I bookmark (’dog-ear’) pages of books with interesting passages.  And as the above picture of Joseph J. Ellis’s American Creation shows, I marked almost every other page of this great book.  I simply couldn’t help myself; there was something thought-provoking and worth remembering on nearly every page.  After I finished the book, I ordered Ellis’s other works and the accompanying DVDs. I even opened up my 10th grade history textbook to learn more about some of the events he touched upon.I don’t have time to transpose every bookmarked quote from the book so I intend only to blog the most important takeaways from each chapter (including historical facts or quotes or retrospective opinion).  Since I certainly can’t include all of the content, I heartily recommend you read the book.

If you’re looking for a review, check out the NY Time’s review.  And for a consideration of Ellis’s historical scholarship in light of his lies about his personal past, the Seattle PI has an interesting piece [the verdict is that his work is accurate].

And now on to my takeaways:

Foreward: The Founding
The opening chapter argues that “American Revolution enjoyed two incalculable advantages: time - or perhaps timing - and space”:

• Timing: The political philosophy for the creation of a America was not entirely original: “Over the preceding two centuries, a number of English, Scottish, and French thinkers had generate a veritable treasure trove of political knowledge that undermined and medieval worldview about goernment, society, and even human nature itself.” [4]
• Space: Washington said: “The Citizens of America, placed in the most enviable condition, as the sole Lords and Proprietors of a vast Tract of Continent, comprehending all the various soils and climates of teh World, and abounding with all the necessaries and conveniences of life, are now by the late satisfactory pacification, acknowledged to be possessed of absolute freedom and Independency; They are, from this period, to be considered as the ACtors on a most conspicuous Theatre, which seems to be peculiary designated by Providence for the display of human greatness and felicity.” [4-5] In other words: “the United States began with the largest trust fund of any emerging nation in recorded history.” [5]

The opening chapter also points out that the founding fathers were not Gods but fallible men.  They (generally) did not want to deified or revered by later generations (though it is clear they cared about the legacies).  Of John Adams: “It is only fair to note that John Adams was particulary sensitive about the creation of a mythical American story line with a cast of demigods in part because he feared he would not be given one of the starring roles.  His critical assessments of Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, and even more of his devastating denunciations of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Paine, betrayed a throbbing obsession with his own place in the history books.” [7]

Although the book doesn’t explicitly deal with each of the following accomplishments, Ellis makes a five-point summary of what the founders should be credited with:

1. “The revolutionary generation won the first successful war for colonial independence in the modern era”
2. “They established the first nation-sized republic. Until then it was presumed that republican governments based on the principle of popular consent could function only in small areas like Greek city-states or Swiss cantons.”
3. “They created the first wholly secular state.”
4. “They rejected convential wisdom … that political soveriegnty must reside in one agreed-upon location.  The Constitution defied this assumption be creating multiple and overlapping sources of authority in which the blurring of juristidction between federal and state power became an asset rather than a liability.”
5. “They created political parties as institutionalized channels for ongoing debate, which eventually permitted dissent to be regarded not as a treasonable act, but as a legitimate voice in an endless argument.” [8-9]

Finally, one quote that rings true in an election year:

• All of them [the founders] regarded the act of campaigning for office as a formal confession that they were unworthy to servce, a statement that they were not statesmen but demagogues. While popular opinion was hardly irrelevant, it was regarded as flighty, undependable, shortsighted, and easily manipulated.  That ultimate allegiance of the founders was not to “the people” but to “the public,” which was the long-term interest of the citizenry that they, the founders, had been chosen to divine. [15]

Chapter One: The Year
The first chapter makes the interesting point that prudence and patience were the most important parts of the Revolution’s success.  Ellis describes Jefferson’s comments about the time to mean “making an explosion happen in slow motion.” Here is Ellis’s critical paragraph:

