What Made Us Unique?

Joseph Ellis is probably one of my favorite contemporary writers. He writes about the American founding with great insight and eloquence. I've read several of his books, one on Jefferson, another on Washington and then his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Founding Brothers. His latest book, American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic, just arrived in the mail today. In the prologue, he draws on the contributions of fellow contemporary writers on the founding era and adumbrates four reasons that made the American founding so unique. In a nutshell, here they are:

1. Douglas Adair: The founders were obsessed with their legacy. They spent an exorbitant amount of time and energy editing and polishing their letters and correspondence. To quote Ellis: "They were always on their best behavior because they knew we would be watching." Adair's contribution helps us understand just why the founders have been so revered by successive generations. They were, according to Ellis, continuously "posing for posterity."

2. Gordon Wood: I found his observations extremely insightful and relevant. The founding era was, according to Wood, a congeries of a post-aristocratic and pre-democratic age. One the one hand, the post-aristocratic component of the founding era allowed for Washington, Adams and Hamilton, etc., (men who, in the old world, stood little to no chance of achieving greatness due their to run-of-the-mill, bland blood-lines) to rise meteorically through their own talents and leave their mark on history. The pre-democratic component is even more interesting. Wood argues that the founders belonged to an older age in a sense, because they were not a bunch of sycophants. They instinctively eschewed the fawning over "the people;" a practice very much in vogue today. "Public opinion...was regarded as flighty, undependable, shortsighted, and easily manipulated." The founders were more concerned with "the public," (as opposed to "the people") which had to do with "the long-term interest of the citizenry."

3. Bernard Bailyn: In many respects, it's almost an unanswerable riddle to figure out how such an impressive collection of brain power could manifest itself in a locale that was considered by many in Europe a provincial, lonely backwater of Western Civilization. None of the founders were educated in the esteemed universities of London or Paris and yet, look at what they managed to accomplish! Bailyn turns this perceived disadvantage into a strength. According to Ellis, "Being far removed from the cultural metropolises, which were laden with what Jefferson liked to call 'the dead hand of the past,' the revolutionary generation was freer to question the old self-evident truths and invent their own without fear of offending established sources of power and authority because, in fact, there were none."

4. Joseph Ellis: Ellis perceives another great strength where others may see a weakness; namely, that most of the founders often disagreed vehemently on monumental questions of the day. "The American Revolution never devolved into a one-man despotism that became the sole face of the revolutionary project. Political and personal diversity enhanced creativity by generating a dynamic chemistry. Every major decision...produced a bracing argument among the founders of different persuasions about revolutionary principles. This...replicated the checks and balances of the Constitution with a human version of the same principle." Touching on this point, some may argue, and I tend to agree, that the American Revolution is more appropriately described as The American War for Independence, since the "Revolution" did not seek a dramatic overhaul of the established order of things as did the French, Russian and Chinese Revolutions. The American struggle had much more to do with recovery and revival than revolution. Perhaps it is fair to maintain that the constitutional arrangement, after the war had been won, was revolutionary.