In one of the most "exciting and engaging" (Gordon S. Wood) histories of
the American founding in decades, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian
Joseph J. Ellis offers an epic account of the origins and clashing
ideologies of America's revolutionary era, recovering a war more brutal,
and more disorienting, than any in our history, save perhaps the Civil
War.
For more than two centuries, historians have debated the history of the
American Revolution, disputing its roots, its provenance, and above all,
its meaning. These questions have intrigued Ellis--one of our most
celebrated scholars of American history--throughout his entire career.
With this much-anticipated volume, he at last brings the story of the
revolution to vivid life, with "surprising relevance" (Susan Dunn) for
our modern era. Completing a trilogy of books that began with Founding
Brothers, The Cause returns us to the very heart of the American
founding, telling the military and political story of the war for
independence from the ground up, and from all sides: British and
American, loyalist and patriot, white and Black.
Taking us from the end of the Seven Years' War to 1783, and drawing on a
wealth of previously untapped sources, The Cause interweaves
action-packed tales of North American military campaigns with
parlor-room intrigues back in England, creating a thrilling narrative
that brings together a cast of familiar and long-forgotten characters.
Here Ellis recovers the stories of Catherine Littlefield Greene, wife of
Major General Nathanael Greene, the sister among the "band of brothers";
Thayendanegea, a Mohawk chief known to the colonists as Joseph Brant,
who led the Iroquois Confederation against the Patriots; and Harry
Washington, the enslaved namesake of George Washington, who escaped
Mount Vernon to join the British Army and fight against his former
master.
Countering popular histories that romanticize the "Spirit of '76," Ellis
demonstrates that the rebels fought under the mantle of "The Cause," a
mutable, conveniently ambiguous principle that afforded an umbrella
under which different, and often conflicting, convictions and goals
could coexist. Neither an American nation nor a viable government
existed at the end of the war. In fact, one revolutionary legacy
regarded the creation of such a nation, or any robust expression of
government power, as the ultimate betrayal of The Cause. This legacy
alone rendered any effective response to the twin tragedies of the
founding--slavery and the Native American dilemma--problematic at best.
Written with the vivid and muscular prose for which Ellis is known, and
with characteristically trenchant insight, The Cause marks the
culmination of a lifetime of engagement with the founding era. A
landmark work of narrative history, it challenges the story we have long
told ourselves about our origins as a people, and as a nation.
