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George. Freakin’. Washington.+ Do you need more?
Well, it’s also about the Freakin’ Thirteen Colonies, their very different personalities, and how they came together to shape not just the U.S., but Great Britain and the monarchy.
This book doesn’t shy away from the evils of the first colonies. It doesn’t whitewash slavery, or the displacement and massacre of the Native Americans*, but it also doesn’t shy away from the good, either. No sugar coating, but without prejudice is a fine line, and Ellis walks the tightrope masterfully.
Here’s the publisher’s blurb:
New York Times Book Review — Editors’ Choice • Chicago Tribune — “60 Best Reads for Right Now” • St. Louis Post-Dispatch — “50 Fall Books You Should Consider Reading”
Challenging conventional wisdom, The Cause offers a “necessary” (John S. Gardner, Guardian) account of the origins and clashing ideologies of America’s revolutionary era.
For Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Joseph J. Ellis, The Cause marks the culmination of a lifetime of engagement with the founding era, completing a trilogy of books that began with Founding Brothers. Here Ellis, countering popular histories that romanticize the “Spirit of ’76,” demonstrates through “evocative profiles of British loyalists, slaves, Native Americans and soldiers uncertain of what was being founded” (Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune) that the rebels fought not for a nation but under the mantle of “The Cause,” a mutable, conveniently ambiguous principle all but destined to give rise to the warring factions of later American history. Combining action-packed tales of North American military campaigns with characteristically trenchant insight, The Cause “deftly foreshadows all the issues that would complicate America’s trajectory” (Richard Stengel, New York Times Book Review), forcing us to finally reconsider the story we have long told ourselves about our origins—as a people, and as a nation.
“At the intersection of his expertise and our need for coherence about our national founding arrives historian Joseph J. Ellis. . . . Ellis is no apologist, but he is a chronicler of the entire revolution, its best aspirations, its worst contradictions, and its ongoing dilemmas.” —Hugh Hewitt, Washington Post
+George Washington is such a brilliant example of the good and the bad. So much contradiction in one person. He was a slave owner, and a blinkered one who couldn’t seem to understand why some of the people he enslaved ran off and joined the British. He also commanded an army angry enough to contemplate moving against Congress—and instead of using that army to seize political power, Washington shut that idea down, resigned his commission, and went home.
*I would really like to know how much of the long-term decline and disappearance of Native communities was “absorption”—either into other Native nations or through intermarriage—versus death from war, displacement, or disease. Disease was obviously an enormous killer after European contact, but I don’t know what the proportions were.
The absorption question is an even larger “known unknown.” We expected to find one Native woman in our family tree—my great-great-grandmother—and instead found about four Native women who had married into the family. Interestingly, the relatives in my mother’s generation who have taken DNA tests show no detectable Native ancestry, even though those women appear in the documented family tree. Another branch has rumored Native heritage, but the knowledge died with my great-grandfather, and we haven’t been able to retrace it.