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

American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic | Joseph J. Ellis | Excellent author, great read.

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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 56 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A masterpiece but worthy as a best seller

Joseph Ellis, along with David McCullough (John Adams) and Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton) has sparked deep interest in early American history. Their best selling books have illuminated the lives and achievements of the founders and educated us in ways that survey courses in college never could. Each has brought scholarship and enlightenment to the American history reading public. Ellis with his deep knowledge of the founders confronts the issue of slavery, the treatment of the native America Indian and the fascinating facts behind the Louisiana Purchase. More importantly, he describes the intellectual and political struggle for a democratic government as an evolving ideal and how that struggle in all its fits and starts became embodied in the American two party system and our federal government. While not downplaying Jefferson, Ellis' spotlight shines on Jefferson's sidekick, James Madison, as a founder surely worthy of the next best selling history blockbuster. This masterful book is to be saved, savored and re-read as its succinctness belies its importance and wealth of knowledge. Ellis recently appeared on C Span promoting his book in California. His eloquence and deep understanding of early American history as well as his humor and good spirits makes one desirous of slipping into one of his lectures in Amherst for a semester or two.

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Excellent author, great read.

Excellent work from a very good author, probably the best I have read on this period in our history.

Founding Brothers II

If I have to recommend one book about 18th century America, it would be Joseph Ellis's brilliant, Pulitzer Prize winning Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. In "Brothers", Ellis used a series of events and themes in order to reflect on the character of 8 main American Founders, and on various themes of the American Revolution. Not only is Ellis's book beautifully written, it weaves together a large scale analysis of the main ideological and political aspects of the American Revolution with a careful study of the personalities involved. In short, it is a tour de force, and one that had a special effect on me since I read it while touring Philadelphia, and seeing first hand the various sites where Washington, Jefferson and the rest of founders quarreled and worked to shape their vision of America.

In "American Creation", Ellis, a historian and a Founder-biographer (he has written well received biographies of John Adams, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson) returns to the style of "Founding Brothers" for six more episodes focusing on the "Triumphs and Tragedies" of the American Revolution. Ellis is still a graceful writer and an insightful historian, but as they say, you can't catch a lightning in a bottle twice; "American Creation" is a very good but imperfect history, which treads on grounds familiar from Ellis's and other historian's other writings. When Ellis approaches what is mostly new ground for him (That is, stuff that he hasn't written about in Founding Brothers or in his biographies of Washington and Jefferson, he might have written about it elsewhere), his account is interesting but fails to offer the kind of comprehensive view that made "Founding Brothers" so compelling.

Of the six episodes, four return to a dominant theme of "Founding Brothers": the clash between `The Spirit of `76', that is, the libertarian and radical ideology of Tom Paine and the declaration of Independence, and the `Spirit of `87' - the pragmatic, centralist belief in a strong Federal government that would protect the American experiment. In his discussion, Ellis doesn't merely recapitulate themes raised in "Founding Brothers" but rather demonstrates how these themes played out in different contexts.

The first chapter, "The Year", focuses on the 15 months between the commencement of hostilities between Continental and Imperial British troops and the declaration of Independence. Ellis's main theme is that at the time, even the radical American leaders were actually conservatives: they may have used extremist "rights of man" language, but their purpose was a conservative revolution, a struggle for political power and independence and not a utopian restructuring of the world. Ironically, it has been their triumph that promoted the values which they later tried to reign in.

The third chapter "The Argument" focuses on the creation of the Constitution of the United States of America. After releasing the radical ideology from the bottle in the Revolution, the Federalists such as Madison, Hamilton and Washington had been appalled of the results. Fearing the spread of anarchy and the eventual collapse of the American Experiment, they have pushed forward a qualified counter revolution - moving power from the states to the central government, and bringing forward a more consolidated government, with a more powerful executive to form, hopefully, a more perfect union. Here the irony is in the shifting views of James Madison. Madison entered the Constitutional Convention of 1787 as the nationalist's nationalist, and bitterly resented having to water down his centralized conception of America. But while pressing for the ratification of the American Constitution, Madison discovered that the compromises he had been forced to make in the convention saved him during ratification, in which he defended the American Constitution as not all that centralized, after all.

