American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic

American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic | Joseph J. Ellis | The Battle Rages On...

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American Creation:...

	American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic Joseph J. Ellis Knopf, 2007 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 57 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Another masterpiece by Joseph Ellis

Joseph Ellis has already authored a number of very well received books on early American history: Founding Brothers, American Sphinx (focusing on Thomas Jefferson), and His Excellency (about George Washington). This book is yet another very nice contribution to our understanding of the period from the Declaration of Independence through the early 19th Century. The subtitle, perhaps, says a great detail about the content of this book: "Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic." Ellis notes in his Foreword that (page xi): "This is a story, then, about tragedy as well as triumph, indeed about their mutual and inextricable coexistence."

At the outset, he observes some of the great accomplishments of the Revolution and Founding: the colonies won their independence from the greatest power of the day; the Founders created the first large scale republic; they created a secular state (although I would argue that Ellis overstates matters somewhat with this statement); they divided power among states and the national government; they developed political parties as channels for ongoing debate (although, again, the Founders thought that party was evil, and their development was not understood at the time in such glowing terms). The tragedies? An unwillingness to address slavery and the status of Native Americans. In simplest terms, this represents what this book is about, the development of a new nation and innovative ways of organizing governance--coupled with inherent strains that created their own problems.

One of the special talents of Ellis is his richly drawn characters. Here, Washington, once more, is drawn nicely by Ellis, so that he is not the cardboard figure that often shows up in high school textbooks. Just so, John Adams is nicely portrayed in his complexity--vastly talented, a little uncertain of his place, someone who spent enormous energy on defending his place in American history. Vignettes about the shortest American President, James Madison, and his unusual political brilliance, are telling. One nicely drawn point here: how Madison finally convinced an originally resistant George Washington to be one of Virginia's delegates to the Constitutional Convention.

He spends time on key episodes, such as Washington's dawning realization that, to win the Revolutionary War, he must fight a defensive war, going against everything he wanted to do. Or the machinations of producing a document overthrowing the American government under its first Constitution, The Articles of Confederation (with Madison as a key player). The various historical set pieces conclude with the Louisiana Purchase, under Jefferson's presidency.

In his brief Afterword, he contends that (page 241): "The American Founding lasted for twenty-eight years, from 1775 to 1803. The point? In that historically brief point in time, there was created on this continent a new nation, operating on principles not seen in the family of nation-states at that time.

While I do have some quibbles about this book (as noted earlier), this is a very well done analysis of what happened in the critical era from 1775 to 1803. The reader will have his or her understanding of the Founding challenged and invigorated by this book. Even though I disagree with some elements in Ellis' argument, I am nonetheless impressed with his work and, by grappling with it, have a better sense of what was at stake in that short period of time that he explores.

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The Battle Rages On...

In "American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic," Joseph J. Ellis picks up where he left off in Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. One feature of "Founding Brothers" was the raging historiographical battle on the nature and importance of preeminent historical actors.

In "American Creation" that battle rages on. Ellis takes the position that to reduce the founding fathers to nothing more than dead white males who were "racists, classists, and sexists, a kind of rogues gallery of greats" is irresponsible scholarship. It would also be blind and foolish faith to elevate the founding fathers to demigods.

Instead, Ellis calls for moderation and balances the triumphs of the founding generation (the debate preceding the Declaration of Independence; the ordeal of Valley Forge; the beginning of the party system in the 1790s; and the Louisiana Purchase) with the tragedies of the founding generation (the perpetuation of slavery and the cruel oppression of Native Americans).

Ellis also ably demonstrates the delicate balance between the "Spirit of '76" (with its emphasis on the Declaration of Independence and personal liberty) and the "Spirit of '87" (with its emphasis on an energetic central government). Implicit in Ellis' argument is the conclusions that had America lost sight of the "Spirit of '87," America would have devolved into decentralized regional confederacies and if America had lost sight of the "Spirit of '76" America would have become an oligarchical empire. Extending Ellis' balancing of personal liberty and energetic government slightly further yields that Abraham Lincoln is, perhaps, the greatest embodiment of the fusion between the two in that he used the energetic central government to guarantee the personal liberty of millions of slaves when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

Taken by itself, "American Creation" may be deemed to be "light" in that it is only 304 pages but taken in conjunction with "Founding Brothers" (which is also 304 pages), the reader is served with a healthy dose of history done right.

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Thought-Provoking Book

I enjoyed this book, and recommend it to anyone seeking more knowledge and insight about the founders and the Revolutionary period in American history.

