American Creation Triumph and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic by Joseph J. Ellis
Knopf, 304 pp., $26.95
Over the last dozen years or so, popular interest in the Founding Fathers has risen to new heights. Writers, journalists, and academics have turned with great vigor (and great profit) to the stories of Jefferson, John Adams, Madison, Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, and Sam Adams, as well as lesser-known figures like Gouverneur Morris, Nathanael Greene, John Jay, Dolly Madison, and even the period's great rogue, Aaron Burr.
A willing public consumes these biographies and histories without pause. One after the other has climbed the bestseller lists as its author appeared on the now-cancelled "Booknotes" (C-SPAN). This fascination with the founding generation remains so strong that HBO has just brought David McCullough's John Adams to the same screen that has given us The Sopranos and Big Love.
How are we to explain this fascination at a time when Americans' interest in reading is claimed to be at an all-time low, and polls of our basic historical knowledge show a humiliating lack of it? To look for one cause is hopeless. Changes in the academy, a backlash against academic studies of the period that seemed to put more emphasis on quilting and sex than seems warranted, changes in the structure of publishing houses, and the continuation of the editing projects that make the papers of the founders readily available to the general population--all encouraged this outpouring of books.
The revolutionary generation is also lucky to have found, at the turn of the 21st century, a cohort of talented writers, many of them not professional historians, who are interested in the Founders.
The proliferation of these studies is also related to shifts in national mood, first after the Berlin Wall came down, and then again after the crises during 2001-03. It is safe to say that a fuller understanding of these is necessary to comprehend how one book after another about the Founders could become a bestseller. As a people, we tend, in moments of change or crisis, to turn to figures in our past, particularly the Founders, for guidance back to our core values, and for a kind of national reassurance.
Joseph J. Ellis's American Creation strongly reflects the current obsession with the Founders. Ellis, who teaches at Mount Holyoke and is winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Founding Brothers, as well as the author of highly regarded studies of Adams and Jefferson, did as much as anyone to create this intense interest in the Founders. Certainly, he is the equal of anyone as a storyteller, and has built a public following surpassed, perhaps, only by that of David McCullough.
American Creation is a collection of seven essays (a prologue and six chapters), vignettes of the revolutionary period stretching from the imperial collapse in 1775-76 to the purchase of Louisiana in 1803. The first of these examines the year of crisis, between the assembling of the Second Continental Congress in 1775 and the writing and adopting of the Declaration in 1776. Ellis goes on to examine the impact of Valley Forge, the creation of the Constitution, failed treaty negotiations with a Creek Indian nation's leader, Alexander McGillivray, the origins of the Jeffersonian party and the first party system, and the Louisiana Purchase.
These essays provide sketches of moments that Ellis sees as critical to understanding the revolutionary era and the Founders' character. As always, his style is admirable: Ellis is smooth, provides coherent narrative threads, and generally reads very easily. He is one of the stronger academic writers, maybe the strongest, active in the field of early American history. That said, American Creation is not a very interesting book. It offers little, if anything, new for general readers of this genre, and nothing new for scholars.
Thomas Paine? He almost brought on the Revolution himself with Common Sense, despite the crankiness of the equally important John Adams. Valley Forge? Nasty and cold, until Baron Von Steuben began to straighten out the army and Washington got the states and his own strategy into line. Indians? Treated badly, despite Washington's best intentions. The Constitution? Unintended in its structure, opposed by able men like Patrick Henry, but nonetheless a brilliantly pragmatic solution to political problems both immediate and philosophical in their nature. The Louisiana Purchase? A superb bargain and a damn good idea that almost never happened because of Jefferson's dithering. The Lewis and Clark expedition? Forget the moon missions! The greatest adventure of exploration in American history.
No doubt many readers will agree with these assessments, but they are the insights of the typical seventh-grade history textbook until the advent of "social studies" in our middle and high schools in the 1960s began the process of turning the American public into a nation of historical semiliterates.
