Pondering the American Revolution with Joseph J. Ellis
At the time, no one called it the “American Revolution”, and a divided citizenry has always been less a bug than a feature of our history
April 2, 2024
America is most definitely an idea, but it’s also a cause. Yet what does it mean for a nation to have a cause ? But also to embody one? In the case of the United States, nationhood was theoretically a cause for which it was ultimately fought, but the meaning of nationhood has at once been symbolic, sacred and at war with itself.
I had the pleasure of discussing this “cause” with acclaimed author and the foremost historian of our nation’s founding , Joseph J. Ellis. Ellis is the author of 12 books—“Founding Brothers,” a Pulitzer Prize winner among them—and he joined me to talk about his recent book “The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents” on my podcast this past week.
It can’t be emphasized enough that we are at inflection point in our nation’s 248 year history, and questions about the future of our trajectory are inarguably best answered by our past. Joseph Ellis is frequently and incorrectly regarded as a presidential historian, because he is an American historian, through and through, and the “The Cause” is particularly compelling in asking that we listen to what Ellis calls “the words and music of the revolutionary song.”
Those sounds are of a young country which has improbably endured, but also one which can be too cocksure about its own ‘exceptionalist’ creed. American Exceptionalism can be defined in a multitude of ways not the least of which by believing America to be exempt from history—meaning a nation not founded on feudalism, aristocracy or the church–but I have always viewed America as exceptional because it’s a beautiful paradox. It’s key, however, that we don’t lean into a permanent state of self-flagellation and we celebrate the bones of our foundational blueprint for liberty. But we also mustn’t exist in a state of national delusion, where out attempts to look backward are thwarted by our own denial of a bloody and turbulent past with which we must reckon.
To be sure, examining the revolutionary time with a gimlet eye is not the same thing as looking at it through a contemporary prism or what Ellis calls the “presentistic fallacy” by which we graft modern politically correct notions onto eighteenth century revolutionary America. We must first understand the founders’s world, and acknowledge their imperfections, all the while readily and honestly fessing up to our own. As Ellis explains of the founders, “Indeed, if they were demigods, what could we possible learn from them? It’s time to put away childish things.”
In a similar vein to my take on our national identity, Ellis insists “we must also be capable of thinking paradoxically.” Ellis reframes the way we think about the American Revolution in contending “The American Revolution succeeded because it was not really a revolution. Which means it succeeded because it failed.” Ellis’s book locates the tension between a young nation born of revolution which for all of its ostensibly radical ideas remains a work in progress. No doubt historians and thinkers aplenty have come to like-minded conclusions, but Ellis ensures we come away from his analysis understanding that our view of nearly two and a half centuries of our history is not an ‘either/or.’ It’s a both/and.
The sins of our democratic republic are such that our gorgeous, capacious home still has several haunted rooms. As Ellis argues:
“Moreover, the tragedies of, both the failure to end slavery and avoid Indian removal, were rendered inevitable by the terms of the triumph, which demonized any national government empowered to shape domestic policy as a second coming of British tyranny. The two abiding legacies of The Cause, American independence and slavery, established the central contradiction of American history at the very start. Thus my subtitle.”
Our nation’s history remains a quest toward the noble, if elusive idea of perfecting our Union. We are constitutionally protected from government, even as many marginalized groups have historically needed to be protected by it. Our ‘central contradiction’, as Ellis describes it, is what has often cleaved us even as it has fueled our push to redeem our creedal principles. Can we ever reconcile this contradiction? If so, then how? In the end, Ellis assesses that our founding legacy imbued our national purpose with what he calls “a decidedly oppositional edge, much surer about what is was against that what is was for, prepared to block any hostile takeover from above by any aspiring dictator or domestic version of British tyranny, but incapable of decisive action at the national level to face or resolve the two embedded tragedies of slavery and Native American genocide in slow motion.”