revolution.

In short, the decision to secede from the British Empire was accompanied by a truly revolutionary agenda for the infant American republic. But the most prominent leaders, John Adams chief among them, insisted on the deferral of the revolutionary agenda and, in some instances, its postponement into the distant future. Instead of regarding this gradualist approach as a moral and political failure, a conclusion that historians on the left regard as, shall we say, self-evident, the argument offered here is just the opposite. In my judgment the calculated decision to make the American Revolution happen in slow motion was a creative act of statesmanship that allowed the United States to avoid the bloody and chaotic fate of subsequent revolutionary movements in France, Russia, and China.

And so, within a very strange year of full-scale war occurring alongside political reticence, we find an equally strange pattern emerging that will establish the uniquely judicious framework within which the American Revolution proceeded. John Adams, the major figure in the Continental Congress, and George Washington, the commander in chief of the Continental Army, are the chief players in this unusual story. Thomas Paine, who fits the more conventional revolutionary pattern perfectly, turns out to be the exception rather than the rule, temporarily indispensable but ultimately disposable. The great creative achievement embodied in the leadership of Adams and Washington at this propitious moment was to assure that the American Revolution moved forward, to borrow a modern phrase, with all deliberate speed.



HINDSIGHTS

When John Adams looked back from retirement on his experience thirty years earlier in the Second Continental Congress, two recollections nudged out all the other memories. The first was a bit awkward to acknowledge publicly, but since Adams believed that truth should always trump modesty (especially false modesty), he laid down his personal marker on the proceedings: “I was incessantly employed through the Whole Fall, Winter and Spring of 1775 and 1776 during their Sittings and on Committees on mornings and Evenings,” he recalled, “and unquestionably did more business than any other Member of that house.”[2]

The second recollection had the effect of making the first impossible to verify. No true history of that fateful time would ever be written, Adams insisted, because the most important conversations occurred “out of doors” in local taverns and coffeehouses. What’s more, the official record of the deliberations imposed a misleading gloss of coherence over the congressional proceedings, concealing the messy confusion that reigned supreme for all the delegates, himself included. Any coherent narrative of the deliberations must necessarily falsify the way it really was for all the participants, who were improvising without a script in a historical drama without a known conclusion.[3]

Adams was making a serious, perhaps even a profound, point: namely, that retrospective history—that is, history viewed with the benefit of hindsight—is invariably neater and tidier than history as experienced by those making it. But since hindsight is the only interpretive tool historians have at their disposal, we must run the risk of deploying it here, enjoying the clairvoyance that Adams and his fellow delegates were denied in order to establish the political context of the imperial crisis that they, albeit lacking our prescient perch, were confronting in the late spring and summer of 1775.

Why was there an imperial crisis? The answer of the moment was that British troops had gunned down ninety-five American patriots at Lexington and Concord. Adams was not sure whether this blood-letting would become the opening shot in a war for American independence. He was sure that it represented another escalation in what had become a twelve-year argument about the proper place of the American colonies within a reconfigured British Empire. The Adams version of that dispute was highly partisan. In effect, a corrupt British government had arbitrarily decided to impose new taxes and political restrictions on its loyal American subjects as part of a conspiratorial plot to deprive them of their traditional rights as Englishmen. The carnage at Lexington and Concord, then, was the logical and inevitable culmination of a conscious British scheme to transform loyal subjects into abject slaves.[4]

Hindsight permits a more detached and ultimately ironic version of the imperial story. In 1763, as a result of its stupendous victory in the French and Indian War, Great Britain found itself a newly arrived world power with a vast empire in the eastern third of North America. Previously, British governance of their thirteen coastal colonies had been a lackadaisical affair, with royal governors largely beholden to local legislatures, which controlled the power of the purse. Enforcement of the trade regulations purportedly required by the Navigation Acts was equally blithe in spirit. Now, however, the sheer scale of its recently acquired American empire, plus the sudden recognition that governance of its expanded domain required more management than a few secretaries and clerks in Whitehall could muster, forced a major overhaul of this accidental empire into something more appropriately imperial. What looked to Adams like a sinister plot to enslave the American colonists was viewed from London as a sensible plan to make the British Empire worthy of its name.[5]

