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The Tragic Side of the American Founding
by Joseph J. Ellis
A major new history from our most trusted voice on the Revolutionary era, the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Founding Brothers and the National Book Award winner American Sphinx: an astounding look at how America's founders—Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Adams—regarded the issue of slavery as they drafted the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. A daring and important work that ultimately reckons with the two great failures of America's founding: the failure to end slavery and the failure to avoid Indian removal.
"How does it appear in the sight-of-heaven," wrote Samuel Hopkins of Newport, "that these States, who have been fighting for liberty, cannot agree in any political constitution unless it indulge and authorize them to enslave their fellow men."
On the eve of the American Revolution, half a million enslaved African Americans were embedded in the North American population. The slave trade was flourishing, even as the thirteen colonies armed themselves to defend against the idea of being governed without consent. This paradox gave birth to what one of our most admired historians, Joseph J. Ellis, calls the "great contradiction": How could a government that had been justified and founded on the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence institutionalize slavery? How could it permit a tidal wave of western migration by settlers who understood the phrase "pursuit of happiness" to mean the pursuit of Indian lands?
With narrative grace and a flair for irony and paradox, Ellis addresses the questions that lie at America's twisted roots—questions that turned even the sharpest minds of the Revolutionary generation into mental contortionists. He discusses the first debates around slavery and the treatment of Native Americans, from the Constitutional Convention to the Treaty of New York, revealing the thinking and rationalizations behind Jay, Hamilton, and Madison's revisions of the Articles of Confederation, and highlights the key role of figures like Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet and Creek chief Alexander McGillivray.
Ellis writes with candor and deftness, his clarion voice rising above presentist historians and partisans who are eager to make the founders into trophies in the ongoing culture wars. Instead, Ellis tells a story that is rooted in the coexistence of grandeur and failure, brilliance and blindness, grace and sin.
"As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Joseph J. Ellis has given us a necessary corrective to any would-be triumphant narratives of America's founding. Fluidly written and cogently argued, The Great Contradiction puts the failures to abolish slavery and to avoid Indian removal at the heart of the country's creation story; failures that have shaped us to this day." —Annette Gordon-Reed, author of On Juneteenth
"How did the founders manage to lose all sight of their revolutionary ideals when it came to Black and Native Americans? 'Prejudice, avarice, and pusillanimity' was the assessment of one 1782 idealist, a formula Joseph J. Ellis unpacks here with his trademark clarity. Cutting through mist and myth, Ellis probes—on 18th century rather than 21st century terms—the questions that reduced thinkers like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson to blithering incoherence. An elegant, concise volume that illuminates the obfuscations, misunderstandings, and hypocrisy that continue to sabotage us today." —Stacy Schiff, author of The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams
This information about The Great Contradiction was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Joseph J. Ellis is the author of many works of American history, including Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, which won the National Book Award. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with his wife and is the father of three sons.
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