The Great Contradiction

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph J. Ellis examines the two greatest failures of the American founding: the failure to end slavery and the failure to prevent Indian removal. He frames these as tragedies coexisting alongside extraordinary achievements, posing a central question: Were these outcomes inevitable, like a Greek tragedy dictated by the gods, or were they avoidable, the product of inadequate leadership and moral blindness?

Ellis begins by placing American slavery within the larger context of the Atlantic Slave Trade, which lasted roughly four centuries (1460–1860) and transported 12.5 million African captives, of whom 1.8 million died during the ocean crossing known as the Middle Passage. Only about 4 percent of survivors ended up in the future United States. By the eve of the American Revolution, 500,000 enslaved people lived in the mainland British colonies, constituting 20 percent of the population, with roughly 90 percent concentrated south of the Chesapeake Bay. Ellis describes "the Great Silence," more than four centuries during which major Western thinkers accepted slavery without objection. That silence broke in the mid-eighteenth century, when Enlightenment philosophers and Quaker leaders condemned slavery as both a medieval relic and a sin. Yet no colonial legislature considered emancipation, and the debate quickly became an argument about whether a biracial society was viable, an arrangement almost no white citizens supported. Ellis identifies this tension as "the American dilemma": a white-dominated society rhetorically committed to human equality.

Ellis establishes his interpretive framework by warning against three errors: treating the founders as demigods or villains, assuming democracy always serves worthy causes, and judging the past by present moral standards, a fallacy he calls "presentism." The founding generation did not share modern faith in democracy; the word was an epithet in the late eighteenth century. Any movement to end slavery or prevent Indian removal had to come from the top down, because most white citizens wanted Indian land and could not imagine racial equality. Ellis invokes historian David Brion Davis's concept of "the perishability of revolutionary time": The window to act on egalitarian principles was closing as revolutionary fervor faded. The founders believed confronting slavery directly risked the political unity needed to win the war and build a nation, so they deferred the issue, making the revolution's triumphs possible at the cost of its moral promise.

The book traces how American resistance to British imperial policy simultaneously elevated egalitarian ideals and exposed the contradiction of slavery. After the Seven Years' War ended in 1763, Britain moved to consolidate control over its thirteen colonies. Massachusetts pamphleteer James Otis argued that British policies reduced colonists to the condition of slaves. Virginia planter George Washington compared the threat of British domination to the condition of "the blacks we rule over," without noticing his vulnerability to the same argument. British writer Samuel Johnson retorted: "Why is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?" In Virginia, when young legislator Thomas Jefferson drafted legislation in 1769 allowing slaveowners to free their slaves, the colleague who presented it was destroyed by public hostility. Leading Massachusetts revolutionary John Adams embodied the "prudent revolutionary," insisting that The Cause, the revolutionary struggle for independence, meant separation from Britain and nothing more.

Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in June 1776. A paragraph condemning the slave trade was deleted by the Continental Congress, but delegates left untouched the passage declaring that "all men are created equal" and endowed with rights to "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." President Abraham Lincoln later recognized Jefferson's achievement in embedding natural-rights philosophy in a revolutionary document "for future use." By replacing John Locke's formulation of "life, liberty, and property" with "pursuit of Happiness," Jefferson deprived slaveowners of the claim that owning slaves was a natural right.

Ellis recovers what he calls "unpainted pictures" from the Revolutionary War. At the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775, roughly 150 Black soldiers fought alongside Whites. Washington initially barred all Black soldiers, then reversed the order when new recruits failed to appear, establishing a precedent for racial integration that would not recur until the Korean War. An estimated 5,000 African Americans served by war's end. Meanwhile, Lord Dunmore, the exiled royal governor of Virginia, offered freedom to runaway slaves who joined British forces, and over 800 arrived within weeks. The first chapter of the abolitionist movement began at the state level in five northern states that used the Declaration's values to justify ending slavery, while Virginia's constitution contained expansive language about human rights but limited those rights to "those who enter into a state of society," effectively excluding African Americans and Native Americans.

