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Joseph Ellis American Creation Sparknotes

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In the book, American Creation by Joseph J. Ellis, Ellis talks about the founding of America from the start of it to the finish. He argues that the founding of the United States was not a clash between democracy and aristocracy. He stated that none of the founding fathers even mentioned democracy as one of their goals. The main question was actually how they were going to create a successful nation state. Ellis mentioned, in his book, that the main clash was between the people who favored a full sovereign national government, which were the federalists, and the people who wanted to reserve the state rights over all of the domestic issues, which were the republicans. Ellis organized his book into six chapters. Each of the chapters is supposed …show more content…

He talks about how the colonist had one advantage and that was a variety of territory. The American Revolution was not a conventional war, America just needed to protect the conflict, keep away from the enemy, rally for world support, and fight hard because they were so undersized compared to England. The conditions of Valley Forge were terrible. There were contagious diseases along with bad weather. Food supply was also terrible because the local farmers sold their food to British soldiers because they were more reliable about their money. The terrible conditions highlighted how long the revolution would be. In this chapter, Ellis says that if the British had attacked the colonists that winter, the war would have been over because of all of the terrible conditions that the colonists faced. But the agreement of not having war during the winter held true between the …show more content…

The creation of this system went on to be one of the most lasting contributions to political thought, but at the time of its creation, there was a lot of fighting over it. The person that led the charge to create a political party was Thomas Jefferson. Ellis says that during this time James Madison claimed that he wasn’t converting to the Republican camp but he did it despite saying he wasn’t. He went from the leader of the ultra-nationalists at the constitutional convention to the leader of the opposition that challenged the legitimacy of everything. One reason that Madison did this is because of the creation of the national bank. Its power terrified

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Gordon Wood achieved great success among his peers with the publication of his book, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, for which he was awarded the Bancroft Prize, as well as the John H. Dunning Prize, both in 1970. In it, Dr. Wood breaks down the process of how American political thought developed from early protests against British measures in the construction of the world's first federal republic. He does so by giving us in detail using a number of different sources, historical information on the reasoning behind the revolution. Dr. Wood walks us through how our government started with a monarchical society which was hierarchical, and later transformed, and emerged as a more recognizable modern society, in where a more commercially oriented and capitalistic government came to light. Wood writes, “[Americans] learned how to define the rights of nature, how to search into, to distinguish, and to comprehend, the principles of physical, moral, religious, and civil liberty, how, in short, to discover and resist the forces of tyranny before they could be applied.

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