The quartet Orchestrating the second American Revolution, 1783-1789

Joseph J. Ellis

Book - 2015

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Subjects
Published
New York : Alfred A. Knopf 2015.
Language
English
Main Author
Joseph J. Ellis (-)
Edition
First edition
Item Description
"A Borzoi book"--Title page verso.
Physical Description
xx, 290 pages ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 251-277) and index.
ISBN
9780385353403
9780804172486
Contents unavailable.
Review by Choice Review

Ellis (Williams College) focuses on the American struggle for nationhood following the War of Independence (1776-81). In the second American Revolution (1783-89), Federalists Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, and George Washington analyzed weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation, maneuvered to produce and guide the Constitutional Convention, influenced ratification debates, and "then drafted the Bill of Rights." Their collective as well as individual roles in shaping those crucial events are narrated over seven well-crafted chapters. Ellis effectively argues that a non-elitist political motive was catalyst for the quartet's syncopated strategy and tactics, which had to surmount prevailing anti-Federalist measures. Across and within both camps, however, the persistent drumbeat of disunion over slavery was quieted by constitutional protections such as the Three-Fifths Compromise. In this sense, Ellis is less persuasive where he finds such accommodation as morally defensible given social mores of the times. "That world was ... pre-Martin Luther King, Jr." Such point notwithstanding, this is an important book on American constitutional and government history. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. --James Elton Johnson, independent scholar

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review

Mean Girls: A couple of years ago, when the subject of "likable" characters in fiction resurfaced courtesy of Claire Messud's "The Woman Upstairs," the debate touched not only on gender - nobody complains about bad boys, Messud noted - but on genre, with some commentators suggesting unlikable heroines are automatically seen as more "literary." But of course pop fiction has long embraced difficult women: Consider Gillian Flynn's "Gone Girl," which blithely ruled the best-seller list even as the likability argument raged around it. Now there's another mean girl in the clique: Ani FaNelli, the protagonist of Jessica Knoll's "Luckiest Girl Alive," new on the hardcover fiction list at No. 12. Ani writes a sex column for a women's magazine and schemes to land a trophy husband; some reviewers have called her the mirror image of Amy Dunne in "Gone Girl," since Ani seems purely manipulative at the start but becomes more human as the book reveals its secrets. Knoll (inset), a former editor at Cosmopolitan and Self, told me there's a feminist case to be made for unlikable women. "Men who are ruthless and aggressive in pursuit of their goals are acting within their culturally sanctioned bounds," she said via email, "and we admire them for that. Women who do the same are punished because that hardnosed behavior is counter to how we believe women should be, which is kind, nurturing and selfless. The knee-jerk reaction is to dismiss Ani as vain and vapid. But when we reward women for showing their full range of humanity, warts and all, when we give their struggles weight, we allow for the possibility that their flaws and stories can endear, inspire and move us, just like those of men." A little spice is O.K., in other words, but please hold the sugar. Living History: "The Quartet," Joseph J. Ellis's look at the founders who turned America into one nation rather than a loose federation of states, hits the hardcover nonfiction list at No. 14. Ellis has won a Pulitzer (for "Founding Brothers") and a National Book Award (for "American Sphinx," about Thomas Jefferson). But one accomplishment has eluded him. "I'm secretly jealous of Ron Chernow because of his marvelous play on Broadway based on his Hamilton biography," he told The Boston Globe this month. "If you make American history come alive, there are people who really want to learn more. I wrote him an email that said, 'You lucky sucker, you.'" Watch Out Below: The photographer Sally Mann's memoir, "Hold Still," enters the hardcover nonfiction list at No. 9. Mann told Vogue recently that "the whole nature of photography has changed" thanks to smartphones: "Yesterday, I was walking down the street in New York City, looked up and saw a man who was washing windows without a harness, and the whole street was lined with people with their cellphones up in the air, waiting for him to fall." 'The kneejerk reaction is to dismiss Ani as vain and vapid.'

