The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783

by Joseph J. Ellis Ph.D.

Overview

New York Times Book Review — Editors’ Choice • Chicago Tribune — "60 Best Reads for Right Now" • St. Louis Post-Dispatch — "50 Fall Books You Should Consider Reading"

Challenging conventional wisdom, The Cause offers a “necessary” (John S. Gardner, Guardian) account of the origins and clashing ideologies of America’s revolutionary era.

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324092346
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	09/27/2022
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	90,462
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Joseph J. Ellis is the best-selling author of twelve previous books, including American Sphinx, which won the National Book Award, and Founding Brothers, which won the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, and Plymouth, Vermont.

Table of Contents

Preface: Lest We Forget xi

Part I Origins and Arguments, 1773-1776

Chapter 2 The Rubicon 5

Profile: Joshua Loring 52

Chapter 2 Prudence Dictates 54

Profile: Mercy Otis Warren 91

Part II Arms and Men, 1776-1780

Chapter 3 The Escape 97

Profile: Harry Washington 149

Chapter 4 The Few 152

Profile: Catharine Littlefield Greene 190

Part III Triumphs and Tragedies, 1780-1783

Chapter 5 The Protraction 195

Profile: Joseph Brant 234

Chapter 6 The Chesapeake 237

Profile: William (Billy) Lee 268

Chapter 7 The Exit 270

Profile: Joseph Plumb Martin 304

Epilogue: Legacies 307

Acknowledgments 327

Notes 329

Index 357

Editorial Reviews

"Masterly.... Underscore[s] that the signers failed to deal with some awfully big problems.... Deftly foreshadows all the issues that would complicate America’s trajectory and ends with a historical cliffhanger: Would the Republic survive? It did, but only when the Constitution became the embodiment of The Cause.... As Ellis points out, the word 'democracy' back then was more suggestive of mob rule than reasoned deliberation."

Richard Stengel

"Ruing Washington’s postwar hesitance to set an example by freeing his slaves, Ellis underscores the moral failings and deferrals that were then deemed necessary to ensure political unity. In all, a fresh and astute analysis of the American Revolution."

Booklist - Gilbert Taylor

"Ellis’s witty style and astute analysis make this essential reading for historians and enthusiasts at all levels who want to disentangle the complex historiography of the American Revolution."

Margaret Kappanadze

"Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling historian Joseph J. Ellis superbly captures the issues, personalities and events of the American Revolution... Using rigorous scholarship, Ellis offers vivid portraits of and penetrating insights about this period in history, while challenging our conventional understandings of it... This riveting, highly recommended book by one of America’s major historians will change how you see the American Revolution."

Roger Bishop

07/12/2021

The colonists didn’t describe their war for independence as the American Revolution, Pulitzer winner Ellis (American Dialogue) points out in the preface to this richly detailed, multivoiced history. The term they used was “The Cause”—“a conveniently ambiguous label that provided a verbal canopy under which a diverse variety of political and regional persuasions could coexist.” Ellis skillfully charts those divergent interests as they coalesced in the 1770s to oppose the British parliament’s “new imperial policy” toward the colonies and details early military clashes in the North, struggles to secure funding for the Continental Army, and the decisive victory at Yorktown in October 1781. Peace negotiations in Paris “expanded to include the addition of a western domain with all the ingredients of a looming American empire” while the former colonists’ resistance to “any form of consolidated power” became an enduring point of political tension. Ellis credits the deferral of democratic reforms by “prudent revolutionaries” such as John Adams and George Washington with helping the American Revolution to succeed where the French Revolution failed, but forcefully argues that ending slavery should have been the exception to the rule. Profiles of lesser-known figures including Continental Army soldier Joseph Plumb Martin and Mohawk chief Joseph Brant add depth and nuance to a familiar story. This expert account highlights the “improvisational” nature of America’s founding. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"The Cause comes across as a special gift, the book the author most wanted to write to the reader from the great scholar."

New York Review of Books - Robert S. Davis

"[A] speedy retelling of the nation’s stumbling, fractured founding, through evocative profiles of British loyalists, slaves, Native Americans and soldiers uncertain of what was being founded."

Chicago Tribune - Christopher Borrelli

"[A] carefully wrought, highly engaging reality check on the elusive character of the American Revolution... Ellis, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for previous works, is sensitive to contested vocabularies... [He] knows that words always matter and that the Revolution wasn’t all glorious or miraculous. He regularly reminds us of what it wasn’t.... With its combined examination of tactics and atmospherics, The Cause is a serious (and seriously entertaining) book and a lively addition to the literature. It is told in the breezy manner that fans of the author have come to expect. All in all, it provides a clear and fair-minded assessment of men and women and issues that mattered at a time when everything mattered."

Andrew Burstein

★ 09/01/2021

Ellis examines the American Revolution (known by American insurgents as "the Cause") through the events, motives, participants, and consequences that have often been mythologized, minimized, or forgotten. He relates the history from often conflicting viewpoints on both the British and American sides and warns readers to study the circumstances of the imperfect humans involved before judging them from a 21st-century perspective. Ellis argues that nationhood was not the generally accepted goal of the Cause, contrary to modern misconceptions. Instead, the Colonies' mistrust of a strong, centralized imperial British government both fueled and jeopardized independence, resulting in a deliberately weak coalition of 13 independently managed states that couldn't effectively fund and execute the war or plan a fiscally or politically viable future. Ironically, Ellis argues, leaders of the Cause tried to maintain precarious national unity and win independence for white people by delaying freedom and equity for Black people, Indigenous peoples, and women. He concludes that the legacy of these strategies was antithetical to the Cause, the goals of which have yet to be fully realized. VERDICT Ellis's witty style and astute analysis make this essential reading for historians and enthusiasts at all levels who want to disentangle the complex historiography of the American Revolution.—Margaret Kappanadze, Elmira Coll. Lib., NY

Library Journal

2021-07-14
With his characteristically graceful prose, Ellis offers a short, straightforward history of a critical decade in the nation’s youth.

Unlike most of the author’s previous work—mostly reflective book-length essays on various aspects and leading figures of the Revolutionary era—this work is more in the line of traditional narratives about American history. While both elite leaders and average people populate these pages, no reader will mistake it for a social or cultural history or history-from-the-bottom-up. Nor is it a history of the entire Revolution, which usually starts no later than the 1765 Stamp Act crisis. Instead, Ellis digs in with the Boston Tea Party of 1773 and ends with the Treaty of Paris of 1783. His focus is on the Revolution’s male leaders, its politics, the colonists’ inner civil war, and military campaigns. Little here is new by way of interpretation. The author’s sole general argument—that the colonists’ victory was “foreordained”—won’t go unchallenged. This is, quite simply, a well-known story told by a master storyteller known for perceptive detailing. As is always the case with Ellis, he is brilliant at short takes—events, decisions, individuals. Here, he foregrounds four often overlooked men—diplomat John Jay, thinker and pamphleteer John Dickinson, military leader Nathanael Greene, and financier Robert Morris—without whom the Colonies might not have forged a nation. George Washington duly commands center stage, his character and genius indispensable for American victory. True to his own skills at bringing people alive, Ellis also includes sympathetic miniprofiles of normal, unsung participants in the period’s fraught events: loyalists, women, Native Americans, Joseph Plum Martin (“the Zelig of the American Revolution”), and, perhaps the most captivating, Washington’s personal slave, Billy Lee. The book’s only disappointment is its abrupt close.

It’s hard to imagine a better-told brief history of the key years of the American Revolution.

Kirkus Reviews