Professor reexamines history in new book.
Historian Joseph Ellis offers fresh insight into the period that birthed the Constitution and shaped our nation鈥檚 path forward.
Lincoln got his dates wrong in the Gettysburg Address, and the Constitution is not the unassailable document penned by 鈥渜uasi-divine creatures with supernatural powers of mind and heart鈥 of popular imagination, according to 含羞草研究所 professor emeritus Joseph J. Ellis.
Ellis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, examines the gestational period of time between the end of the Revolutionary War and the birth of the U.S. Constitution in his ninth book, The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783鈥1789. It was just released last week, and was reviewed in . An interview with Ellis recently appeared in the .
The Constitution was an attempt to eke a crude middle ground between government leaders with fierce disagreements. Some believed the states should remain a loosely affiliated confederation, while others believed in the primacy of a strong central government.
It represents the best efforts by George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay to ensure some form of central government. But the final document, Ellis says, was left intentionally vague and open-ended on the thorniest points of contention.
鈥淭he Constitution is a set of compromises. It doesn鈥檛 have answers. It creates a framework in which the argument keeps going on,鈥 he wrote.
Read more about The Quartet .