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 31, 2015]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Here Ellis describes the hard-won journey undertaken by George Washington, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison to push the 13 colonies from pluribus to unum after the Revolutionary War. Dean, an experienced voice actor, narrates this satisfactory audio edition, exuding confidence with tone and dictation. His deep, rich bass lends a certain gravitas to the political machinations of the players involved. Yet Ellis's narrative shows, in considerable detail, how tenuous, unlikely, and contested the quartet's fight for a strong central government was, and Dean's strong, stable reading lacks this air of uncertainty. The final hour of the audio book consists of Dean simply reading the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, and the Constitution of the United States. A Knopf hardcover. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A brilliant account of six years during which four Founding Fathers, "in disregard of public opinion, carried the American story in a new direction."In a virtuosic introduction, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Ellis (Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence, 2013, etc.) maintains that Abraham Lincoln was wrong. In 1776four score and seven years before 1863our forefathers did not bring forth a new nation. American revolutionaries hated distant governments, taxes, armies and inconvenient laws. Their Colonial governments seemed fine. Ellis reminds us that the 1776 resolution declaring independence described 13 "free and independent states." Adopting the Constitution in 1789 created the United States, but no mobs rampaged in its favor. In fact, writes the author, the "vast majority of citizens had no interest in American nationhood, indeed regarded the very idea of national government as irrelevant to their love lives." Ellis delivers a convincing argument that it was a massive political transformation led by men with impeccable revolutionary credentials. The indispensable man was George Washington, whose miserable eight years begging support for the Revolutionary army convinced him that America needed a central government. Its intellectual mastermind, James Madison, not only marshaled historical arguments, but performed political legerdemain in setting the Constitutional Convention agenda, orchestrating the debates and promoting ratification. Less tactful but equally brilliant, Alexander Hamilton's vision of American hegemony would provoke stubborn opposition, but during the 1780s, the people that mattered had no objection. An undeservedly neglected Founding Father (Thomas Jefferson became our first secretary of state only after he declined), John Jay was close to the others and a vigorous advocate of reform. This is Ellis' ninth consecutive history of the Revolutionary War era and yet another winner. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Preface: Pluribus to Unum   The idea for this book first came to me while listening to twenty-eight middle school boys recite the Gettysburg Address from memory in front of their classmates and proud parents. My son Scott was teaching science at the Greenwood School in Putney, Vermont, and had invited me to judge the annual oratorical contest. I don't remember exactly when it happened, but at some point during the strenuous if repetitious effort to get Lincoln's words right, it dawned on me that the first clause in the first sentence of Lincoln's famous speech was historically incorrect. Lincoln began as follows: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this Continent a new Nation." No, not really. In 1776 thirteen American colonies declared themselves independent states that came together temporarily to win the war, then would go their separate ways. The government they created in 1781, called the Articles of Confederation, was not really much of a government at all and was never intended to be. It was, instead, what one historian has called a "Peace Pact" among sovereign states that regarded themselves as mini-nations of their own, that came together voluntarily for mutual security in a domestic version of a League of Nations. And once you started thinking along these lines, there were reasons as self-evident as Jefferson's famous truths why no such thing as a coherent American nation could possibly have emerged after independence was won. Politically, a state-based framework followed naturally from the arguments that the colonies had been hurling at the British ministry for over a decade, which denied Parliament's right to tax them because that authority resided within the respective colonial legislatures, which represented their constituents in a more direct and proximate fashion than those distant members of Parliament could ever do. The resolution declaring independence, approved on July 2, 1776, clearly states that the former colonies were leaving the British Empire not as a single collective but rather as "Free and Independent States." Distance also made a huge difference. The vast majority of Americans were born, lived out their lives, and died within a thirty-mile geographic radius. It took three weeks for a letter to get from Bos­ton to Philadelphia. Political horizons and allegiances, therefore, were limited--obviously no such things as radios, cell phones, or the Internet existed to solve the distance problem--so the ideal politi­cal unit was the town or county government, where representatives could be trusted to defend your interests because they shared them as your neighbors. Indeed, it was presumed that any faraway national government would represent a domestic version of Parliament, too removed from the interests and experiences of the American citizenry to be trusted. And distrusting such distant sources of political power had become a core ideological impulse of the movement for independence, often assuming quasi-paranoid hostility toward any projection of power from London and Whitehall, which was described as inherently arbitrary, imperious, and corrupt. And so creating a national government was the last thing on the minds of American revolutionaries, since such a distant source of political power embodied all the tyran­nical tendencies that patriotic Americans believed they were rebelling against. In 1863 Lincoln had some compelling reasons for bending the arc of American history in a national direction, since he was then waging a civil war on behalf of a union that he claimed predated the existence of the states. This was a fundamental distortion of how history happened, though we may wish to forgive Lincoln, since it was the only way for him to claim the political authority to end slavery. Truth be known, nationhood was never a goal of the war for independence, and all the political institutions necessary for a viable American nation-state were thoroughly stigmatized in the most heartfelt convictions of revolutionary ideology. The only thing holding the American colonies together until 1776 was their membership in the British Empire. The only thing holding them together after 1776 was their common resolve to leave that empire. Once the war was won, that cord was cut, and the states began to float into their own at best regional orbits. Any historically informed prophet who was straddling that postwar moment could have safely predicted that North America was destined to become a western version of Europe, a constellation of rival political camps and countries, all jockeying for primacy. That, at least, was the clear direction in which American history was headed.   