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.)