Description
Book SynopsisGeorge Washington claimed that anyone who attempted to provide an accurate account of the war for independence would be accused of writing fiction. At the time, no one called it the “American Revolution”: former colonists still regarded themselves as Virginians or Pennsylvanians, not Americans, while John Adams insisted that the British were the real revolutionaries, for attempting to impose radical change without their colonists’ consent.
With The Cause, Ellis takes a fresh look at the events between 1773 and 1783, recovering a war more brutal than any in American history save the Civil War and discovering a strange breed of “prudent” revolutionaries, whose prudence proved wise yet tragic when it came to slavery, the original sin that still haunts America. Written with flair and drama, The Cause brings together a cast of familiar and forgotten characters who, taken together, challenge the story we have long told ourselves about our origins as a people and a nation.
Trade Review"
The Cause comes across as a special gift, the book the author most wanted to write to the reader from the great scholar." -- Robert S. Davis - The New York Review of Books
"Masterly... [Ellis] deftly foreshadows all the issues that would complicate America’s trajectory and ends with a historical cliffhanger: Would the Republic survive? It did, but only when the Constitution became the embodiment of The Cause....Can America be truly great if we are built on a foundation that includes slavery?... [Ellis] would say that while the Constitution contains that terrible defect, it also contains the cure for democracy’s wrongs — if we choose to use it." -- Richard Stengel - The New York Times Book Review
"No one would accuse Joseph J. Ellis of making history dull. He is a masterly story-teller." -- T. H. Breen - The Times Literary Supplement
