A lesson learned from THE GREAT CONTRADICTION: THE TRAGIC SIDE OF THE AMERICAN FOUNDING, by Joseph Ellis

 America has struggled to define who was included in "freedom" from the beginning.

    One of the lessons I emphasize to my American History students is that there are two questions that have defined the course of our country; just what exactly the word "freedom" means and who it's supposed to apply to, and just who is included in the definition of an "American citizen." The great American Revolution scholar Joseph Ellis tackles those questions head-on in his latest book The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding, as he studies just how much the Founding Fathers struggled to apply the principles of American freedom to the new nation's oppressed minorities and Native American nations, and all the ways their generation came up short on these principles. Ellis makes the intriguing-if-debatable argument that the Founders did the best they could at establishing the groundwork for future emancipation, and that the mass displacement of the Native Americans was inevitable regardless of the personal wishes of the Founders. Ellis takes the controversial stance that we should not judge the failures of the Founding generation too harshly, as they did the best they could given their historical circumstances.

    Ellis is a long-time expert on the Founding Fathers, and his expertise with each of them shines through and gives them all distinct personalities; the shy, physically small, lawyerly Madison; the philosophical Jefferson; the stoic and cold Washington; the wise funny old man Franklin; and Hamilton, an honorable visionary who was also a little too close to loving kings and elite rule. Ellis' own personal biases are evident to anyone who knows his books well; he's long admired Washington over Jefferson, for example. The Great Contradiction is a relatively short book for such a dense topic (clocking in at under 200 pages), which makes it a solid read for more amateur historians looking for quick enlightenment.

    While the book focuses on the Founders' policies regarding both African Americans and Native Americans, its overwhelming emphasis is on the former group (as Ellis himself admits in his introduction). He paints a Founding generation that all agreed to put the slavery debate off until the new nation could be founded and built into a real power, albeit with completely different view of the future--with many Northerners seeing slavery's extinction as imminent and necessary for American values, while many Southerners could see no real future without it. All of the Founders acknowledged that slavery was completely incompatible with the ideals of American freedom, and some (most notably Benjamin Franklin) took real steps to challenge it and try to begin its destruction, but the most powerful Founders--Washington and Jefferson--had a tortured path. Washington treated his rebellious and runaway slaves with real cruelty and contempt, and yet freed all of his slaves in his will and hinted that he believed a future of racial equality was possible; Jefferson by contrast philosophically denounced slavery and made early attempts to restrict its growth, all while assaulting his own female slaves and resisting real progress on emancipation due to an inner racism that he could never overcome. Ellis argues that Washington and Hamilton deserved credit for helping to create a powerful national government that could one day be used to strike against slavery, while also saying that the Founders' failure to restrict slavery from new American territories early on in Washington's presidency made a future bloody civil war over the topic virtually unavoidable. Ellis does save a chapter toward the end where he argues that Washington had the best interests in mind for Native Americans (wanting to protect and slowly assimilate them into the new nation), but that he was ultimately foiled by the new national government having no real power to stop the flood of white settlers invading Indian territory, with the encouragement of the Southern state governments.

    Overall, The Great Contradiction is another solid work from Ellis, one that anyone with an interest in the debates surrounding the American Revolution should read. Professional historians will find things they disagree with Ellis on (I personally don't disagree with his preference for Washington over Jefferson, but that bias is obvious here), but he is a well-read scholar who knows the topic well. The work of authors like Ellis has long since laid waste to the myth that the Founding generation all agreed on what America needed and what the word "freedom" meant, and their intense differences on these core values continue to shape the development of our politics today. Overall, The Great Contradiction is a fascinating contribution to our age-old debates as to what exactly America is and what it's supposed to be.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A lesson learned from NAT TURNER--BLACK PROPHET, by Anthony Kaye and Gregory Downs

  Being overly certain of your own morality is a recipe for disaster.     One historical figure I have long been curious to learn more about is Nat Turner, the famous slave who in 1831 launched a bloody rebellion against the white slave-owners in rural Virginia, a failed rebellion that had seismic consequences in the politics and worldview of the South. Nat Turner--Black Prophet is a curious book in a variety of ways. It was begun by Professor Anthony Kaye back in the 2010's, and in the wake of his death it was finished years later by Professor Gregory Downs (of my own U.C. Davis). It's a book that reads like a standard History book when discussing Nat's origins and legacy, as well as the culture in which he lived. But when discussing Nat's own personal beliefs and visions, it dives deep into Biblical analysis, so much so that it often reads much more like a Religious Studies text. The authors argue that approach is vital for truly understanding Nat's motivations, a...
Read more

A lesson learned from LINCOLN VS. DAVIS, by Nigel Hamilton

Your strength can quickly become your weakness, if you cannot pivot to changing circumstances. Nigel Hamilton’s Lincoln vs. Davis: The War of the Presidents is an intriguing and at times frustrating book, especially if you’re well familiar with the Lincoln presidency and its major outline. The book sells itself as a study of the two leaders’ approaches to war leadership, yet it focuses almost exclusively on the first two years of the war (1860-1862), i.e. the time period when Lincoln often looked like a commander-in-chief who was totally in over his head, while Davis looked like he might very well successfully lead the Confederate States of America in a successful bid for independence. The book is a great read, but also frustrating in how limited its focus is; that said, Hamilton does a superb job in setting up the book’s heel turn in its final section, when Lincoln suddenly pivoted into greatness while Davis floundered his new “country” into oblivion, and that was in how Lincoln rec...
Read more

A lesson learned from YOU HAVE TO BE PREPARED TO DIE BEFORE YOU CAN BEGIN TO LIVE: TEN WEEKS IN BIRINGHAM THAT CHANGED AMERICA, by Paul Kix

There's never an "ideal" time to confront injustice--you just need to do it.      Lately I've been on a roll reading great books, but Paul Kix's new book recounting Martin Luther King's most famous protest campaign is a real page-turner, and one that feels deeply relevant in an era where people feel injustice happening on a global scale. As a man who has an interracial family, Kix tells a deeply personal story of how MLK, whose Civil Rights Movement had faltered and struggled for years to make major progress, finally awoke the conscious of America (and its ruling brothers JFK and RFK) with his Birmingham Campaign of 1963. Many of the Civil Rights Movement's most iconic moments came in the wake of Birmingham, and what was ironic about its success was that everyone told MLK it was an "ill-timed" protest--that he was better off waiting and hoping for more gradual progress.     MLK took on great personal risk when he and his fellow civil rights leade...
Read more