Ellis traces the path from the Articles of Confederation, a deliberately weak state-based government, to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Jefferson's Ordinance of 1784 proposed ending slavery in new western territories by 1800, but the measure lost by one vote. Nationalists John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison orchestrated what Ellis calls a "coup d'état" to replace the Articles. At the convention, slavery was the defining "Ghost at the Banquet," shaping every major compromise but never explicitly named; the words "slave" and "slavery" never appeared in any draft. Four compromises emerged: the three-fifths clause for counting enslaved people for House representation; an unspoken understanding that the northwest would prohibit slavery while the southwest permitted it; extension of the slave trade until 1808, brokered after South Carolina's John Rutledge threatened secession if the trade was prohibited; and the fugitive slave clause, which passed unanimously without debate and required free states to return escaped slaves. Senior statesman and convention delegate Benjamin Franklin urged acceptance of the imperfect document, arguing no convention could produce a better one.

During ratification (1787–88), votes in Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York were extremely close. In February 1790, Quaker petitions to end the slave trade reached the House, followed by a petition under Franklin's signature urging abolition. Southern representatives argued slavery was essential, then shifted the argument to race, demanding advocates of emancipation explain what to do with freed slaves. Franklin, in his last public act, published a parody comparing pro-slavery arguments to those of a fictional Algerian pirate justifying the enslavement of Christians. Behind the scenes, Madison maneuvered the committee report into a declaration that Congress had "no authority to interfere in the emancipation of slaves" within any state. The amended report passed 29 to 25, placing congressional debate over slavery permanently out of bounds. Ellis contends this was the moment the window of opportunity closed, with the enslaved population approaching 700,000 and rising.

Ellis then turns to the failure to prevent Indian removal. The American victory proved catastrophic for roughly 100,000 Native Americans living between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. Secretary of War Henry Knox persuaded Washington to reverse Indian policy entirely: treaties would be negotiated between equals, and federal troops would block white encroachment. The Creek Nation, led by Alexander McGillivray, a chief of mixed ancestry with a classical education and fluency in English, Spanish, and Creek, was chosen as the test case. The Treaty of New York (1790) guaranteed Creek Country as a vast domain, but white settlers kept pouring across the borders, and the military resources to enforce the treaty did not exist. Ellis concludes that Indian removal was "the inevitable consequence of unbridled democracy in action," as the white population doubled every 25 years while the Indian population declined.

In the book's final chapters, Ellis examines Washington's and Jefferson's personal struggles with slavery. Washington's will (1799) directed that all the slaves he owned be freed upon Martha's death, with his longtime manservant Billy Lee freed immediately. Washington also stipulated that freed slaves must be permitted to remain in Virginia, a position unique among prominent planters. Three obstacles had delayed this decision: the intermarriage of his slaves with Martha's dower slaves (enslaved people from her first husband's estate, which neither George nor Martha could legally free), financial difficulties, and an emotional resistance rooted in his identity as a Virginia slaveowner since age eleven.

Jefferson's trajectory was more openly tragic. When the Marquis de Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolution, visited Monticello in 1824, Jefferson's position on slavery had hardened into what Ellis calls a "bimodal pattern": Slavery was a moral atrocity, but freed slaves "must be removed beyond the reach of mixture," and Jefferson had calculated that no removal plan was feasible. He died bankrupt, and six months later 130 enslaved people at Monticello were sold at public auction, families broken apart. Ellis concludes with Virginia's 1831 legislative debate, in which Thomas Dew of the College of William and Mary argued that all discussion of ending slavery should cease, since Jefferson himself had judged removal impossible. Dew's pamphlet circulated as Virginia's declaration of dependence on slavery, clarifying Jefferson's words to mean all white men are created equal. Virginia chose to continue its decline, and Ellis argues its leaders would embrace the Confederate flag, the "Lost Cause" (the pro-Confederate narrative portraying the South's war as noble), and opposition to the civil rights movement, deriving significance from standing on the wrong side of American history.