Preface - The Generation

This initial chapter summarizes Ellis's take on the period after the American Revolution. Here's a key passage:

The creation of a separate American nation occurred suddenly rather than gradually, in revolutionary rather than evolutionary fashion. . . [It was] an improvisational affair in which sheer chance, pure luck -- both good and bad -- and specific decisions made in the crucible of specific military and political crises determined the outcome.

He also says that the United States was "founded on a contradiction" and is still engaged in on-going debate that has yet to be resolved.

. . . the revolutionary generation found a way to contain the explosive energies of the debate in the form of an ongoing argument or dialogue that was eventually institutionalized and rendered safe by the creation of political parties. And the subsequent political history of the United States then became an oscillation between new versions of the old tension, which broke out in violence only on the occasion of the Civil War. In its most familiar form . . .  [it is seen] as a conflict between state and federal sovereignty. 

When you consider the current "polarization" of the political process, you might wonder how much longer the two party system will be able to contain the "explosive energies" of this ongoing argument.

Historians also seem caught up in this argument as they attempt to summarize the early history of the republic.  One version is known as the "pure republicanism" interpretation or the "Jeffersonian interpretation."

It depicts the American Revolution as a liberation movement, a clean break not just from English domination but also from the historic corruption of European monarch and aristocracy. The ascendence of the Federalists to power in the 1790s thus becomes a hostile takeover of the Revolution by corrupt courtiers and moneymen (Hamilton is the chief culprit), which is eventually defeated and the true spirit of the Revolution recovered by the triumph of the Republicans in the elections of 1800.

The alternate verison "sees the American Revolution as an incipient national movement with deep, if latent, origins in the colonial era."

The constitutional settlement of 1787-1788 thus becomes the natural fulfillment of the Revolution and the leaders of the Federalist party in the 1790s -- Adams, Hamilton, and, most significantly, Washington -- as the true heirs of the revolutionary legacy. (Jefferson is the culprit.) The core revolutionary principle in this view is collectivistic rather than individualistic, for it sees the true spirit of '76 as the virtuous surrender of personal, state, and sectional interests to the larger purposes of American nationhood, first embodied in the Continental Army and later in the newly established federal government.

No matter what the interpretation, the fact is the original colonies achieved nationhood. Not only that, but they managed to create a democratic republic on a large scale -- something that had never been done before. How the Founding Fathers did it is the question Ellis explores in his series of stories about them, starting with the famous duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr.