Joseph J. Ellis is my favorite early American historian. He writes about the important topics with clarity and grace.
What do the "Founders" have to say to us today? Other historians have dealt with this theme. Ellis does it the best.
Our country is divided. Ellis talks about John Adams and economic inequality. Who else but Thomas Jefferson and racism. Washington on foreign relations not only using his famous final address but his dealings with native Americans. Then there is Mr. Constitution James Madison on constitutional law.
History is always unfinished in the sense that the future always uses the past in new ways.
-Peter Gay, p. 3
We hold these truths to be self-evident. Jefferson certainly didn't know that he was composing the American creed. P. 3
Reading history is like extending your memory back in time. P. 4
Nothing is more than certain than that these people are meant to be free, but not under the same government. Thomas Jefferson, 1821 P. 13
The central figure in American history with regard to the slavery and racism is Thomas Jefferson. P. 13
The claim that "all men are created equal" has created unlimited opinion and commentary, but it is clearly incompatible with slavery, and there is no reason not to acknowledge that Jefferson knew it. P. 21
Jefferson's rarified criticism of slavery is reprehensible because it never entered the reality of his slave plantation at Monticello. P. 22
Madison and Jefferson talking in code about slavery is also reprehensible. P. 25
The nefarious "Jeffersonian Persuasion" highlighted by his Kentucky Resolutions. P. 31
The Louisiana Purchase was the last realistic chance to implement a process of gradual emancipation, but Jefferson did nothing. P. 35
For the rest of his life, the impossibility of it all dominated Jefferson's life. There was no viable solution to the slavery problem. P. 35
The degradation of amalgamation. Jefferson rejected Coles. P. 36
Jefferson's "fireball in the night" related to the preservation of the white race and his apocalyptic vision of a race war. No wonder he was consumed with the Missouri Compromise. P. 37
The joke of his "diffusion" delusion. P. 37-38
The Missouri Compromise busted Jefferson's pretensions on slavery. This "fireball in the night" foreshadowed the unsolvable slavery question in the western territories. The compromise exposed Jefferson's hypocrisy. His lofty early antislavery pronouncements evolved into opposing any effort to restrict slavery. P. 38
The transition of the young to the old Jefferson is a sad spectacle. P. 39
Jefferson's foolproof rationale was that any plan for emancipation had to include a program for expatriation. His inaction was therefore include. P. 40
His fear of racial amalgamation proved stronger than "all men are created equal." P. 40
Yet what happened at Monticello was a laboratory in racial mixing. P. 41
Despite Jefferson's effusions of farmers as God's chosen people the man never walked behind a plow. He considered farming dull and boring. P. 41
Ultimately how can anyone knowledgeable like this hypocritical man?
Did Jefferson regard his children with Sally as mongrels? No matter what, Jefferson is disgusting. P. 42
Blacks could be assimilated into American society only when they stopped looking black. Jefferson's flair for functional delusions. P. 44
"Madison would die bankrupt, as would James Monroe and most of Virginia's planter class, all victims of an inherently unprofitable slave economy. P. 45
Jefferson consistently broke up slave families. Such a tragedy. P. 45
Jefferson himself was underground without seeing some of the devastation of his racism. P. 46
Jefferson's legacy led to the Confederacy. P. 46
Jefferson seems to disappoint all but his devoted disciples. P. 46
Even the most progressive men of his generation believed in colonization. P. 47
Jefferson clearly believed in the inherent inferiority of people of color. Colonization was the logical result of this belief. P. 47
The long and deep history of race in this country cannot be erased. It starts with recognizing the truth behind Thomas Jefferson. P. 48
The past will remain horrible as long as we refuse to assess it honestly. (James Baldwin) P. 49
Jefferson never intended his lyrical vision of the American future to include blacks. P. 49
Since the war racial progress has always led to a retrenchment. P. 50
Reconstruction was a "splendid failure" according to W.E.B. DuBois. P. 54
The Adams critique of Jefferson centers on the preternatural wisdom of "the people." The naive assumption of the people are rational creatures. The romantic conviction that American was immune from the class divisions of Europe. The differences between Jefferson and Hamilton are too multifaceted to be reduced to liberal and conservative. We should think in terms of an idealist and a realist, a pessimist and an optimist, a skeptic and a believer. Both were great patriots but thought differently. P. 71
"For over a century, starting with Herbert Croly's landmark critique of the Jeffersonian political tradition, The Promise of American Life (1909), the major debate at the center of the American political tradition has been depicted as an argument between Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, the former the most articulate advocate for agrarian America, the latter for the fully empowered national government along the lines of the New Deal. The political pairing has the virtue of modern-day relevance, but it would have struck most members of the revolutionary generation as bizarre. In the political firmament of their time, Adams and Jefferson were the two juxtaposed stars, while Hamilton was the brilliant comet that raised across the horizon, then disappeared." P. 75
Adams believed that entrenched economic inequality would create oligarchy. P. 97
Adams on economic inequality and oligarchy is with the price of the book. Adams believed that economic inequality and oligarchy was inevitable.