Madison's change of heart plays a central place in the fifth chapter "The Conspiracy", in which he breaks away from his one time Federalist collaborators, and becomes a leader of the first American opposition party along with Thomas Jefferson. This chapter is the closest to "Founding Brothers", and readers of the latter would find very little that is new. Novices to Ellis may be surprised by his vehement anti-Jeffersonian attitude, which remains more or less unchanged.

The final chapter, "The Purchase", offers another ironic twist in the plot: The anti-Federalist Republican party, led by Thomas Jefferson, has captured the presidency. Yet in it's time of greatest triumph it betrayed its principles. In one of the most brazen act of Executive initiatives in American history, Jefferson purchased Louisiana from Napoleon, thus doubling the size of the American republic, and leading the way to the triumph of the American Empire, as well as to its major tragedies: the spread of slavery and the destruction of the native Americans.

The second chapter is the least interesting, offering an account of Washington's stay in Valley Forge. This chapter focuses on the American War of Independence and it the weakest because the war had been only a part of a larger scale conflict between the major world powers of the day, primarily Britain and France. By focusing only on America, Ellis offers a distorted view of the war, and his analysis of military strategy is not insightful enough to compensate.

The most intriguing and frustrating chapter is the fourth, chronicling the efforts of the first Washington administration to find a just solution to the problem of the native Americans. The main weakness here, I think, is that unlike the other topics of American history, this has been relatively scantly investigated; Thus the conceptual tools for addressing it are lacking. Basically, Ellis offers a convincing picture of the destruction of native Americans as more or less inevitable: white settlers would not obey any treaty limiting their spread, and the Federal government had neither the strength nor the will to oppose them. "Indian Removal" was the necessary consequence of demographics.

"American Creation" is a fascinating and extremely well written book; I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone interested in American history: but if you haven't, read "Founding Brothers" first.

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The good and the bad from the Founding Era

"American Creation" by Joseph Ellis is very similar to his past work in "Founding Brothers" -- a collection of stories centered around a main theme. Ellis continually reflects back on this theme while applying it to each of the six chapters, that being that the Revolutionary period really extended to 1803 through the incredibly fragile stages of the new government when it seemed likely it would collapse in on itself.

Which of the six topics you enjoy the most really depends on where your historical interests are, because they are all very similar in format, and Ellis tries his hardest using a casual writing style to keep the reader's attention. Personally, I was most interested in the chapters on Valley Forge and the birth of the two-party system, but all six had an effect on me in some way. The description of George Washington's attempts at a side-by-side living situation with the Creek Indians was informative and tragic in the end, and the circumstances behind the Louisiana Purchase and how this one acquisition by the government spelled doom for any resolution of both the slavery and Indian issues was fascinating.

One of the author's main ideas is that most historical studies on the Founding Fathers either portray them as gods or as failures. Ellis sets out to go up the middle and focus on both their triumphs and their tragedies, as the title indicates. Arguably most triumphant are George Washington and James Madison, the latter for his work in getting the Constitution ratified and saving post-war America from pulling apart into separate confederacies. On the other hand, Thomas Jefferson comes off the most tragic for his inability to stem the tide of slavery despite his recognition that it violated every revolutionary principle the founders fought for and would probably be settled in the future by civil war. Ellis contends however that the issue of slavery was so tense that even broaching the subject publicly could sabotage the union before it rose to its feet -- which explained why many went so far as to never even put it down on paper, choosing not to risk having their opinions go public at the present or taint their reputations in the future.

This book is a strong complement to more general works on the Revolutionary Era, but is not a good place to start. Each chapter is relatively short, largely due to the fact that Ellis assumes the reader is already familiar with much of the background issues in each story. There were times where I wish Ellis would have expanded the chapters a bit further so that more of the essential parts of the period were explored and detailed. Instead, Ellis sacrifices details on much of the background so that he may sharpen the focus on the main players.

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