American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic
By Joseph Ellis
Knopf, 283 pages, $26.95
I must begin with a confession: I am a latecomer to the Founding Fathers phenomenon that has overtaken the publishing world in the last decade. The god-father, or founder, if you will, of the movement is Joseph Ellis, the Ford Foundation professor of history at Mt. Holyoke College, who won a 1997 National Book Award for “American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson” and a 2001 Pulitzer Prize for “Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation.” In the intervening years, books about the founding fathers have dominated the non-fiction best-seller lists, including blockbuster biographies of John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin.
It is not hard to account for America’s recent fascination with the subject. The founders’ intentions have become a potent political football in the last dozen years. Policy wonks, political speechwriters and legal theorists invoke the founders to legitimize their opinions on an array of issues including judicial power, Christianity in the public sphere, federal versus states’ rights and foreign interventions.
Despite all this hubbub, my most vivid encounter with the American Revolution remained a grade-school infatuation with Johnny Tremain. But after reading Ellis’ latest entry, “American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic,” I am now a zealous convert to “founders chic,” as Newsweek dubbed it. To put it flatly: “American Creation” is one of the most enjoyable and thought-provoking books I’ve read in years.
It is a loose sequel to “Founding Brothers,” which Ellis billed as “a modest sized account of a massive historical subject.” To accomplish this daunting task, Ellis follows the episodic model pioneered by British biographer Lytton Strachey, who insisted that the historian who wishes to challenge conventional wisdom must “attack his subject in unexpected places” in order to “shoot a sudden revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined.” As in “Founding Brothers,” this book is structured around six critical episodes in the revolutionary era, from the rebellion of 1775 through the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.
Like his fellow best-sellers, Ellis rebukes those who try to pin the founders to a single, stable system of ideas. He dismantles the Mt. Rushmore myths, instead emphasizing, in his words, “flawed greatness, the coexistence of intellectual depth and personal shallowness, the role of contingency and sheer accident instead of divine providence.”
But what lifts Ellis above other historians of the era is his breathtaking mastery of suspense. This gift is all the more remarkable because the suspense is built almost entirely from the intrigue of ideas rather than the visceral emotions of flesh and blood adventures.
His first step is to lead the reader out of what he calls “the land of foregone conclusions.” Instead Ellis re-creates the world as it was experienced at that moment — brimming with unpredictable events, unintended consequences, mixed motives, desperate improvisations and blind luck. Unlike a fiction writer who asks readers to suspend disbelief, Ellis, in effect, asks readers to cultivate disbelief, even astonishment, at how “brazen and improbable” it was that a tiny former colony on the far edge of Western civilization managed to defeat the Earth’s most powerful empire and “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.”
This sets the stage for the driving question of the book: How did the same men who waged a violent revolution go on to create a stable national government from its ashes — a phenomenon nearly unique in modern world history? Ellis argues that there were actually two founding moments. The first was the secession from England in 1776, the second was the declaration of nationhood in 1787-88. The former was represented by the Declaration of Independence and the latter by the Constitution.
Yet there are deep contradictions between these two acts and their cherished documents. The Declaration of Independence was, Ellis observes, “a radical document that locates sovereignty in the individual and depicts government as an alien force, making rebellion against it a natural act,” while the Constitution is “a conservative document that locates sovereignty in that collective called ‘the people,’ makes government an essential protector of liberty rather than its enemy, and values social balance over personal liberation.” How then did the radical “Spirit of ’76,” as it was dubbed, evolve into the conservative “Spirit of ’87”? What did we gain, and what did we lose?
The story opens in 1775, after British soldiers have gunned down 95 American rebels just outside of Boston. John Adams is hurrying off to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, George Washington is heading to Massachusetts to take command of the new Continental Army, and a pamphleteer named Tom Paine is preparing a revolutionary manifesto known as “Common Sense” — all a familiar story.
But we forget: No one knew then if the colonists would pursue reconciliation, or a war of secession with Britain, or Paine’s vision of a full-fledged revolution that went beyond mere secession “to topple all forms of arbitrary power.” The drama of the first chapter comes from this unexpected clash of public opinion, as Adams painstakingly steers the Colonies between the shoals of capitulation and the waves of revolution, into a popular mandate for independence — only to find himself upstaged by Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and its eloquent egalitarianism.
Next we find ourselves in Gen. Washington’s legendary winter of 1777-78 in Valley Forge, Pa., the turning point of the Revolution, both militarily and politically. This episode is especially provocative for its parallels to the current war in Iraq, particularly the challenge of sustaining an all-volunteer Army and an ambivalent civilian population long after the war was supposed to be over. As Washington observed wryly, anyone who counts on patriotism alone “as a sufficient basis, for conducting a long and bloody War, will find themselves deceived in the end.” His primary solution was to offer generous life pensions for all soldiers and family benefits for soldiers killed or disabled, and to institute a draft. Both measures violated the republican principles of the American Revolution “i.e., creating a standing army of professionals and replacing voluntarism with coercion,” yet without these measures defeat was certain, making these fine principles irrelevant.
By Chapter 3, on the drafting and ratification of the Constitution, it is abundantly clear that the concept of a unified founders’ intentions is wholesale fiction. In fact, many of the founders had no desire to establish a centralized nation, instead campaigning for something more like the current European Union, a confederation of regional nation-states. The underappreciated James Madison emerges as the hero here, brokering a brilliant, if slippery, compromise that enshrined conflict itself at the center of our political system. Madison, in Ellis’ words, created a legal “framework in which federal and state authority engaged in an ongoing negotiation for supremacy.” The Constitution, he quips, is by its very nature “an argument without end.”
More surprises arrive in Chapter 4, which takes up President Washington’s attempt to apply the principles of 1776 to American Indians. The story of his failed plan to create a series of independent Indian homelands east of the Mississippi will be entirely new to most readers, as will its startling central character, the Machiavellian lead negotiator for the Indians, a charismatic, half-blooded Creek chief named Alexander McGillivray.
But I was most shocked by Ellis’ account of Jefferson in the final chapters. The ink was barely dry on the new Constitution when Jefferson and his acolyte Madison began to turn against the federal system they had fought so hard to create. The two men considered themselves Virginians first, Americans second, and they seemed genuinely shocked when the federal government began to assert its new powers in ways that impinged upon their state’s interests, particularly on the red-hot topic of slavery.
Here we run up against the limitations of “American Creation.” Ellis’ episodic, idea-driven storytelling works beautifully when the founders are honestly trying to balance principle and pragmatism in a constantly shifting political landscape. But when it came to Jefferson’s evasions, reversals and misrepresentations, his betrayal of his own shifting principles, I longed for deeper insight into the obscure recesses of his mind.
But this is quibbling; after all, “American Sphinx” is on the shelf waiting for me.
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Debby Applegate won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in biography for “The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher.”
