Editorial Content for The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

Joseph J. Ellis --- winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History for FOUNDING BROTHERS: The Revolutionary Generation and the National Book Award for AMERICAN SPHINX: The Character of Thomas Jefferson --- has long been regarded as one of the foremost contemporary scholars of the Revolutionary Era.

In THE GREAT CONTRADICTION: The Tragic Side of the American Founding, Ellis examines “two legacies of the founding era that must be noticed, and both qualify as enormous tragedies.” Those legacies --- the utter failure to end slavery “or, more realistically, put it on the road to extinction,” and the unsuccessful attempt to protect the territorial rights of the fledgling nation’s Native American population --- have haunted the country throughout its history.

From the outset, Ellis acknowledges the gulf that separates the Declaration of Independence’s soaring rhetoric of equality from the political realities confronting the founders as they strove first to unite to win a war against the powerful British Empire, and then to navigate the by-no-means assured transition from a loose affiliation of states jealous of their identities and prerogatives to a unified nation.

"In a work that is both clear-eyed and sympathetic, Ellis...thoughtfully fulfills his mission. In doing so, he enables us to see, and perhaps identify with, America's founders in their full humanity."

Beginning with the debates of the Continental Congress, Ellis recognizes that when it came to the slave trade and slavery, “moral considerations had no role to play in the deliberations.” He argues that in severing the colonies’ ties with the British Empire, unlike historic revolutionaries like Robespierre, Lenin and Mao, “the leaders of the American resistance were not utopian visionaries, but, rather, an assemblage of pragmatic statesmen accustomed to negotiating the space between ideals and realities in their respective colonial governments.” For them, at all times, “there was a clear consensus that slavery was a taboo topic with the explosive potential to blow up any pretense of political unity.”

In this concise but well-sourced and lucid account, Ellis explains how once the war had been won (with the aid of at least 5,000 Black soldiers, though some 10,000 to 12,000 fought on the British side), that perspective carried over into the debates surrounding the drafting and ratification of the United States Constitution. In his view, the vision of a national government advanced by men like Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay was nothing less than a “coup d’etat,” but one doomed to failure if abolitionists had pressed their arguments to their ultimate conclusion. In detailing the four sectional compromises over slavery that were part of this process, he argues that pragmatism ultimately triumphed over principle, as it became clear that any effort to abolish the slave trade, let alone emancipate the nearly 700,000 slaves living in America by 1790, doomed the federal project to failure.

Ellis devotes considerably less attention to the story of the failed attempt to put policy toward Native Americans on a more humane path. Most of his discussion concerns the efforts of George Washington and his Secretary of War, Henry Knox, to negotiate the pact formalized as the Treaty of New York in August 1790 with the colorful and controversial chief of the Creek Nation, Alexander McGillivray. “They inherited an Indian policy headed inexorably toward the extermination of Indian Country east of the Mississippi,” Ellis writes in describing the challenge facing Washington and Knox, “and they attempted to turn it around.”

The treaty, signed amid a celebratory atmosphere, was intended to protect the Creeks and allied tribes in the face of rapid settlement of their homelands. But as Ellis explains, the good intentions it embodied were swamped by the demographic realities of an expanding white American population and a shrinking Native American one. “No political effort to contain or control this explosion stood much chance of success,” he argues. And by the time of Andrew Jackson’s presidency and the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, a policy antithetical to the one pursued by Washington and Knox had long held sway.

THE GREAT CONTRADICTION concludes with brief portraits of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in their final years, contrasting Washington’s decision to free his Mount Vernon slaves in his will with Jefferson’s refusal to do so based on his judgment that emancipation without repatriation of America’s slave population was impossible. In different but related ways, the actions of both men epitomize the tragedy of this era of American history.

In a work that is both clear-eyed and sympathetic, Ellis --- who describes his efforts during the past four decades as “dedicated to rescuing the founders from the electromagnetic field we have constructed around them, asserting that “the mythology surrounding the founding generation was a fog bank that needed to be blown away” --- thoughtfully fulfills his mission. In doing so, he enables us to see, and perhaps identify with, America's founders in their full humanity. Despite all their undeniable achievements, the legacies of these leaders must be weighed against their inability to rise above their circumstances and do what they knew to be right.