gilda_elise

A major new history from the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Founding Brothers and the National Book Award winner American Sphinx, on how America’s founders—Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams—regarded the issue of slavery as they drafted the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. In this daring and important work, our most trusted voice on the founding era reckons with the realities and regrets of our founding and the tragedy of its two great the failure to end slavery and the failure to avoid Indian removal.

“How does it appear in the sight-of-heaven,” wrote Samuel Hopkins of Newport, “that these States, who have been fighting for liberty, cannot agree in any political constitution unless it indulge and authorize them to enslave their fellow men.”

On the eve of the American Revolution, half a million enslaved African Americans, many in place for several generations, were permanently embedded in the North American population. The slave trade was flourishing, even as the thirteen colonies armed themselves to defend against the idea of being governed without consent. This paradox gave birth to what one of our most trusted and admired historians, Joseph J. Ellis, calls the “American Dilemma.” How could a government that had been fought for and founded on the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence institutionalize slavery? How could it permit a tidal wave of western migration by settlers who understood the phrase “pursuit of happiness” to mean claiming Indian land?

In The Great Contradiction, Ellis, with narrative grace and a flair for irony and paradox, addresses the questions that lie at America’s twisted roots—questions that turned even the sharpest minds of the revolutionary generation into mental contortionists. He discusses the first debates around slavery and the treatment of Native Americans, from the Constitutional Convention to the Treaty of New York, revealing the thinking and rationalizations behind Jay, Hamilton, and Madison’s revisions of the Articles of Confederation, and highlights the key role of figures like Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet and Creek chief Alexander McGillivray.

Ellis writes with candor and deftness, his clarion voice rising above presentist historians and partisans, who are eager to make the founders into trophies in the ongoing culture wars. Instead, Ellis tells a story that is rooted in the coexistence of grandeur and failure, brilliance and blindness, grace and sin.

For such a short book, it delves into two of the most intriguing questions of the Revolution: why was slavery permitted to continue, and why the indigenous population’s removal allowed. They would be the two greatest failures of the revolutionary generation.

Though more of the book focuses on the subject of slavery, both issues are given thorough examination, being the “great contradiction” of the American founding and early history. The founders would declare that all men are created equal, while preserving slavery. They would declare their freedom from a tyranny that they would then use to allow the genocide of the indigenous population.

One can argue that the Union could never have been created if the southern colonies had not been allowed to keep their slaves. That the new government didn’t have the martial strength to hold back the tide of rapacious settlers as they swarmed over native land. Both are true. But not only would nothing be done about the issues, but laws would be passed that would make both issues worse.

The main characters on both sides of each issue are examined. Their motives would be concisely analyzed to the best of the author’s knowledge. It would seem that the contradiction was both political and personal.

The book is a truly compelling read.