The Great Contradiction
The Tragic Side of the American Founding
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
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, and featured in THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, a film by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt, on PBS.
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.
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
America’s Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal, but in this stunning expose, historian Joseph J. Ellis explores how the U.S.’s policies on slavery and treatment of Native Americans contradicted its founding philosophy from day one. He demystifies figures like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, showing how, in their own writings, they prioritized American independence over plans to end the slave trade—despite loud calls to do so from abolitionists like Thomas Paine. With a host of primary sources and a comprehensive understanding of the era, Ellis illustrates how racism and misguided pragmatism were seeded into both policy and culture in order to justify the U.S.’s barbaric practice of chattel slavery and horrific behaviour toward Native Americans. This kind of hard research and analysis makes it easy for Ellis to demonstrate why the fundamental conflict between America’s founding principles and its actual policies created a tension that can still be felt today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This incisive history from Pulitzer winner Ellis (American Sphinx) probes the contradiction between the Revolutionary era's defense of universal rights and its complicity in slavery and Native American dispossession. Hanging his narrative on vivid character studies of the founders, he finds that most were well aware of their troubling hypocrisy. His intricate recap of the Constitutional Convention shows how those with abolitionist sentiments nonetheless allowed themselves to accept that compromise on slavery was necessary; meanwhile, the otherwise rigorous minds of proslavery defenders like James Madison grew incoherent on the issue, indicating obvious guilt, Ellis argues. Noting that the Great Compromise has often been lamented by later observers as a failure of the founders to make full use of "revolutionary time," a period when the people's great optimism would allow for great reordering of society, he points to how the era actually was marked by far stronger, and less remembered, attempts by the founders to reorder relations with Native Americans. He turns to the Washington administration, when the first president and his cabinet made a concerted effort to counter the public's bloodthirsty desire for Indian removal by normalizing relations with the Five Southern Tribes. Ellis convincingly demonstrates that this reordering was perceived by the founders themselves in revolutionary terms. It adds up to a robustly complex portrait of the imperfect but dedicated shepherds of the first modern republic.