Certainly, Ellis and the others who have participated in this revived presentation of the Founders' stories have provided a real service: They have helped reconnect us to a coherent and usable past that includes the actions of actual people as reasons for dramatic changes. But to pretend that any real insight has been offered in American Creation or many of the other books in this genre is to do just that--pretend.
Part of the problem is that American Creation is dependent on the aforementioned presidential papers and related editorial projects as its primary basis. These provide a vital source, but if you use them to the degree that Ellis and others do, you end up not only adopting the same perspective as those who write the papers, but saying the same things over and over again. There is no evidence in American Creation of any archival research and more surprisingly, no evidence of research in the period's myriad newspapers and pamphlets now available online and word-searchable through the entrepreneurial efforts of the American Antiquarian Society and the Readex Corporation. These, too, contain a wealth of information, and would have provided a much more nuanced understanding of the period and its problems than is evident here.
Such nuance would have helped in many ways. Particularly troubling is Ellis's portrayal of the origins of the Jeffersonian-Republicans and the first party system. His insistence on portraying the Jeffersonians as a conspiratorial southern party, the "projection onto their enemies of a deceptive agenda with which they had a deep and intimate experience," led by Virginia planters fearful of a Northern, monied conspiracy against the Revolution and slavery, flies in the face of 20 years of scholarship that demonstrates the party's appeal in the Middle Atlantic and New England states. His main evidence for this slave power conspiracy seems to be a vague statement made by Nathaniel Macon in an 1818 letter, almost 30 years after the events that Ellis focuses on in the chapter!
In fact, small farmers, ambitious, scrambling entrepreneurs, and other dissidents in the North gave the Republicans strong support in western Pennsylvania, parts of New Jersey, upstate New York, Vermont, and the Maine district of Massachusetts. The humble as well as the mighty found meaning in an ideology that called for small government, limited state intervention in private lives, and a jealous guardianship of what they called the Spirit of 1776. Some slaveholders with agendas related to the "peculiar institution" supported the Jeffersonians, but most of its supporters cannot be characterized this way. It may make for a better story to portray Jefferson and Madison as paranoid slaveholders, and the party they created as the expression of their fears, but it hardly makes for good history. Nor does it do justice to the available sources and the events they document.
Ellis's lack of subtlety in interpretation is, in spots, linked to a lack of factual command. We are told, for example, that Nathanael Greene "bested the most accomplished British general, Lord Charles Cornwallis, on multiple occasions." In fact, Greene famously lost every battle he fought against Cornwallis, but in a fashion that provided the British commander with hollow victories. Only Greene's subordinates defeated British troops in the field, in small-unit engagements while on detached service.
Such errors further erode the reader's confidence in the scholarly apparatus at the foundation of American Creation. The desire to write well and play the part of public intellectual is no excuse for weak scholarship; indeed, the role would seem to demand just the opposite, a powerful command of the period that allows the scholar to speak with an authority that gives the reader confidence.
Perhaps, collectively, we need to be more restrained in what we ask of these men and women, some now nearing the advanced age of 300 years. Maybe they have done all they could do by providing us a malleable but workable (and astonishingly durable) constitutional framework, as well as their own copious papers to help make sense of change over time in revolutionary America.
These are magnificent legacies, and to ask for more, to place more weight on them, to overwork and overcommercialize them, is to court a kind of trouble more serious than that caused by revealing their foibles and sexual peccadilloes. The Founders can be neither priests nor rabbis to us, nor demons or dark preachers. They are not even a sure guide to the dilemmas we now find ourselves in as a nation and a people.
Of course, this leaves it up to us to solve the problems of our time, and a real knowledge of why people and societies change is a handy tool in doing so. When the stories of the revolutionary generation and their times are twisted to fit our needs or to sell books, we do damage not only to them, but to ourselves. We deserve better, and so do they.
Brendan McConville, professor of history at Boston University, is the author, most recently, of The King's Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688 to 1776.