To say that "something happened" to change that direction is obviously inadequate. The beauty of the Lincoln version of the story is its presumption that a national ethos was already embedded in the political equation, albeit latently or implicitly, so that what we might call the second revolution of 1787-88 followed naturally from the first in 1776. But for all the political, ideological, and demographic reasons already noted, the transition from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution cannot be described as natural. Quite the contrary, it represented a dramatic change in direction and in scale, in effect from a confederation of sovereign states to a nation-size republic, indeed the largest republic ever established. So how do we explain such a seismic shift in the gravitational field of American political history? Well, the kind of bottom‑up explanation that works so well to convey popular opposition to British impe­rial policy in the 1760s and 1770s will not work in the 1780s. Mobs did not appear, urging the creation of a fully empowered American nation. Quite the opposite: the dominant historical forces in the 1780s were centrifugal rather than centripetal, meaning that the vast majority of citizens had no interest in American nationhood; indeed, they regarded the very idea of a national government as irrelevant to their local lives and ominously reminiscent of the British leviathan they had recently vanquished. There was no popular insurgency for a national government because such a thing was not popular. The obvious alternative explanation is top-down. All democratic cultures find such explanations offensive because they violate the hallowed conviction that, at least in the long run, popular majorities can best decide the direction that history should take. However true that conviction might be over the full span of American history--and the claim is contestable--it does not work for the 1780s, which just might be the most conspicuous and consequential example of the way in which a small group of prominent leaders, in disregard of popular opinion, carried the American story in a new direction. There is an ironic precedent for this argument. During the first half of the twentieth century Charles Beard and his disciples, chiefly Merrill Jensen, created a school of thought, called the Progressive School, that dominated our understanding of the revolutionary era. While much of their work has not aged well, chiefly its claim that the founders were driven primarily by economic motives, two features of their story line remain abidingly relevant: first, that the founders must not be regarded as demigods with unique access to supernatural wisdom; and second, that the transition from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution was orchestrated by a political elite that collaborated--to say "conspired" seems sinister, but it is what the Progressives meant--to replace a state-based confederation with a federal government that claimed to speak for the American people as a collective whole. In virtually every other respect, the narrative offered in the pages that follow veers in a different direction from the Progressive interpretation. My sense is that the most prominent leaders of this founding elite were driven by motives that were more political than economic, chiefly the desire to expand the meaning of the American Revolution so that it could function on a larger, indeed national, scale. The great conflict, as I see it, was not between "aristocracy" and "democracy," whatever those elusive categories might mean, but rather between "nationalists" and "confederationists," which is shorthand for those who believed that the principles of the American Revolution could flourish in a much larger political theater and those who did not. Finally, my version of the story regards the successful collaboration of this small cadre not as a betrayal of the core convictions of the American Revolution, but rather as a quite brilliant rescue. My argument is that four men made the transition from confederation to nation happen. They are George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. If they are the stars of the story, the supporting cast consists of Robert Morris, Gouverneur Morris (no relation), and Thomas Jefferson. Readers can and should decide for themselves, but my contention is that this political quartet diagnosed the systemic dysfunctions under the Articles, manipulated the political process to force a calling of the Constitutional Convention, collaborated to set the agenda in Philadelphia, attempted somewhat successfully to orchestrate the debates in the state ratifying conventions, then drafted the Bill of Rights as an insurance policy to ensure state compliance with the constitutional settlement. If I am right, this was arguably the most creative and consequential act of political leadership in American history. It made a huge difference that all four of the political collaborators identified here possessed impeccable revolutionary credentials. (The posture of Progressive historians has always seemed somewhat odd on this score, since the men they accused of hijacking the American Revolution were all central players in making the victory over Great Britain happen.) If the overarching issue at stake was what direction the American Revolution should take after independence was won, no one could accuse them of failing to grasp the almost mystical meaning of "The Cause." And since Washington was the one-man embodiment of all the semi-sacred reverberations that term conveyed, his endorsement of the national agenda provided a crucial veneer of legitimacy for their bold and slightly illegal project. It also helped that all four of them had served in the Continental Army or the Continental (then Confederation) Congress, which meant that they had experienced the war for independence from a higher perch than most of their contemporaries. They were accustomed, as Hamilton put it, to "think continentally" at a time when the allegiances and perspectives of most Americans were confined within local and state borders. Indeed, the very term American Revolution implies a national ethos that in fact did not exist in the population at large. Perhaps the best way to understand the term American Revolution is to realize that it describes a two-tiered political process. The first American Revolution achieved independence. It was a mere, or perhaps not so mere, colonial rebellion. It also created a series of mini-republics in the former colonies, now states, but it did so in ways that were inherently incompatible with any national political agenda. The second American Revolution modified the republican framework existent in the states in order to create a nation-size republic. The overly succinct way to put it is that the American Revolu­tion did not become a full-fledged revolution until it became more expansively American. Or even more succinctly, the first phase of the American Revolution was about the rejection of political power; the second phase was about controlling it. More practically, the United States could not become the dominant model for the liberal state in the modern world until the second American Revolution of 1787-88. Excerpted from The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 by Joseph J. Ellis All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.