For Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph J. Ellis, The Cause marks
the culmination of a lifetime of engagement with the founding era,
completing a trilogy of books that began with Founding Brothers. Here
Ellis, countering popular histories that romanticize the "Spirit of
'76," demonstrates through "evocative profiles of British loyalists,
slaves, Native Americans and soldiers uncertain of what was being
founded" (Christopher Borrelli, Chicago Tribune) that the rebels
fought not for a nation but under the mantle of "The Cause," a mutable,
conveniently ambiguous principle all but destined to give rise to the
warring factions of later American history. Combining action-packed
tales of North American military campaigns with characteristically
trenchant insight, The Cause "deftly foreshadows all the issues that
would complicate America's trajectory" (Richard Stengel, New York Times
Book Review), forcing us to finally reconsider the story we have long
told ourselves about our origins--as a people, and as a nation.
"At the intersection of his expertise and our need for coherence about
our national founding arrives historian Joseph J. Ellis. . . . Ellis is
no apologist, but he is a chronicler of the entire revolution, its best
aspirations, its worst contradictions, and its ongoing dilemmas." --Hugh
Hewitt, Washington Post
