The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

This chapter argues that the popular, romanticized image of the Revolutionary War, shaped by artists like John Trumbull, obscures the conflict’s brutal realities and the essential role of African Americans. The racially integrated American army is often overlooked; for instance, 150 Black soldiers fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Although George Washington initially barred Black men from enlisting, manpower shortages forced him to reverse his decision. By the war’s end, African Americans comprised slightly more than 10% of the Continental Army; Ellis notes that Black and white soldiers would not again serve together in integrated American combat units until the Korean War.

In 1775, Lord Dunmore, Virginia’s recently exiled royal governor, sought to exploit Virginia’s vulnerability to its large enslaved population. He issued a proclamation offering freedom to self-emancipated people who joined his forces. This act terrified Virginia’s enslaving class, pushing many toward independence, and more than 800 enslaved people reached Dunmore within three weeks and volunteered to serve in his “Ethiopian Regiment.” However, the refugee camps were ravaged by smallpox; within weeks, over half of Dunmore’s roughly 1,000 “soldiers” were dead, and the other half were dying, establishing a pattern of disease as a primary cause of death for freedom seekers.

At Valley Forge, the weakness of the Continental government led Washington to call for greater federal power, but sovereignty remained concentrated in the states under the Articles of Confederation, making any national initiative against slavery impossible. The war exposed a growing sectional divide. Five northern states began the process of abolishing slavery, while political leaders in Virginia and South Carolina resisted proposals that threatened slavery. When the young officer John Laurens proposed arming enslaved men to defend Charleston in exchange for their freedom, the South Carolina legislature rejected the idea, choosing to protect slavery even at the risk of military defeat. Later, as the British war effort shifted south under commanders including Charles Cornwallis, more than 10,000 enslaved people fled toward British forces, although only about half reached Cornwallis’s army. He never armed them and viewed them as a logistical burden. At the Siege of Yorktown, Washington selected the predominantly African American Rhode Island regiment to lead a key assault on a redoubt; Alexander Hamilton persuaded Washington to let him lead the nighttime attack, with Laurens joining him. Just before his surrender, Cornwallis expelled his Black followers who were sick with smallpox.

At the war’s conclusion, British commanders Guy Carleton and Alexander Leslie defied the terms of the peace treaty, arguing that those who had sought freedom under British protection shouldn’t be returned to their former enslavers, as they allowed many formerly enslaved people to be evacuated to freedom in Nova Scotia and England. Washington sought the return of enslaved people he believed were in New York but recovered only two, and he ultimately chose not to press the matter publicly, unwilling to appear to be acting in his own self-interest and increasingly mindful of his historical legacy. The most immediate and historically significant postwar event was Washington’s resignation of his commission on December 23, 1783—described as perhaps the most consequential moment in American history—after which political power remained concentrated in the states under the Articles of Confederation, leaving antislavery initiatives to proceed at the state level.

Chapter 5 details how the US Constitution was the product of what the author terms a “coup d’état” by a small group of nationalists who, to create a strong central government, had to negotiate with the ever-present but unspoken issue of slavery—the “Ghost at the Banquet” (79). The Treaty of Paris had also given the US a vast western domain, raising the question of whether slavery would expand into the new territories. In the Ordinance of 1784, Jefferson proposed ending slavery in the territories by 1800, but the provision failed in Congress by one vote. After the war, nationalists including James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay concluded that the weak Articles of Confederation were failing. To replace them, they helped bring about the Constitutional Convention and recruited a reluctant George Washington, whose presence lent the controversial project legitimacy.

Ellis argues that the nationalists sought to keep slavery off the official agenda because confronting it directly threatened the consensus necessary to create a national government. James Madison’s Virginia Plan set the terms of debate by proposing a complete replacement of the Articles in favor of a new, three-branch national government. The Convention’s first major crisis wasn’t over slavery but over representation, pitting large states against small ones. The resulting Great Compromise created a bicameral legislature—with proportional representation in the House and equal state representation in the Senate—establishing a hybrid government that was partly national and partly federal. Throughout the debates, the delegates feared two “ghosts”: monarchy, which they discussed endlessly, and slavery, which they avoided. Their distrust of direct democracy was evident in their creation of the Electoral College to filter the popular will.

Despite efforts to avoid it, slavery forced four major compromises. First, the Three-Fifths Clause was adopted as a political compromise for counting enslaved people when determining representation in the House. Second, a separate vote occurred not in Philadelphia but in New York, where southern delegates to the Confederation Congress cast votes in favor of the Northwest Ordinance, which prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory—part of what the author describes as a plausible unspoken understanding that the Southwest would remain open to slavery’s expansion. Third, after delegates from South Carolina and Georgia threatened to walk out, New England delegates accepted the continuation of the Atlantic Slave Trade until 1808, while South Carolina and Georgia accepted a simple-majority requirement for legislation regulating imports and exports. This debate featured moral condemnations of slavery from Gouverneur Morris, Luther Martin of Maryland, and George Mason of Virginia. Fourth, near the end of the proceedings, the Fugitive Slave Clause was passed unanimously and without debate, requiring states where slavery had been abolished to participate in the return of formerly enslaved people.

In his closing speech, Benjamin Franklin urged the delegates to accept the Constitution’s imperfections, acknowledging that he didn’t entirely approve it but regarded a general government as necessary and doubted that any other convention could produce a better one. Years later, Morris captured the same resignation with his metaphor of the Constitution as a sectional marriage, taken “for better or for worse” (106). The resulting sectional compact endured for 74 years, until the Southern states seceded in 1861.