The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding - Hardcover

Ellis, Joseph J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593801415 ISBN 13: 9780593801413

Verlag: Random House Inc, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A major new history from our most trusted voice on the Revolutionary era, the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Founding Brothers and the National Book Award winner American Sphinx, and featured in THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, a film by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt, on PBS.

An astounding look at how America’s founders—Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Adams—regarded the issue of slavery as they drafted the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. A daring and important work that ultimately reckons with the two great failures of America’s founding: the failure to end slavery and the failure to avoid Indian removal.

On the eve of the American Revolution, half a million enslaved African Americans were embedded in the North American population. The slave trade was flourishing, even as the thirteen colonies armed themselves to defend against the idea of being governed without consent. This paradox gave birth to what one of our most admired historians, Joseph J. Ellis, calls the “great contradiction”: How could a government that had been justified and founded on the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence institutionalize slavery? How could it permit a tidal wave of western migration by settlers who understood the phrase “pursuit of happiness” to mean the pursuit of Indian lands?

With narrative grace and a flair for irony and paradox, Ellis addresses the questions that lie at America’s twisted roots—questions that turned even the sharpest minds of the Revolutionary generation into mental contortionists. He discusses the first debates around slavery and the treatment of Native Americans, from the Constitutional Convention to the Treaty of New York, revealing the thinking and rationalizations behind Jay, Hamilton, and Madison’s revisions of the Articles of Confederation, and highlights the key role of figures like Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet and Creek chief Alexander McGillivray.

Ellis writes with candor and deftness, his clarion voice rising above presentist historians and partisans who are eager to make the founders into trophies in the ongoing culture wars. Instead, Ellis tells a story that is rooted in the coexistence of grandeur and failure, brilliance and blindness, grace and sin.

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JOSEPH J. ELLIS is the author of many works of American history, including Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, which won the National Book Award. He lives on Hawk Mountain, in Plymouth County, with his wife and two labradoodles

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Part I

Overviews

F

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (1945)

To despise slaves as Negroes was redundant, but when Negroes were no longer slaves they became despicable as Negroes. The spate of manumissions after the Revolution tended to heighten the white man’s distaste for Negroes as such. Certainly no one wanted them around.

—winthrop d. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968)

Chapter 1

An American Dilemma

Why increase the sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding all blacks and tawneys, of increasing the lovely white and red? But perhaps I am partial to the complexion of my Country, for such kind of partiality is natural to Mankind.

—Benjamin Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind (1751)

If historians were asked to identify the greatest human tragedies of all time, the Holocaust would probably top the list, for reasons both powerful and plausible. In a short period of time, between six and seven million Jews were exterminated in Central and Eastern Europe. Unlike the higher mortality rates caused by plagues and pandemics, the Holocaust was a man-made event, a systematic program of unspeakable brutality conducted by otherwise civilized human beings.

A century before the Holocaust happened, the future prime minister of Great Britain Henry Palmerston provided his own answer to the same question: “If all the crimes which the human race has committed from the creation down to the present day were added together in one vast aggregate . . . ,” he observed in 1844, “they would scarcely equal . . . the amount of guilt which has been incurred by mankind in connection with this diabolical slave trade.”

Palmerston was describing the Atlantic Slave Trade, also a systematic program of unspeakable brutality conducted by otherwise civilized human beings. But it was a much-longer-term tragedy, lasting for four centuries—roughly speaking, from 1460 to 1860. And it was, if you will, a sin committed by multiple nations, including Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and the United States. And for that very reason, it enjoyed long-standing and broad-gauged acceptance; nothing akin to the Nuremburg Trials occurred to judge and condemn the prominent slave traders. Great Britain did its penance by becoming the most ardent enforcer of laws against the slave trade on the high seas during the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

Almost four centuries earlier, Portugal had laid the foundation for the Atlantic Slave Trade, primarily because the superior design of Portuguese ships permitted captains to sail against the wind and down the western coast of Africa. Europe was “discovering” Africa at the same time it was “discovering” the Americas. Initially, the dominant presumption was that enslaved Native Americans would become a labor force for European nations. Instead, enslaved Africans became the labor force for European colonies in the Americas.

