Quotes from Joseph J. Ellis

Only ten years after the passage and ratification 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 Republicians alike were afloat in a sea of mutual accusations and partisan interpretations. The center could not hold necausemit did not exist.

The Adams presidency, in fact, might be the classic example of the historical truism that inherited circumstances define the parameters within which presidential leadership takes shape, that history shapes presidents, rather than vice versa.

He became preoccupied with the inevitable limits imposed by time and circumstance. In short, his nationalistic ideology began to be affected by his personal frustration, his increasing fatalism, and the sense that his time was running out.

Though we might wish otherwise, the history of what might have been is usually not really history at all, mixing together as it does the messy tangle of past experience with the clairvoyant certainty of our present preferences.

Keep in mind that the past is not history, but a much vaster region of the dead, gone, unknowable, or forgotten. History is what we choose to remember.

But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans—we are all federalists.

In truth, it would be misleading to say that local and state concerns trumped the national interest, because in most minds no such thing as the national interest even existed.

Brother, wrote one Cherokee chief, we give up to our white brothers all the land we could any how spare, and have but little left...and we hope you won't let any people take any more from us without our consent. We are neither birds nor fish; we can neither fly in the air nor live under water.... We are made by the same hand and in the same shape as yourselves.

Having now finished the work assigned me," Washington solemnly said, "I retire from the great theatre of Action. . . . I here offer my Commission, and take my leave of all the enjoyments of public life." The man who had known how to stay the course now showed that he also understood how to leave it. Horses were waiting at the door immediately after Washington read his statement. The crowd gathered at the doorway to wave him off. It was the greatest exit in American history.

Of course Peale himself did not believe that he was imposing his order on chaos, but rather discovering the order that already existed. Creativity, originality, and virtuosity were not appropriate goals for him, because he saw himself as a recorder of the prevailing unity and order reigning in the universe.

The emergence of an early form of democratic politics had not yet reached that stage of development. It was still considered unbecoming for a serious statesman to prostitute his integrity by a direct appeal to voters.79

In the late spring of 1781 word arrived in Philadelphia of some grand European conclave, led by France, Russia and Austria, that purportedly intended to put an end to the war and impose a peace based on the current state of forces.

It has endured not because it embodies timeless truths that the founders fathomed as tongues of fire danced over their heads, but because it manages to combine the two time-bound truths of its own time: namely, that any legitimate government must rest on a popular foundation, and that popular majorities cannot be trusted to act responsibly, a paradox that has aged remarkably well.

ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever.

You could look back and, with the advantage of hindsight, locate the moment when the tide began to turn in the 1960s. In 1963 Leonard Levy published Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side, which, as its title announced, found Jefferson's record as a liberal defender

He was a literate but not a well-read man. Adams had gone to Harvard, Jefferson to William and Mary, but Washington had gone to war, meaning that his education possessed a more primal quality that aligned itself nicely with his commanding physical presence.

The five Pillars of Aristocracy," he argued, "are Beauty, Wealth, Birth, Genius and Virtues. Any one of the three first, can at any time, over bear any one or both of the two last.

American literary culture proved to be less like an explosion that went off with the Revolution than a tender plant that required over fifty years of cultivation before it blossomed.

Ordinary British soldiers harbored several strange preconceptions of their own. Some were surprised that the colonists wore clothes, thinking they would dress like Indians. Other had expected to encounter roving bands of wild animals in the manner of African jungles. And when a loyalist came aboard one ship to help it into port, the British crew and troops were dumbfounded. All the People had been of the Opinion, they exclaimed, that the inhabitants of America were black.

Mr. Henry had without a doubt the greatest power to persuade, [but] Mr. Madison had the great power to convince.

I am not a Federalist, because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever. . . . Such an addiction is the last degredation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.

Almost every other American statesman might be described in a parenthesis," Adams observed. "A few broad strokes of the brush would paint the portraits of all the early Presidents with this exception . . . , but Jefferson could be painted only touch by touch, with a fine pencil, and the perfection of the likeness depended upon the shifting and uncertain flicker of its semi-transcendent shadows.

There is no question that Washington wanted the newly independent United States to become a republic in which consensus rather than coercion was the central political value. But he wanted that republic to cohere as a union rather than as a confederation of sovereign states. In his capacity as commander in chief, he could testify that the confederation model nearly lost the war. And if it persisted in its current form, he believed that it would lose the peace.

At the public level, Morris's chief task was to restore the credit of the United States government. (Actually, restore is not right, since nothing had existed beforehand to be restored.)