6/8 The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783, by Joseph J. Ellis, Ph.D.

Photo: Harry Washington, depicted in Washington as Farmer at Mount Vernon, 1851, part of a series on George Washington by Junius Brutus Stearns. Located at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.  Library of Congress document.


Harry Washington was born in West Africa around 1740. He was captured in his early 20s, placed in the bowels of a slave ship, and endured the horrors of the Middle Passage. On the shores of the Potomac, he was purchased and enslaved by a man named Daniel Tebbs.In 1763, Tebbs sold Harry to none other than George Washington. After working with several other enslaved people on draining swamps in Virginia with a company George Washington founded called The Dismal Swamp Company, Harry found himself at Mt. Vernon, taking care of George Washington’s horses and even working in the household at Mt. Vernon.Harry’s opinion of our founding father is not one shared by the majority of Americans today. In fact, George Washington did not have the reputation of being a kind man when it came to the people enslaved on his plantation. British writer Richard Parkinson spent some time with Washington on his planation and wrote in his book, A Tour of America that “it was the sense of all his neighbors that he treated them with more severity than any other man.”
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6/8  The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783, by Joseph J. Ellis, Ph.D.    Hardcover – September 21, 2021 

https://www.amazon.com/Cause-American-Revolution-Discontents-1773-1783/dp/1631498983

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.

6 illustrations; 7 maps