Book Review - Joseph Ellis - American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic

Last week, historian Joseph Ellis's newest book, American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic, was released. Ellis is not exactly the most admirable of individuals. He claimed for many years to have served with the 101st Airborne Division during the Vietnam War until the Boston Globe discovered his deception in 2001. Despite this, Ellis is an excellent historian who writes works that are both enjoyable and insightful. He has won both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize and has written several national bestsellers.

American Creation is constructed similarly to Ellis's Pulitzer Prize winning work, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. Like that work, this book is somewhat of a collection of loosely connected essays that cover different events during the Revolutionary Era. Unlike Founding Brothers, which covered only the 1790s, this book covers the whole era, from the beginning of the effort by radicals like John Adams to get the colonies to declare independence in 1775 to the purchase of Louisiana from Napoleon Bonaparte in 1803. Each of these events are among those that are covered in this book, joined by the winter at Valley Forge, the drafting and ratification of the United States Constitution, the attempt by the Washington Administration to reshape Indian Policy so as to achieve a just peace which would eventually lead to assimilation and the birth of the two party system with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison acting as midwives.

In his forward, Ellis says that he wrote this book to answer the question "If you believe that the last quarter of the eighteenth century has stood the test of time as the most politically creative chapter in American history, and if you declared inadmissible any explanation for this creative moment that depended upon divine intervention, then what besides dumb luck can account for the achievement that was the American founding?" Ellis answers this question in his introduction, writing that "Political and personal diversity enhanced creativity by generating a dynamic chemistry that surfaced routinely in the form of competing convictions whenever a major crisis materialized. Every major decision ... produced a bracing argument among founders of different persuasions about revolutionary principles. This not only enriched the intellectual ferment, but also replicated the checks and balances of the Constitution with a human version of the same principle." He then goes on to show how the great triumphs of the era - declaring independence, creating a workable strategy to defeat the British, the creation of the U.S. Constitution and the legitimization of dissent through the creation of the two-party system - all fit into this pattern. He does this without beating you over the head with his argument; he follows the recipe for good writing taught by a high school English teacher: "Show, don't tell."

But as the book's subtitle suggests, Ellis deals not just with our founders' triumphs but also with the tragedies of the era. He writes that "The darkest shadow is unquestionably slavery, the failure to end it, or at least to adopt a gradual emancipation scheme that put it on the road to extinction ... The other shadow, almost as dark, was the failure to implement a just and generous settlement with the Native Americans." Both of these topics are covered in depth. Although he doesn't devote any single section to it (unlike in Founding Brothers), Ellis deals with it extensively in both his chapter on the creation of the two-party system and in his chapter on the Louisiana Purchase. Native American policy is dealt with in a fascinating chapter that tells the story of what might have been the only good faith effort by powerful political leaders in American History to achieve a "just settlement" with the Native Americans. The chapter, entitled "The Treaty" tells of how George Washington's Secretary of War, Henry Knox, convinced the President to take Native American policy in a new direction. Needless to say, Washington and Knox failed in their efforts, due mostly to the weakness of the Federal Government.

Despite the fact that each of the main sections is well written and full of fascinating interpretations, the book is not perfect. Ellis's complaint that most of his colleagues seem to dismiss the founders as dead white men might be valid, but it is inflammatory and an oversimplification to write "...most professional historians of the revolutionary era have opted to avoid mainstream politics altogether in favor of less articulate and more marginalized groups a rather bizarre choice as I see it, somewhat akin to showing up at Fenway Park with a lacrosse stick..."

Despite this, the portrait of the founders that Ellis paints is refreshing because he neither portrays them as villains nor as demigods. I would strongly recommend that anyone with even a remote interest in American history read this book.