"The Great Contradiction," Joseph J. Ellis

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

Joseph J. Ellis

November 22, 2025

 

“Alongside their impressive achievements, the founding generation failed

to reach a just accommodation with the Native American population, and

failed to end slavery or, more realistically, put it on the road to extinction.”

                                                                                                                                Joseph J. Ellis (1943-)

                                                                                                                                The Great Contradiction, 2025

 

In addressing the two situations that violated the ideals stated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, Professor Ellis (retired now and living in Vermont) has done us a favor. In his foreword he wrote that he would leave it to the reader as to whether this was a Greek tragedy, by which he means “inevitable and unavoidable,” or whether it was “Shakespearian,” “a product of inadequate leadership rooted in moral blindness” and thus avoidable.

 

We are reminded that it was not a democracy – a term then associated with demagoguery – that the Founders created, a government not of “the people,” but rather one for “the public,” where the “public interest was the equivalent to the long-term interest of the people, a concept not understood by a majority, “mostly because they were born, lived their lives, and died within a three-hour horse ride.”

 

Professor Ellis, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Founding Brothers, provides, via correspondence and letters, portraits of John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, and somewhat longer vignettes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both slave owners, and Alexander McGillivray, chief of the Creek Nation. 

 

Two thirds of the book deals with slavery, which, while concentrated in Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas, was existent in all states in 1790 except Maine and Massachusetts, despite rising voices in the north calling for abolition. The remaining third speaks to the forced movement west of Native Americans. The Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War, provided the new country with all the land from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and from Canada to Spanish-held Florida. Yet three-quarters of that land was inhabited by Native Americans. Despite a series of treaties between the United States and various Indian Nations, demography proved to be destiny, as pioneers pushed west.

 

This is an important book, as the author tackles a sensitive subject with reason and sensitivity. While Professor Ellis does not provide the reader, overtly, his personal feelings as to what type of tragedy was incurred with the failure to address slavery and with the forced removal of Native Americans from their historic hunting grounds, one is left with the sense that a United States would never have been created without accommodating the desires of slave owners – as immoral and antithetical to the concept of liberty as they were – and with allowing the inevitable move west of an ever-expanding immigrant and pioneer people. The United States “would have remained a confederation of sovereign states...”

 

This reader finished the book, with sense that the tragedy was unavoidable, but further impressed by the fortune that we, as Americans today, had in our Founders, imperfect as they were.