The great contradiction The tragic side of the American founding

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. (Oct.)

The distinguished historian examines America's two original, foundational sins. By Ellis' account, the Founding Fathers oversaw and overlooked "two unquestionably horrific tragedies." The first, of course, was slavery. Virginia, home to Washington and Jefferson, had the largest enslaved population, some 40% of its people. Jefferson, as a junior politician, floated an act that would allow owners to free enslaved people without first petitioning the governor or legislature, but he asked a senior colleague to introduce the bill, only to discover that "anyone even suggesting that emancipation was on the political agenda in Virginia was committing political suicide." Even though Black soldiers made up some 10% of the Continental Army during the American Revolution--"the only occasion when Blacks and Whites served alongside one another in integrated combat units until the Korean War"--no serious consideration was given to freeing them after the war. The second great tragedy beset the Indian nations of the East, with Washington himself saying that "a truly just Indian policy was one of his highest priorities, that failure on this score would damage his reputation and 'stain the nation.'" A case in point was the Creek Nation of the Southeast, increasingly pressured after the Revolution, as indeed were other nations beyond the Appalachians, by white encroachment, "a relentless tide that swept all treaties, promises, excellent intentions, and moral considerations to the far banks of history." The Creek leader, Alexander McGillivray, was of mixed blood, a freedom fighter who held slaves, a power broker and skilled negotiator, but "resolutely anti-American," and it was only a matter of time before conflict broke out--pitting federal authorities against state militias in an early hint of the Civil War--and the Creeks were removed. Ellis closes with the apt observation that the white supremacy inherent in both tragedies is very much with us today in the "thinly disguised racial prejudice" of the MAGA movement. A provocative, revisionist view of the first years of the Republic. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.