In short, the decision to secede from the British Empire was accompanied by a truly revolutionary agenda for the infant American republic.  But the most prominent leaders, John Adams chief among them, insisted on the deferral of the revolutionary agenda and, in some instances, its postponement into the distant future.  Instead of regarding this gradualist approach as a moral and political failure, a conclusion that historians on the left regard as, shall we say, self-evident, the argument offered here is just the opposite.  In my judgement the calculated decision to make the American Revolution happen in slow motion was a creative act of statesmanship that allowed the United States to avoid the bloody and chaotic fate of subsequent revolutionary movements in France, Russia, and China. [21]

The slow-motion approach gave the British the opportunity to resolve the rebellion diplomatically, through shared sovereignty or decreased taxes.  Instead, the British were aggressive, thick-headed, and over-confident: what Ellis says “consistitutes perhaps the greatest blunder in teh history of British statecraft.” [25]

[Sidenote: First, how cool is it that the word ’statecraft’ exists?  Second, anyone that has read Asimov’s The Foundation series should see the similarities between the founding father’s patience and that of the major characters within The Foundation series; both groups rely on letting the world move foreward until the desired change is inevitable.  Ellis says of Adams: “He believed that ideas needed to fester until both his fellow delegates and his fellow Americans came to recognize, at their own speed and in their own way, that what had initially seemed so improbable was in fact inevitable.” [27]  The great psycho-historian Hari Seldon could not have said it better.]

Some quotes from the rest of the chapter:

• Temperamentally, at least on the face of it, Washington was the anti-Adams.  If Adams was excitable, always on the verge of a volcanic eruption that threatened to overwhelm his opponents in a lava flow of words, Washington was preternaturally calm and almost obsessively self-controlled, a man accustomed to dominating any room by his sheer physical presence, to lead by listening while less secure men babbled on. [30]
• “It seemed to be the principle employment of both armies,” wrote one observer [of the Boston Siege], “to look at each other with spyglasses.” [31]
• [about the New England patriots that created the first revolutionary army:] Leaving their posts for a few weeks to return home struct them not as desertion, but instead as a wholly sensible exercise of the very freedom they were defending. [32]
• There was one additional achievement locked into place at the Boston encampment … the routinized acceptance of civilian control over the military. … From the start, Washington deferred to the congress on questions of pay, the allotted size of the army, even final decisions about strategy. “I am not fond of stretching my powers,” he explained, “and if Congress will say thus far & no further you shall go, I will promise not to offend whilst I continue in their Service.” [36]
• Washington’s supreme statement of civilian control, of course, would not occur  until the end of the war, when he surrendered his sword to the president of congress and rode off into retirement as the American Cincinnatus. [37]
• Regarding Thomas Paine: a failed businessman with a “knack for alienating himself from those in power,” but with two talents that made Benjamin Franklin consider him an “ingenious young man.”  His “deep sense of social justice” and “ability to craft prose that expressed his political convictions in language that was simultaneously simple and dazzling.” [Franklin’s ingenious quote, the rest are Ellis on 41]
• [on the first words of the Declaration of Independence] Apparently regarded by all the delegates at the time as a mere rhetorical flourish designed to introduce the more serious business, these fifty-five words would grow in meaning to become the seminal statement of the American creed. [56]

Chapter Two: The Winter
The points that stand out (to me) within Ellis’s take on the famous Valleyforge Winter of 1777-1778  are critical supply chain problems, the new military talent utilized, the American people’s anti-American economic motives, and the new military strategy eventually embraced by Washington.

Some quotes:

