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NONFICTION
Two of America’s Leading Historians Look at the Nation’s Founding Once Again — to Understand It in All Its Complexity
THE CAUSE
The American Revolution and Its Discontents
By Joseph J. Ellis
POWER AND LIBERTY
Constitutionalism in the American Revolution
By Gordon S. Wood
There was nothing inevitable about the creation of the United States — the United States, singular, that is, a continental nation-state with a central government, rather than these United States, plural, a collection of small, quarrelsome quasi republics connected by a weak treaty of friendship. In fact, the path to the nation as we know it, with a powerful executive, a representative legislature and an independent judiciary, was highly implausible. For the 13 states at the time of the Revolution — mini-nations that had their own currencies, their own foreign policies, their own navies — the quest for independence was not just freedom from an imperial Britain, but independence from one another. America could have very easily looked like a bigger, more dysfunctional European Union.
In these two masterly works, the great historians of America’s Revolutionary era, Gordon S. Wood and Joseph J. Ellis, show how this experiment in republican self-government almost didn’t happen. As Ellis writes in “The Cause,” there was always far more emphasis on pluribus than unum, on the many rather than the one. The original demand of The Cause (the historical term for the Revolutionary War) was actually conservative: Give us our due rights under British law. Nationhood was not the goal. People saw themselves as Virginians, Rhode Islanders, New Yorkers — not Americans. How the many became a fractious one is the story these two books tell. They both suggest that it was only the creation of the Constitution in 1787 that made these disparate citizens into Americans.
But Ellis and Wood are not triumphalist about the Constitution. They each underscore that the signers failed to deal with some awfully big problems. They both assert that the deepest flaw was the failure to purge the new nation of the evil of slavery, and that error, more than any other, betrayed the values on which America was founded. Each of them writes that many of the same difficult questions that almost prevented the Union from coming into being 234 years ago — bondage versus emancipation, big government versus small, city versus country, individualism versus communitarianism — still divide us today. Back then, the anti-Federalists protested that creating a strong national government was just substituting one form of tyranny for another. Whether they know it or not, the governors who now reject federal mask mandates are echoing the anti-Federalists of the 1780s.
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“Power and Liberty” is based on a series of lectures that Wood, a professor emeritus at Brown and a Pulitzer Prize winner, gave at Northwestern University in 2019. They were a summing up of his life’s work and the book has an elegiac quality along with his customary clarity. Wood sees the half-century from the 1760s till the early 1800s as “the most creative period of constitutionalism in American history and one of the most creative in modern Western history.” In “The Cause,” Ellis, also a Pulitzer Prize winner and a professor emeritus at Mount Holyoke, tells the complementary story of the “prudent” Revolutionaries who won the war but weren’t quite sure what to do next. Like Wood, he deftly foreshadows all the issues that would complicate America’s trajectory and ends with a historical cliffhanger: Would the Republic survive? It did, but only when the Constitution became the embodiment of The Cause.
In fact, both authors suggest we romanticize the making of the Constitution. There are hundreds of books that glorify the sweltering summer weeks in Philadelphia in 1787 when that radically new operating system came into being. But Ellis and Wood note that the model for that federal constitution came not from Madison’s imagination but from the laboratories of the states. By the end of 1776, eight states had created their own constitutions with the same separation of powers — executive, legislative, judicial — that the federal constitution would establish. All of them had genuine voter representation, an idea that seems natural today but was radical then. Britain had “virtual” representation in Parliament well into the 19th century.
The constitutional process was jump-started when a handful of men — Washington, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin and Jefferson — came to believe that a national government was the fulfillment, not the betrayal, of The Cause. This didn’t happen overnight. It took Washington seven grueling years of war — when the miserly states consistently refused to finance the Continental Army — to become convinced that The Cause would survive only with a powerful central government.
Between the two authors, Wood is more the champion of the little guy; he is Jefferson to Ellis’s Hamilton. But neither man would maintain that the framers were “small d” democrats. As Ellis points out, the word “democracy” back then was more suggestive of mob rule than reasoned deliberation.
Washington, Madison and Hamilton all thought that one of the reasons America needed a federal constitution was that there were too many uneducated regular folks making mischief in the state legislatures. Madison deplored the “mutability” of state legislatures and wanted Congress under the new constitution to be able to overrule any state law. For Madison, Wood writes, “democracy was no solution to the problem, democracy was the problem.”
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And, of course, even the democracy that they created was not very democratic. “We the People” did not include Black people, women or even white men who did not own land. (Still, as Wood notes, it was the most representative and participatory system in the world at the time.)
But the deepest fault was the preservation of slavery. Although the word “slavery” does not appear in the Constitution, the framers allowed the slave trade to continue till 1807 to prevent the Southern states from jumping ship. And, yet, the Constitutional Convention was the moment when America came closest to doing away with slavery until after the Civil War. Both Wood and Ellis write that the Revolution galvanized opposition to slavery not only in the North but in Virginia as well. Wood notes that the first antislavery convention in world history met in Philadelphia in 1775. After the war, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island passed laws eliminating the slave trade. The framers knew how hypocritical their toleration of slavery looked after talking for years about breaking free from their bondage to England.
Wood rebuts the myth that only the Southern delegates owned slaves: He notes that John Hancock of Boston, John Dickinson of Philadelphia and Robert Livingston of New York were all slave owners. But none of them were proud of it, and many Northern delegates believed the institution was withering away. “No prominent member of the Revolutionary generation,” Ellis writes, “ever attempted to argue that slavery was morally compatible with the values of the Declaration.”
Yet there was something the Revolutionary generation cared about even more than the abolition of slavery, and that was the creation of a nation. At the outset of the Constitutional Convention, the Northern delegates introduced a clause abolishing slavery. The Southern states vehemently objected, and the Northern delegates acquiesced. Why? Wood cites Madison’s despairing line: “Great as the evil is, a dismemberment of the Union would be worse.” Ellis writes that if South Carolina had to choose between independence and retaining slavery, it would have chosen to preserve slavery. That’s a difficult position to negotiate with.
Although Wood signed a letter that was critical of some of the arguments of the 1619 Project, both he and Ellis see the problems of race and slavery as the great flaws in America’s birth. “The two abiding legacies of The Cause,” Ellis writes, “American independence and slavery established the central contradiction of American history at the very start.” What enriches these two books is their moral complexity. Despite our central contradiction, both Wood and Ellis believe in what they call a civic “small r” republicanism, a sense of public purpose built into our founding. Yes, there may be faults in our software, but the Constitution also contains a built-in self-correcting mechanism: It can be amended. The Union can be made more perfect.
Can America be truly great if we are built on a foundation that includes slavery? Both Ellis and Wood would say that while the Constitution contains that terrible defect, it also contains the cure for democracy’s wrongs — if we choose to use it.
Richard Stengel is the former editor of Time and former president of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. He is the author, most recently, of “Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation.”
THE CAUSE
The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783
By Joseph J. Ellis
Illustrated. 400 pp. Liveright. $30.
POWER AND LIBERTY
Constitutionalism in the American Revolution
By Gordon S. Wood
240 pp. Oxford University Press. $24.95.
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