THE QUARTET
Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789
Joseph J Ellis
Alfred A Knopf
290 pages; $27.95
More than two centuries after the ratification of the Constitution, the historian Joseph J Ellis writes in his absorbing new book, The Quartet, "a mystic haze has formed" around that document. Much as he captured the human beings behind the marble masks of the founders in earlier books, so he examines here the contingent roles that fortune, visionary ideals and pragmatic politics all played in forging a framework for the fledgling nation, a set of ideas and institutions that would become a model of representative government.
Although several delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia of 1787 would later recall that "the hand of Providence" was at work, Mr Ellis reports, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison "all left town thinking they had failed to transform a confederation" of 13 quarrelling colonies - which had come together to win independence from Britain - "into a full-blooded nation."
This is well-trod ground, of course. It is territory reconnoitered by Mr Ellis himself in more than a half-dozen books, including vibrant portraits of Washington (His Excellency), Jefferson (American Sphinx) and Adams (Passionate Sage), as well as acute meditations on the Revolutionary era (Founding Brothers, American Creation). Mr Ellis does an adroit job here of repurposing earlier material, and uses his easy familiarity with the era to give readers a wonderfully immediate and gripping account of the founders' efforts to transform the freedom won in the war for independence into an enduring nationhood.
If Mr Ellis hops and skips at times over some details, The Quartet still offers the lay reader a compelling overview of the walk-up to the Constitutional Convention and its momentous impact for generations to come. This book could not be more timely, given the recent Supreme Court rulings on gay marriage and health care, and debates over the meaning of the Constitution. It will also convince readers that Hamilton - the nation's first treasury secretary and one of its most prescient economic policy makers - should not be pushed from the $10 bill.
At the same time, Mr Ellis's intimate knowledge of these four men enables him to dramatically show the roles that personality and individual decisions played in ensuring that 13 colonies became "We the People of the United States": from Washington's indispensable leadership in fighting for his vision of the new country to Madison's savvy as a political tactician and strategist to Hamilton's fiscal wisdom and shrewd understanding that "Americans needed to think continentally" to Jay's diplomatic skills and ambitions for the country's western expansion.
As Mr Ellis makes abundantly clear, the deck initially seemed stacked against the nationalists: the Revolution had been fought against the distant authority of Britain, and it was presumed by many, Mr. Ellis writes, that any national government "would represent a domestic version of Parliament, too removed from the interests and experiences of the American citizenry to be trusted."
The driving force for national unity had been the war, and afterward, Mr Ellis observes, the dominant historical forces "were centrifugal rather than centripetal, meaning that the vast majority of citizens had no interest in American nationhood, indeed, they regarded the very idea of a national government as irrelevant to their local lives and ominously reminiscent of the British leviathan they had recently vanquished." A "historically informed prophet" of the day, he writes, would have predicted North America becoming "a western version of Europe, a constellation of rival political camps and countries, all jockeying for primacy."
So how was this averted? As Mr Ellis sees it, the elite quartet of Washington, Hamilton, Madison and Jay not only understood the limitations of the Articles of Confederation (which provided no coherent means of defining foreign policy or settling western land disputes) but also exercised extraordinary leadership in bringing to fruition their alternate vision, or something close to it. He writes that they deftly "manipulated the political process to force a calling of the Constitutional Convention"; collaborated on setting the agenda in Philadelphia; and helped orchestrate the debates in the state ratifying conventions (creating an up or down vote, which took the option of revising the Articles off the table).
Mr Ellis does not try to impose contemporary values on members of the founding generation, but rather assesses their actions within the context of their day and the political realities they faced. Concessions made to the Deep South over slavery, he writes, "appear horrific to our eyes," but without them, "the Constitution almost certainly could never have come into existence."
What the founders did not want, says Mr Ellis (taking on judges and scholars fixated on "original intent"), was to be embalmed, or to have their prescriptions taken as sacred script. He closes his book with words from Thomas Jefferson: "Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I know that age well; I belonged to it and labored with it. It deserved well of its country ...
"But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind."
© The New York Times News Service 2015
