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American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies in the Founding of the Republic Paperback – October 14, 2008
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National Bestseller
Acclaimed historian Joseph J. Ellis brings his unparalleled talents to this riveting account of the early years of the Republic.
The last quarter of the eighteenth century remains the most politically creative era in American history, when a dedicated group of men undertook a bold experiment in political ideals. It was a time of both triumphs and tragedies—all of which contributed to the shaping of our burgeoning nation. Ellis casts an incisive eye on the gradual pace of the American Revolution and the contributions of such luminaries as Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, and brilliantly analyzes the failures of the founders to adequately solve the problems of slavery and the treatment of Native Americans. With accessible prose and stunning eloquence, Ellis delineates in American Creation an era of flawed greatness, at a time when understanding our origins is more important than ever.
- Print length283 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateOctober 14, 2008
- Dimensions7.9 x 5.1 x 1 inches
- ISBN-100307276457
- ISBN-13978-0307276452
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“Illuminating. . . . Compelling. . . . Focuses on a series of key moments: most notably, Valley Forge, the standoff between the Federalists and their opponents, [and] the consequences [of] the Louisiana Purchase on slavery and the treatment of Indians.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“[Ellis] is a storyteller, and a superb one . . . no historian is better at making a complicated jumble of events clear and comprehensible.” —The New York Review of Books
“Illuminating . . . entertaining. . . . Ellis has done us a great service.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Delightful. . . . Ellis is the reigning master of the episodic approach to history.” —The Boston Globe
About the Author
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 recently retired from his position as the Ford Foundation Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College and lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with his wife and their youngest son.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Product details
- Publisher : Vintage; Reprint edition (October 14, 2008)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 283 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0307276457
- ISBN-13 : 978-0307276452
- Item Weight : 10.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 7.9 x 5.1 x 1 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #660,366 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #473 in American Revolution Biographies (Books)
- #1,352 in U.S. Revolution & Founding History
- #1,450 in US Presidents
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Joseph J. Ellis is Ford Foundation Professor of History at Mount Holyoke and author of the National Book Award-winning American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Founding Brothers, and The Passionate Sage (Norton).
Photo by Larry D. Moore [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons.
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[1] "The Year"...1775...when the need for, and possibility of, independence, became apparent to a "critical mass" of influential people. Ellis makes the excellent point that America was never a one man show. Yes, Washington was central, but Adams, Jefferson, and Madison were almost equally central, and there was quite a supporting cast. Other countries...France, Russia, Cuba...have had revolutions dominated by one man, then gone to hell. We have survived, partialy because our nation was never wholly personified in one person.
[2] "The Winter"...at Valley Forge. We almost lost everything right there. Washington held it together by force of will, despite the Conway Cabal, despite disloyal local farmers, despite everything. But, with a big assist from Baron von Steuben.
[3] "The Argument"...over ratification of the Constitution. OK...we won...what do we do now? By 1887, it was apparent that the Articles of Confederation weren't working. A Constitutional Convention, chaired by Washington, was held in Philadelphia [in secret]. Madison, and others produced a federal compact, then sent it to the states. There, the REAL story was written; the Virginia debates, with Madison and Marshall on one side, and Patrick Henry [with help] on the other are the stuff of legend. Ratification won [barely], but Henry and George Mason were able to force a Bill of Rights into the picture. {Later, Henry became a big federalizer, and Madison went the other way, but that's another tale}.
[4] "The Treaty"...with the Creek Indians in 1790. The Indians went to New York, with much pomp, negotiated with Washington, Henry Knox, and Jefferson, and signed the "Treaty of New York". The Indians got the shaft. What else is new? Well, Joe is good enough to make the point that they brought much of it on themselves, and in the process introduces us to the book's closest approach to comic relief, Creek Chief Alexander McGillivray. [OK, Citizen Genet has comic aspects, too]. The Chief was a drunken, double-dealing, genius. Both sides violated the treaty before the ink was dry, and McGillivray got rich....
[5] "The Conspiracy"...by Jefferson and Madison that gave us our modern two-party system. The two founders took a trip to New England in 1791, and politics has never been the same. Till then, "parties" were seen as dishonorable. BUT, except for a minor spot of trouble between 1861 and 1865, we've managed to settle our differences peacefully. This MAY represent Jefferson's greatest gift to us.
[6] "The Purchase"....of Louisiana...Thomas Jefferson took office pledging to shrink the government, and save money. Instead, he gave us an "Empire of Liberty". The purchase [probably] violated the Constitution, but Jefferson played his cards to perfection, and grabbed a once-in-a-millenium opportunity. Of course, there was the minor problem of slavery, and the non-Republican administration of the new territory, but, hey......
Once again, Joe Ellis has given us an absolutely fabulous book. Buy it; more important, study it. We have a great country, and far too few understand how it got that way.
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.