There then ensued a decade of parliamentary legislation—the Sugar Act, the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, the Coercive Acts—all designed to fold the colonies into the empire by placing them within the authority of Parliament, which represented the collective interests of all British citizens everywhere. The colonists, of course, contested that claim, Adams leading the way by arguing that American interests were not represented in Parliament, but rather in the respective colonial legislatures, which alone could justifiably speak for American interests because they alone were duly elected to do so.[6]

Knowing as we do the world-changing events about to transpire—a seven-and-a-half-year war in which more Americans were killed or wounded proportionally than in any subsequent conflict save the Civil War, in which the British lost their entire empire in North America except for Canada—it seems strange that such a massive movement of the historical templates could be caused by such a minor, merely constitutional, difference of opinion. In retrospect, the core problem blocking a sensible resolution was the British presumption—fully as self-evident to them as the truths that Jefferson was soon to hurl at “a candid world”—that imperial sovereignty must be singular. For George III and his chief minister, Lord North, it was akin to an axiom of political physics, a veritable Newtonian principle of political theory, that there must be one sovereign source of governance. To suggest otherwise was tantamount to arguing there was not one but many gods.

If they could only have jettisoned that assumption, a workable solution to the imperial crisis was staring them right in the face. Indeed it was proposed by the First Continental Congress in 1774 and would be proposed several times again by the Second Continental Congress throughout 1775 and up to July of 1776. The solution was shared sovereignty, whereby the American colonies remained within the British Empire as loyal subjects of the Crown but retained control over their own domestic affairs. A version of this creative solution, called federalism, became the basis for the American constitutional settlement in 1787–88. A century later the same principle became the organizing feature of the British Commonwealth. Our dalliance with hindsight, then, ends with two overlapping conclusions: first, the American Revolution was eminently avoidable; second, the imaginative failure of the British ministry in 1775–76 constitutes perhaps the greatest blunder in the history of British statecraft.[7]



NOTES
[1] Three previous studies of this awkward year that strike me as first rate are Allen French, The First Year of the American Revolution (Boston, 1934); Thomas Fleming, 1776: Year of Illusions (New York, 1975); and, more recently, David McCullough, 1776 (New York, 2005).
[2] AD 3:355.
[3] The quotation is from Adams to Benjamin Rush, 17 August 1812, in John A. Schutz and Douglass Adair, eds., The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805-1813 (San Marino, Calif.: 1966). I have assessed the Adams posture toward all straight-line narratives of the American Revolution in Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York: 2001), 215-81. On Adams's role in the Continental Congress, the semifictional account by Catherine Drinker Bowen, John Adams and the American Revolution (Boston, 1950), still manages to capture the context most imaginatively.
[4] Adams is almost a textbook example of the revolutionary mentality first identified by Bernard Bailyn in Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967).
[5] The first historian to insist on viewing the American Revolution from the British perspective was Lawrence H. Gipson, who summarized his multivolume account in The Coming of the Revolution, 1763-1775 (New York, 1954). The most recent version of this imperial interpretation is Theodore Draper, A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution (New York, 1996).
[6] On the role of the colonial assemblies, the authoritative work is Jack P. Greene, The Quest for Power: The Lower Houses of Assembly in Southern Royal Colonies, 1689-1776 (Chapel Hill, 1963).
[7] My conclusion here is harsh, but I find it inescapable. See, for example, Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, The Fall of the First British Empire (Baltimore, 1982). On the British side of the story, equally derogatory, see Stanley Weintraub, Iron Tears: America's Battle for Freedom, Britain's Quagmire, 1775-83 (New York, 2005).


From the Hardcover edition.

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