The Contradictions of 1776

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June 10, 2026

Banquo’s Ghost

The contradictions of the American Revolution.

From the outset the United States was founded to protect both freedom and slavery.

A depiction of the tarring and feathering of a British Customs commissioner in Boston. (Getty Images)

Joseph J. Ellis is one of the most celebrated historians in the nation. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize and once the holder of an endowed chair at Mount Holyoke, he was hailed by The Washington Post as the “most widely read scholar of the Revolutionary period and…probably the most influential as well.” His best-selling books on Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and other founders have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and have been instrumental in forging a remarkable consensus, from left to right, that sees July 4, 1776, as a sacred date and a great leap forward for all of humanity.

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The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

by Joseph J. Ellis

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But in his latest book, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding , Ellis reconsiders the essence of his oeuvre and this consensus, which is akin to the pope reconsidering Catholicism. Focusing “on two unquestionably horrific tragedies the founders oversaw”—the “failure to end slavery, and the failure to avoid Indian removal”—Ellis seeks to understand how and why they happened. “Next to the failure to end slavery,” he writes, the “inability to reach a just accommodation with the Native Americans was the greatest failure of the revolutionary generation.” Charting not only the history of the republic’s founders but also the history that preceded and followed them, he outlines what he terms the “Great Silence”: “For more than four centuries, the most important voices of Western civilization remained mute as a highly organized program of unspeakable barbarity with genocidal implications flourished throughout Europe. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Aquinas, Erasmus, Locke, and all the Catholic popes regarded slavery and the slave trade as acceptable features of European society.”

Why has Ellis chosen at this late date to break from the pack of rationalizers and justifiers? The antics of the 47th US president and his avid followers have clearly left him shaken, but more than that: They point to a pattern, “an inherently paradoxical pattern,” that “racism surges only after some semblance of racial equality becomes foreseeable,” which Ellis now believes runs throughout this nation’s history. It began, he notes, “during the American founding,” and “we are currently living through its most recent manifestation in the movement to ‘Make America Great Again.’”

Ellis does not expand on this explosive point, but he concedes that the late Edmund Morgan, one of his mentors, got it right, particularly in his trailblazing American Slavery, American Freedom , which argues that these polar opposites were there from the outset. Much like Macbeth and Banquo’s ghost, Ellis concedes, the nation cannot evade the tragedy preordained at its founding.

To begin his story, Ellis starts with the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade, which accelerated as the settlers landed on these shores and was “growing exponentially” in the prelude to 1776. He observes cogently that “creating a [multiracial] society” was not as pressing a concern in the imperial capitals as it was here. Abolition would have created such a nation, and this was inconceivable for most of the founders, he suggests. Likewise, he presents the expropriation of the Indigenous as being virtually inevitable, given the pressure from below of land-hungry settlers.

Throughout his account, Ellis continually reminds us that without a compromise favoring the enslavers, the republic would not have materialized—to which I say: So what? This could have meant another Canada, a pleasing alternative to the war-driven status quo. He also explores the central paradox found in the fact that the republic depended on the labor of enslaved workers, one that Morgan had put at the center of his own work—namely that, as Ellis writes, “the presence of an enslaved black population actually enhanced the commitment to freedom by the white population of Virginia…. Less prominent Virginians were spared the task of performing manual labor, since enslaved blacks filled that role, thereby allowing all white Virginians to unite racially instead of being divided into upper and lower classes, as was the case in England and throughout Europe.”

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A corrupt bargain indeed: a republic born out of enslaving many so that some could profit and be free. Naturally, such a society would engender enormous instability. Enslavers, and those who admired them, Ellis writes, “were sitting atop an active volcano on the verge of eruption…especially in the Tidewater [Virginia] counties, where Blacks outnumbered Whites three to one.”

Virginia was the California of the founding, the largest and most prosperous settlem…