• Recent American experience in Iraq, and our earlier experience in Southeast Asia, shoudl help identify the missing variable in the equation by allowing us to grasp the strategic dilemma confronting British policy-makers in Londong and Whitehall more emphatically than was previously possible.  The earliest articulation of this strategic dilemma appeared in the House of Lords in 1775, when the Earl of Camden, attempting to question the wisdom of George III and Lord North in imposing a military solution on the American rebellion, delivered a prescient warning: “To conquer a great continent of 1,800 miles, containing three millions of people, all indissolubly United on the great Whig bottom of liberty and justice, seems an undertaking not to be rashly engaged in … It is obvious, my lords, that you cannot furnish armies, or treasure, competant to the mighty purpose of subdoing America.” [59]
• [requests by Washington…]  first, all officers who signed up for the duration should receive pensions of half pay for life, and, if they are permanently disabled or killed, their wives and children should be compensated; second, mandatory quotas, in effect a draft, should be imposed on each state in order to assure that the fighting strength of the Continental Army reached its full complement of slightly more than forty-thousand troops.  Washington recognized that both requests … violated the very principles the American Revolution purportedly embodied. But it was the only way to wint he war. And defeat rendered all the republican principles irrelevant. [67]
• The Continental Army purchased supplies with certificates whose value was tied to the vastly inflated Continental currency, making the certificates nearly worthless. The British paid in pounds sterling, a much more reliable medium of exchange. And so their [farmers near Valley Forge] decision to sell to British army was not so much a political statement as it was a wholly rational economic calculation based on self-interest. [74]
• Washington was caught between … confiscating the food that prevented the starvation of his soldiers [but] alienated the very people of the American Revolution … or maintaining his revolutionary principles while watching his army dissolve. … Washington preserved his conscience by insisting that all confiscated crops must be paid for in certificates.  While worthless, they provided a moral balm. [76]
• The two armies were primarily pawns in a struggle for the hearts and minds of ordinary citizens in the countryside, the ultimate battlefield where the conflict would be decided. [81]
• In spite of his instinctive urge to defeat the British army, Washington realized that the most crucial battlefield was elsewhere, out there on the psychological terrain where ordinary Americans were calculating their interests and allegiances. [86]

Also noteworthy: Ellis points out that the meriocratic/non-bloodline/non-aristocratic military system allowed several individuals to rise and flourish in military service (including Washington) that might not have had a chance in tradition-bound Britian.

Chapter Three: The Argument
This chapter chronicles the “the most creative moment in all of American political history,” when the system of central government was created and accepted by the states.  Ellis points out that “none of these players believed wholeheartedly in the constitutional settlement proposed in 1787 and ratified in 1788, which was more the product of painful compromise and elegant improvisation than any pure and sustained argument about political theory.” [90]

One of the most interesting about this period was the ~decade delay to erect a central government from the start/end of the revolutionary war.  I usually lump the creation of the central government in with the declaration of independence … but there is a lot of time (and a lot of fighting) between those two events.  So why did Madison and Washington fight so strongly for a stronger central government rather than the loose affiliation of states through the Articles of Confederation?  After all, “the Articles of Confederation accurately reflected both the ideology that justified the American Revolution as well as the mentality and experience of most American citizens, for whom grand visions of a powerful nation-state with imperial pretensions floated far above their daily lives.” [92]

Washington came to be a nationlist after nearly losing the American Revolution because of an ill-equipped and manned army, and sought a stronger central power to ensure the nation’s military defense.  Madison, on the other hand, had witnessed the poor local democratic decisions in his home state of Virginia (fearmongering, interest group legislation, political scheming) that made him yearn for a stronger and more principled central government. Madison’s revolt at a corrupt democratic state-government fueling a desire for a larger democratic central-government seems quite odd.  But Madison reversed the convential wisdom for close-democracy in a very interesting argument:

The conventional assumption, most famously articulated by Montesquieu, held that republics worked best in small geographic areas, where elected representatives remained close to the interests of citizens who elected them.  […] But Madison had just spent many pages in “Vices” demonstrating that proximity to the electoroate had not produced responsible political behavior by state legislators. Quite the opposite: the overwhelming evidence, as Madison read it, revealed a discernible pattern of gross irresponsibility, a cacophony of shrills voices, a veritable kaleidoscope of local interests with no collective cohesion whatsover.

So Madison reversed the convential logic. Small republics, like the states, were actually more vulnerable to factional squablling and sectarian divisions than large republics, because the larger scale of the enterprise vastly increased the number of competing factions, thereby producing “a greater variety of interests, of passions, which check other … So an extensive Republic meliorates the administration of a small Republic.” [105-106]

Madison is arguing that local interests are stronger within smaller democracies than they would be within larger democracies.  Ellis notes this idea may have come from “Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), where Smith’s analysis of the synergistic balance of the marketplace, surely familiar to Madison, provided an economic version of the idea that Madison might have tranposed to the political arena.” [106]  In some sense, there were economies-of-scale with regard to fairness as democracies grew.

Whether you agree or disagree with that notion, Madison was a talented debater.  “He habitually compensated for his deficiencies as an orator by always being the most fully prepared participant, the kind of frustrating opponent who always had more relevant information at his fingertips and who also somehow understood the logical implications of your argument better than you did.” [101]

Yet despite Madison’s debating prowess, the finished Constitution that was proposed for ratification to the state governments lacked two major qualities that made Madison consider it a failure: “a federal veto [ability] of all state legislation and for proporational representation in both branches of the legislation.” [111]  These two points were, to Madison, crucial, because they allowed the states too much sovereignty. Interestingly, as Madison ventured into the states to muster support for the Constitution, he found these two critical absences, “initially regarded as the fatal weakness of the Constitution gradually grew into its greatest strength.” [113]

Like a politician who must accomodate himself to unwelcomed evidence about public opinion, Madison shifted his ground to become the chief advocate for the very argument he had opposed in Philadelphia: namely, that the Constitution institutionalized a unique form of shared sovereignty. [118]

The June 1788 debate between Patrick Henry and Madison in Virginia, which was critical for ratification as other states followed it, is noted to “lay plausible claim to being the most consequential debate in American history.” [120]  Ellis does an amazing job describing Madison and Henry’s differing styles and specific arguments; those few pages should be required reading for every student of American history.

Chapter Four: The Treaty
This chapter deals with the political struggle surrounding the Native Americans populations that United States citizens were rampantly overrunning at the edges of state borders.  The accepted strategy had been to use gradual demographics to push back the Native Americans. As put by Philip Schuyler: “As our settlements approach their country they must, from the scarcity of game, retire further back, and dispose of their lands, until they dwindle comparatively to nothing, as all savages have done, … when compelled to live within the vicinity of civilized people.” [132]

That approach was generally accepted … except for a few that realized we’d be systematically taking the Native American property, which was something the American Revolution had fought to secure for all.  Henry Knox pestered George Washington that the Constitution gave the President the power to deal with foreign nations (like the Native Americans) and that “It would reflect honor on the new government, were a declarative Law to be passed that hte Indian tribles possess the right of the soil of all lands … and that they are not to be divested thereof but in consequence of fair and bona fide purchases, made under the authority, or with the express approbation of the United States.” [135]  Washington agreed, got Jefferson involved, and began to form a plan.

[sidenote: Ellis notes that Washington created a special commission to negotiate with the Native Americans, which the Constitution required he consent the Senate.  The meetings went badly and, as Ellis puts it: “Washington thanked the Senate, walked out briskly, never returned, and from that moment to the present day “the advice and consent of the Senate” ceased to mean direct presidential consultation.” [141]]

Perhaps the best anecdote of the chatper comes from the actions of Georgia lawmakers:

In January of 1790 the Georgia legislature announched the sale of twenty-four million acres of land to three private companies, collectively called the Yazoo Companies, which claimed control over a vast region now comprising the states of Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi - in other words, all of [Native American] Creek County.  The legal rationale for this sale was the original Georgia charter, which placed the western border of the then colony at the Mississippi River. This inflated claim made perfect sense to most members of the Georgia legislature, who owned shares in this speculative bonanza, making it a thoroughly corrupt and breathtakingly brazen scheme from the start. [149]

And what of the eventual Treaty of New York with Creek Nation that promised them their land and treated them as a foreign nation?  The Georgia settlers simply kept coming and the federal government could not control demographics: “The white American population was doubling every twenty to twenty-five yearsat the same time the Indian population was declining at roughly the same rate. By the last decate of the eighteenth century an ongoing demographic explosion was radiating out from the eastern rim of North America, and the Indian population opposing it was simply outnumbered and overwhelmed. No political effort to contain or control this explosion stood much chance of succes.” [162]

Also: “[The Indian Peace Initiative] had been a top-down affair conceived and planned in the executive branch with little if any consolutation with Congress except for the Senate ratification vote, which had itself happened awkwardly, even comically.  … From Washington’s perspective, only a bold assertion of executive power could put American Indian policy on a republican course. But in the minds of many observers in the Congress and out, such a conspicuous projection of executive power itself violated republican principles and conveyed the distinct odor of monarchy.” [163] 

Anyone care to translate this to modern day issues?

Chapter Five: The Conspiracy 
This chapter deals with the creation of the two political party system now standard in America, with the first difference being the power of the states and the power of the central government.  Ellis makes a great point about politics in general:

One of the ultimate implications of the two-party system that was so hard for most of the founders to accept was the realization that different versions of the truth could coexist alongside one another and both claim, with considerable plausibility, to be true.  Unlike mathematics, in politics there was no agreed-upon solution reached by sheer brainpower and logic, but rather an ongoing and never-ending struggle between contested versions of the truth.

I simply can’t cover all of the ground within this chapter to do it any justice.  Jefferson and Madison create the Republican party to fight the Alexander Hamilton’s creation of a Central Bank, arguing both against the bank and the expansion of federal powers used to create it. Ellis deftly narrates how part of the opposition to the bank by Virginians was based partly in response to Virginia’s economic decline, conspiracy theories about bankers, and simply because “the [Virginian] planters had not the dimmest understanding of what Hamilton was talking about.” Ellis also notes: “One of the distinguishing features of most conspiracy theories is the tendency to personalize what are, in truth, impersonal forces of unwelcomed change. Hamilton and his banking cronies thus became the personification of the reasons for Virginia’s economic decline.” [174]

Ellis is unfortunately light on details of Hamilton’s central bank proposal, only noting that it “represented an effort to restore fiscal stability to an American economy burdened by debt and previously incapable of doing much about it.  The enrichment of a few investors was an extraneous by-product of an economic policy rather brilliantly designed to persuade the international market makers that the United States was not, in modern parlance, a banana republic.” [172] 

All of Madison’s arguments against the Central bank are ironic because Hamilton’s central bank was “also the fullest projection of federal sovereignty over the states, the kind of undiluted statement of wholly national ethos that Madison had not so long ago advocated just as strenously.” [175]  And it came back to get Madison:

In the debate over the bank that raged throughout February of 1791, its opponents, to include both Jefferson and Madison, based their opposition on its unconstitutionality, arguing that Congress possessed only certain enumerated powers, that the power to create a corporation (i.e., the bank) was not one of them, so the bank violated the Tenth Amendement, which reserved all powers to the states not specifically delegated to the federal government.  But the winning argument proved to be Hamilton’s which cited the “necessary and proper” clause of the Constitution (Article I, Section 8 ) to sanction congressional authority as one of the implied powers inherent in the Constituion. Hamilton quoted, almost verbatim, the argument made in Federalist 44, which everyone presumed he had written: “No axiom is more clearly established in law, or in reason, than that wherever a general power to do a thing is given, every particular power necessary for doing it, is included.” [176]

 So what all of this? You simply need to read the rest of the chapter because there is too much to go through.  The creation of the two-parties, America’s siding with Britain rather than France … and so muc more.

Chapter Six: The Purchase
Reading how the success of the Louisiana Purchase was entirely dependent on the indirectly-related uprising of slaves on Santo Domingo against Napolean’s army was quite interesting.  Like every other chapter, it was hugely educational/entertaining.  Or how about this anecdote:

There was then [after the sale of Louisiana to America for $12.5M] the famous bath scene, where Napolean lay in his tub, teh water sprinkled with cologne, when his two brothers came in and accused him of impetuosity in deciding to sell all Louisiana. He lacked the authority to make such a huge decision without consulting the elected representatives of the legislature, they insisted, and when the debate in the legislature began, they intended to side with the opposition. “You will hav eno need to lead the opposition,” Napolean replied, “for I repeat there will be no debate, for the reason that the project … conceived by me, negotiated by me, shall be ratified and executed by me, alone. Do you comprehend me?”

I leave you with that. Go read this book.

[zacknote: reminder that you read most of this book traveling from OAK to BOS for Christmas on Dec 24th, opening the book on the Bart ride out and finishing it on Christmas day.]

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