Portugal established the framework: coastal harbors from Senegal to Angola; inland routes, usually along rivers, reaching five hundred miles into the African interior; contracts with African tribal chiefs, who provided the human captives for a price that, on average, was less than half the price the enslaved Africans would fetch in Brazil. Everyone prospered: the Lisbon investors; the Portuguese government, which took a percentage of the profits; the merchant class; the African chiefs. The only losers were the enslaved Africans. Several papal bulls offered assurance that the suffering that Africans endured as slaves was more than justified by the eternal life in heaven they would enjoy as converts to Christianity.

Over time, first the Spanish, then the French, then the British stepped into the African marketplace that the Portuguese had created. Although the word “capitalism” had not yet entered the lexicon, the Atlantic Slave Trade flourished for one elemental reason: it was the most lucrative investment available for Europe’s merchants, bankers, and landed aristocracy. And until late in the game—the middle years of the eighteenth century—one would be hard-pressed to hear any criticism of such a flourishing enterprise. Moral blindness made eminent economic sense.

If demography is destiny, the Atlantic Slave Trade transformed the destiny of the entire Western Hemisphere. Between 1500 and 1800, five times as many Africans as Europeans were carried to the New World. Thanks largely to the recent work of British historians, who have created a digital database that provides the most accurate account ever assembled of the African diaspora, we now know much more precisely the scale and size of the Atlantic Slave Trade and where the enslaved Africans ended up.

Between 1550 and 1860, European vessels embarked with 12.5 million African captives and landed 10.7 million in the New World. During the notorious Middle Passage, 1.8 million enslaved Africans died from some combination of disease, malnutrition, mistreatment, and suicide. Of the 10.7 million survivors, 4.8 million went to South America, 4.7 million went to the Caribbean, 800,000 went to Central America, and 400,000 went to North America. (An additional 60,000 entered North America indirectly from the British West Indies.) In effect, only a small percentage of the enslaved Africans, about 4 percent, were deposited in the future United States.

As a result, the Southern Hemisphere was destined to become a multiracial society including a population with African origins. The Northern Hemisphere was destined to become a predominantly white society with a substantial African minority. The term “African” is somewhat misleading, since the enslaved black population identified as Ashanti, Ebo, Igbo, Congolese, or other tribal affiliations, each with its own language, religion, and customs. In his monumental African Founders, David Hackett Fischer has documented in considerable detail the ways in which the different tribal origins of the enslaved population generated regional differences in the shape slavery assumed within the future United States.

For obvious reasons, the vast majority of enslaved Africans were imported into the British colonies of North America only after Great Britain assumed domination of the Atlantic Slave Trade in the late seventeenth century. On the eve of the American Revolution, there were five hundred thousand slaves of African origin in the mainland British colonies—20 percent of the total population. Though the slave trade was still booming, a majority of the enslaved population were second- or third-generation residents, for whom Africa was a distant memory and English the dominant language. They had become African Americans, a term that entered the lexicon in 1782. For that reason, when the plan to reverse the diaspora and resettle the emancipated slaves in Africa became a condition for emancipation, very few of the African Americans were willing to go voluntarily.

The accompanying map describes the distribution of African Americans in the American colonies on the eve of independence. Approximately 10 percent of the black population lived in New England or the Middle Colonies, where most but not all were enslaved. The remaining 90 percent lived south of the Chesapeake, from Maryland to Georgia. Virginia was the largest colony with the highest number of enslaved African Americans, constituting 40 percent of the population. The number in South Carolina was smaller, though enslaved Blacks constituted 60 percent of the population. In Tidewater Virginia and coastal South Carolina, Blacks...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593801415
• ISBN 13: 9780593801413
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland