The true character of the American Revolution? It’s complicated
This carefully wrought, highly engaging reality check on the elusive character of the American Revolution opens with the author clarifying what otherwise appears to be a simple, almost generic book title. “The Cause” is not an arbitrary term, Joseph J. Ellis asserts: It’s how the struggle for political independence from Britain was cast by the revolutionaries themselves. Perhaps the most memorable renderings are those invoked by Thomas Paine in “Common Sense”: “The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind,” and later: “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth.”
“The Cause,” Ellis explains, was short for the “Common Cause,” a phrase that came into vogue in 1774, along with the Coercive Acts by which London imposed a blockade on Boston Harbor the ostensible point of no return in the march to war. The “all-consuming patriotism of 1774 and 1776” did not last, however.
As Ellis lays it out, when the War for Independence was launched, rebellious colonists exhibited a localized sense of belonging, not yet a national one. His argument points to the uncertainty of expectations and contending voices in the Continental Congress. He injects into the narrative such destabilizing texts as Samuel Johnson’s “Taxation No Tyranny,” which, in “defiance of traditional codes of etiquette,” offered a delirious takedown of colonial excuses. There was, too, a momentarily convincing “fiction” floated in Philadelphia: that war would be prevented by a direct appeal to King George III.
Ellis, whose biography of George Washington emphasized the timely exits of one who might otherwise have chosen to aggrandize power, here again portrays the general as a realist with his eyes on the prize of military victory: indifferent to an attempt by some in Congress to replace him mid-war, and with an “uncanny flair for silence” at a time of internecine feuds. The author has “rounded up the usual suspects,” as he puts it, featuring many of the figures who loom large in his earlier books, though this time the stage lights also shine upon several lesserknowns, such as Joshua Loring, a recipient of British patronage as superintendent of prisoners of war in New York; Billy Lee, Washington’s body servant, whom the author unabashedly calls “the most famous African American slave in America”; and Caty Greene, the “disarmingly social” wife of the outstanding Gen. Nathanael Greene. She “never missed a winter encampment” and danced with Washington at such length that it raised a few virtue-signaling eyebrows.
Ellis, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for previous works, is sensitive to contested vocabularies. He adopts a cautious perspective in accord with that of Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, whose important study of British leadership in the 1770s, “The Men Who Lost America,” paints the other side as firm believers in liberty and the rule of law, convinced that parliamentary authority secured just that.