As Ellis writes in “The Cause,” there was always far more emphasis on pluribus than unum, on the many rather than the one. Ellis, show how this experiment in republican self-government almost didn’t happen.
In these two masterly works, the great historians of America’s Revolutionary era, Gordon S.
America could have very easily looked like a bigger, more dysfunctional European Union. For the 13 states at the time of the Revolution - mini-nations that had their own currencies, their own foreign policies, their own navies - the quest for independence was not just freedom from an imperial Britain, but independence from one another. In fact, the path to the nation as we know it, with a powerful executive, a representative legislature and an independent judiciary, was highly implausible. There was nothing inevitable about the creation of the United States - the United States, singular, that is, a continental nation-state with a central government, rather than these United States, plural, a collection of small, quarrelsome quasi republics connected by a weak treaty of friendship. Ellis POWER AND LIBERTY Constitutionalism in the American Revolution By Gordon S.
THE CAUSE The American Revolution and Its Discontents By Joseph J.
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