Quotes from Joseph J Ellis

If Jefferson seemed predestined to tell people what they wanted to hear, Adams now acknowledged that his own destiny was just the opposite: to tell them what they needed to know.

To be sure, the Dickinson Draft has always been a tortured document that leaned toward a state-majority confederation. And it was always clear that the vast majority of Americans did not regard the war for Independence as a movement for American nationhood, to the extent they gave the matter any thought at all.

Only ten years after the passage of the Constitution, however, what were treasonable or seditious acts remained blurry and more problematic judgments without the historical sanction that only experience could provide. Lacking a consensus on what the American Revolution had intended and what the Constitution had settled, Federalists and Republicans alike were afloat in a sea of mutual accusations and partisan interpretations. The center could not hold because it did not exist.