The Great Contradiction Quotes

“Virginia was consciously choosing to continue its downward spiral as an economic and cultural backwater, where the planter class, like Jefferson, would die bankrupt, where the white working class refused to work, with the uplifting idea of a Virginia Dynasty just a bygone memory.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“On the Indian side, it is also difficult to imagine a more capable and shrewder leader than McGillivray. He played the cards that were dealt him as deftly as possible. Though unscrupulous in the realpolitik sense of the term, he was incorruptible whenever the fate of the Creek Nation was at stake, and his combination of pure intelligence, diplomatic agility, and sheer audacity made him the most effective Indian leader of his time. Looking back with all the advantages of hindsight, McGillivray remains the most impressive Indian leader we might have handpicked to avert the tragedy.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“Knox was arguing that the prevailing policy of the United States toward Native Americans was nothing less than a direct repudiation of the values embodied in the American Revolution.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“It would reflect honor on the new government,” Knox observed, “were a declarative Law to be passed that the Indian tribes possess the right of the soil of all lands…and that they are not to be divested thereof but in consequence of fair and bona fide purchases, made under the authority, or with the express approbation of the United States.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“When the chiefs of the Ohio tribes expressed their willingness to negotiate concerning lands south of the Ohio River, the American commissioners corrected them: “We claim the country by conquest; and you are to give not to receive.” It was a take-it-or-leave-it proposition in which the Indians surrendered a portion of their tribal lands or faced war with the United States.[”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“Put simply, how could a republic be an empire? More specifically, 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?”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“The arrogance of this Eurocentric approach was matched only by its ignorance, since most of the European diplomats would have been hard-pressed to distinguish the Appalachians from the Rockies or the Mississippi from the Potomac.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“Ultimate power lay with those white settlers streaming over the Appalachians into Indian Country, a relentless tide that swept all treaties, promises, excellent intentions, and moral considerations to the far banks of history”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“Next to the failure to end slavery, or at least put it on the road to extinction, the inability to reach a just accommodation with the Native Americans was the greatest failure of the revolutionary generation.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“Knox put it most succinctly: “Indians being the prior occupants of the rights of the soil…to dispossess them…would be a gross violation of the fundamental Laws of Nature and of that distributive Justice which is the glory of a nation.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“Under the Articles of Confederation, Indian policy had been an incoherent blend of federal and state jurisdictions, with a gloss of reassuring rhetoric that covered a crude reality of outright confiscation.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“several nails were hammered into the coffin of abolition over the next twenty years: the Haitian insurrection (1791–93); the cotton gin (1794); the domination of the presidency by the Virginia Dynasty, all defenders of states’ rights over domestic policy (1800–1824); the Missouri Compromise (1820).”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“the census of 1790 provided unmistakable evidence that those antislavery advocates who believed that the future was on their side were deluding themselves. The slave population was now approaching seven hundred thousand, up from five hundred thousand in 1776.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“The badge of mourning the members of the House agreed to wear also bore testimony to the now tragic fate awaiting more than three generations of enslaved African Americans, and to what must be judged the greatest failure of the revolutionary generation.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“Whatever window of opportunity had existed to complete the most glaring piece of unfinished business in the revolutionary era was now closed. But the debate itself did not die. It moved from the political arena to the churches, where slavery would come under scrutiny as a sin requiring a national purging, and where the oral debate would not be burdened by realistic political considerations about the possible dismemberment of the emerging American republic. From a purely moral perspective, if that was the price to pay for salvation, so be”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“in 1833, Daniel Webster cited the same precedent: “My opinion is that Congress has no authority to interfere in the emancipation of slaves. This was resolved by the House in 1790, and I do not know of a different opinion since.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“The debate began when Thomas Scott of Pennsylvania acknowledged that the Constitution imposed restrictions on Congress’s power to end the slave trade but said nothing whatsoever about abolishing slavery itself.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“How does it appear in the sight-of-heaven,” wrote Reverend Samuel Hopkins of Newport, “that these States, who have been fighting for liberty, cannot agree in any political constitution unless it indulge and authorize them to enslave their fellow men.”[11]”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“The ratification debate, then, was a hydra-headed monster that exposed the counterintuitive fact that Alexander Hamilton had foreseen much earlier: no such thing as American nationhood existed, so it had to be created by establishing a national government that gradually forced itself on an otherwise provincial population.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“If any person bound to serve or labor in any of the U. States shall not be discharged from such service or from which they escape, they shall be delivered to the person justly claiming their service or labor.[43] The proposal passed unanimously, without debate. It not only explicitly endorsed slavery, but also required those states where slavery had been abolished to become explicitly complicitous in holding slaves in bondage.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“Not content to condemn slavery as “a moral travesty,” Morris compared the burgeoning economies of the northern states with “the misery and poverty which overspread the barren wastes of Virginia and the other states having slaves.” As far as the slave trade was concerned, Morris found it impossible to understand “the inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina who goes to the coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity, tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondage.” His two-hour speech was greeted with dead silence. Morris had torn the lid off Pandora’s box.[39]”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“As much as or more than any other feature of the Constitution, the thought process that produced the Electoral College exposed the fact that the word “democracy” was an epithet throughout the founding era, not quite as dangerous as “monarchy,” or nearly as explosive as “slavery,” but nevertheless troubling for its sinister and seductive appeal to gullible majorities.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“Historians can argue convincingly that the founders failed to make the Constitution a document with clear antislavery implications, and David Waldstreicher has done just that with impressive mastery of the available evidence. The only problem with this morally correct approach is that no document that met our modern-day standard of social justice—in effect, any document that refused to make compromises with the slave states of the deep south—could ever have been passed or ratified. Which in turn meant that the United States would have remained a confederation of sovereign states, precisely the political framework adopted by the Confederate States of America in 1861.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“The most provocative feature of Hamilton’s resolution was its claim that, since a national mentality did not exist, the only way to generate a population capable of “thinking Continentally” was to impose a national government on them, whether they wanted it or not.[8]”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“There were two glaring omissions in this otherwise uplifting vision: first, the presence of an indigenous population whose rights to their ancestral lands could not be ignored without violating the consensual values of The Cause; second, the sectional split between northern and southern states over slavery, already quite discernible, which rendered conflict over the incoming territories more than likely.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“He was not numb to the larger moral issues at stake, but such concerns still floated above the palpable and almost primal conviction that his slaves belonged to him.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“Blacks could be bartered as slaves, but not freed as soldiers”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“the nonnegotiable moral principles of The Cause were forced to negotiate with the political realities of a divided electorate of white voters.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

“Johnson delivered his most famous line: “Why is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?”
― Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding