American Creation

American Creation

From the opening shots fired at Lexington and Concord in April 1775 to the 1803 purchase of the Louisiana territory, an acquisition that both vastly expanded the size of the young republic and assured her future mastery of the continent, the birth of the United States was a tumultuous, bitterly contested affair. Even the leading lights of the Founding couldn’t agree on the best course for their bold experiment in liberty and republican government. Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, to take just a few instances out of many, disagreed bitterly over matters including banking, states rights, standing armies, and slavery.

So how did the United States come to exist? In a soaring narrative that stretches from the modest beginnings of the rebellion to the give-and-take of the Constitutional Convention and the uncertain early years of the new republic, Joseph Ellis’ magnificent American Creation reveals precisely how it was done. “[It] is a story,” Ellis writes, “about tragedy as well as triumph, indeed about their mutual and inextricable coexistence.”

Ironically, Ellis continues, some of the Founders’ most impressive and inventive solutions actually closed off options that would have solved other key problems. “By circumscribing federal power, especially at the executive level,” he notes, the Constitution greatly limits the risk of domestic despotism, but it also “made it virtually impossible to…reach a just accommodation with the Native Americans.”

And then there is the Founding generation’s most infamous compromise: slavery. To abolish the “peculiar institution,” as figures like New York’s irrepressible Gouverneur Morris demanded, would have totally alienated the South. Yet to explicitly sanction human bondage would have provoked a firestorm of outrage in the North. Indeed, as no less an authority than James Madison recorded in his published Notes on the 1787 Constitutional Convention, “the great division of interests did not lie between the large & small States; It lay between the Northern & Southern.” Thus the Constitution speaks of “other persons” in its three-fifths clause, not slaves, which left the matter to be resolved by a future generation and a brutal civil war.

Employing the same dazzling narrative gift and mastery of source material that defines his acclaimed Founding Brothers, American Sphinx, and His Excellency, Joseph Ellis gives us the true story of the American Founding—including the many false starts, dreadful mistakes, and unsavory compromises that have since shaped our politics and society.

Hardcover: 304 pages

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc./Random House ( October 30, 2007 )

Item #: 99-5814

ISBN: 9780307263698

Product Dimensions: 6.25 x 9.25 x 0.76 inches

Product Weight: 18.0 ounces