The debate over the proper role of the federal government has been a central question over the expanse of American history. P. 113
"Jefferson went to his grave believing that the United States was a union of sovereign states, a coherent confederation, not a nation-state." P. 113
To the extent that Madison coaxed Washington to Philadelphia this may have been his greatest contribution to the country. P. 129
What were Madison's motivations at the start of the Constitutional Convention?
". . . the answer is quite clear: to replace the Articles with a truly national government that shifted authority away from the state to the federal level in a decisive and uncompromising fashion. It soon became clear that Madison's preferred goal was politically impossible." P. 134
The author deftly debunks "originalism" thru the Heller decision. P. 160
Judge Scalia's tortured reasoning in the Heller decision shows the moral vacuity of the originalist position. P. 165
"The fate of 320 million Americans will be decided by five judges who, citing nineteenth-century dictionaries, to translate words from an eighteenth-century document, misguidedly claim they are channeling the wisdom of the founders." P. 170
The Revolutionary War did not automatically lead to a united nation. P. 177
It was clear from the beginning that Native Americans did not fit into the republican vision of westward expansion. White settlers assumed that Indian land was theirs for the taking. White policy toward natives was European-style imperialism. Every agreement was only temporary. Genocide in slow motion. A republican cloak hiding an imperialistic agenda. P. 180-84
For the first time I read about The Treaty of New York. This treaty was signed August 13, 1790. In the tortured and tragic history of Indian-white relations in this country, this was probably the most hopeful moment. P. 190
Washington and Henry Knox had a strategy that might have avoided Indian removal and Indian wars; hence, might have avoided most of the coming genocide. Promises were made to Indians for land and the government was to prevent white settlements on this land. But Washington was ultimately unable to stop the demographic wave. Nothing short of a Chinese Wall could have stopped it. How tragic. P. 190-191
"His realistic approach to foreign policy, then, was only a piece of his larger perspective on life itself: the fates were fickle, and one could trust only what one could control; human nature seldom rose to its highest aspirations; all utopian expectations for paradise on earth were delusional dreams destined to end at the guillotine or firing squad wall. His one attempt to act on moral principle---the effort to rescue Native Americans from genocide---had ended in abject failure for all the realistic reasons that he had done his best to subvert. P. 205
"The American narrative is morally unresolvable because the society that saved humanity in the great conflicts of the twentieth century was also a society built on enormous crimes---slavery and the extinction of native inhabitants." Robert D. Kaplan, Earning the Rockies (2017), p. 207
"As a result, the founders will forever resist exclusive ownership by any political party or ideological camp. To paraphrase Walt Whitman, the founders contained multitudes. The American Dialogue they framed is a never-ending argument that neither side can win conclusively. It is the argument itself, not the answer either liberals or conservatives provide, that is the abiding legacy." P. 232
A tribute to G. Morris: "We the people." P. 239
I was thinking this morning how Joseph Ellis is my favorite early American historian.
No comments:
Post a Comment