This book covers the time period of 1775 - 1803, i.e. from the Revolutionary War to the Louisiana Purchase. The book moves chronologically, with each chapter covering a specific episode or topic, such as relations with the native Americans, the Louisiana purchase, and the development of the two-party system. It does NOT cover the time period in a continuous chronological march from 1775 to 2003; rather, it skips years here and there to cover about a half-dozen key developments. So, it cannot (and was not intended to) serve as a textbook or comprehensive examination of the revolutionary period.

There were many interesting aspects of the book. For me, the really striking feature was the incredible prescience of quite a few of the key players, from Madison's great counterintuitive insight that factions and interests would work better on a larger, national scale than on the local level, all the way to Napolean's sudden decison to dump the Louisiana territory on the Americans for pocket change, after realizing there was no future in trying to control a vast territory from across the Atlantic, no matter how many troops or how much treasure was thrown at it. I am not doing either of these stories justice; for that, you'll have to read the book. Suffice to say, the book really brings to light the far-reaching, future-seeing prescience of a group of leading figures of the time - a level of leadership insight and depth that is very rare today, if it's present at all.

Some of the chapter topics were more interesting than others. The chapter on Washington's efforts (and ultimate failure) to protect and cut a fair deal with the Indians was fascinating, as were the chapters on the politics and wheeling-dealing in the year of Revolution (1775-1776), and the miserable almost-lost situation at Valley Forge. Some of the later chapters on political parties and politics toward the end of the 28-year period got a bit cumbersome, hence my 4 stars instead of 5. But overall, it was a very solid, readable, interesting book.

There was a great insight in the book that really enhanced my understanding of the revolutionary era and the larger-than-life-yet-mortal men who led it, and for that insight I'm thankful to the author. Ellis refers to it as the "accordian" effect of the Constitution's design. The founders had many philosophical and practical differences over whether sovereignty should reside at a federal or state level or (abstractly) with "the people", and in the end could not agree where ultimate power would reside. The result was a compromise document that both failed to conclusively answer the question one way or the other, but which also succeeded brilliantly in creating a system in which (federal) government power expands and contracts from time to time to meet the needs of different eras. When one looks at the ponderous and largely ineffective European constitutions, with their attempts to codify and define for all time what they believe is "right", and compares it to the more modest and insightful US constitution, designed from the outset to fit itself to the the times in which the founders' descendants would live, one really begins to grasp how clever the founders were. These were men who understood that you could not set up a strict rule-based system for far-future generations, but what you you could do was establish a system with embedded core values and a framework for nudging and harnessing competing interests into a cooperative, successful whole. The Constitution has held its own for over two centuries, one of history's longest-standing documents of political organization, precisely because it is less a set of strict rules devised by self-righteous geniuses, than a set of tools for bringing competing interests together, developed by very practical men who saw the need for an adaptive system. The founders were thus "evolutionary revolutionists" - with big ideas, and a vision of small steps and a little meandering over time to achieve them. Their accordian Constitution has worked, enabling the US government to at times consolidate great power to conduct world wars or fight back from the depression, and at other times, basically get out of the way so commerce and activities at the state level could proceed without undue interference. It's an ongoing flexing of national vs. local power - a multi-generational negotiation process that has produced the world's federal hyperpower but which also sometimes manages to stay out of the way of its citizens at times when more decentralization is needed. This whole topic is covered brilliantly in the book, and is reason on its own to buy it and read it. As the author states, these men were not Gods, and it's when you see them as both philosophical men and practical politicians trying to come up with something that would be feasible through the generations, that you realize how deeply capable and talented they were.

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A clear-eyed look at the founding

This book impressed me a little less that "Founding Brothers," but it's still very worthwhile. Through a series of essays, Ellis attempts to look at the founding fathers neither as perfect gods nor racist villains, but something in between--talented men who did many great things, but came up short in other ways, particularly in their failure to end slavery and to do justice to Native Americans. The result is a multi-faceted view of the nation's founding, both its achievements and its failures. A good read for anyone tired of caricatured and overly-simple portrayals of the founders.

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Ellis Replows the Founding

Ellis is an "easy" read author. He writes well and is articulate in telling his tale. Despite his stated awareness that authors should not make their evaluations of the character and motivations of their subjects of an earlier era, he proceeds to criticize the founding fathers for not having today's politically correct views on slavery and treatment of the indigenous native populations of the time. Taking that into account, it is still a good read and informative.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, page 10, 11, 12

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