American Creation Quotes

“Hindsight history, sometimes call counterfactual history, is usually not history at all, but most often a condescending game of oneupmanship in which the living play political tricks on the dead, who are not around to defend themselves.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic

“creation: “If I could not go to heaven but with a party,” proclaimed Thomas Jefferson, “I would not go there at all.”1”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Creation

“how could a government founded on the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence, which stigmatized the arbitrary and coercive policies of the British Empire, then proceed to behave just as imperiously toward the original occupants of American soil as the British had acted toward them? More tellingly, did not the treatment of the Indian population constitute an obvious acid test of the republican values the American Revolution claimed to stand for?”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Creation

“responsible statesmen needed to make a fundamental choice: “We are either a United people, or we are not. If the former, let us, in all matters of general concern act as a nation, which have national objects to promote and a National character to support—If we are not, let us no longer act a farce by pretending to it.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Creation

“Both sides had legitimate claims to historical truth. Both sides harbored the sincere conviction that they spoke for the deepest impulses of the American Revolution. That awkward fact should serve as the bipartisan starting point for any genuinely detached effort at grasping the messy and shifting meanings of the American Revolution after independence was won.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Creation

“It would be lovely if we were writing a story about Washington’s capacity to recognize wisdom when it was offered. At later moments in his military and political career that story would be true. But in this instance he digested the written recommendations from all his general officers and decided he could not make a decision.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Creation

“In the countryside around Valley Forge it became clear for the first time that the American Revolution, while still and always a struggle for independence, was also now a civil war for the hearts and minds of the American people. And the two contests were closely connected.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Creation

“The American founding was a collective enterprise with multiple players who harbored fundamentally different beliefs about what the American Revolution meant. Adams and Jefferson went to their graves arguing with each other about what they had actually founded and how they had somehow done it. Unlike the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions, or the scores of Third World revolutions in the twentieth century, the American Revolution never devolved into a one-man despotism—Napoleon, Lenin/Stalin, Mao—that became the sole face of the revolutionary project. The American founding was, and still is, a group portrait.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Creation

“The operative question when discussing the American founding has become not “How did it happen?” but “How did they do it?”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Creation

“It is uncommon for the same men who make a revolution also to secure it.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic