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BANQUO’S GHOST  
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Gerald Horne
July 5, 2026
The Nation
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_ The contradictions of the American Revolution. _

A depiction of the tarring and feathering of a British Customs
commissioner in Boston., Getty Images

 

Books in review The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the
American Founding by Joseph J. Ellis

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Joseph J. Ellis is one of the most celebrated historians in the
nation. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize and once the holder of an
endowed chair at Mount Holyoke, he was hailed by _The Washington Post_
as the “most widely read scholar of the Revolutionary period
and…probably the most influential as well.” His best-selling books
on Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and other founders have sold
hundreds of thousands of copies and have been instrumental in forging
a remarkable consensus, from left to right, that sees July 4, 1776, as
a sacred date and a great leap forward for all of humanity.

But in his latest book, _The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of
the_ _American Founding_, Ellis reconsiders the essence of his oeuvre
and this consensus, which is akin to the pope reconsidering
Catholicism. Focusing “on two unquestionably horrific tragedies the
founders oversaw”—the “failure to end slavery, and the failure
to avoid Indian removal”—Ellis seeks to understand how and why
they happened. “Next to the failure to end slavery,” he writes,
the “inability to reach a just accommodation with the Native
Americans was the greatest failure of the revolutionary generation.”
Charting not only the history of the republic’s founders but also
the history that preceded and followed them, he outlines what he terms
the “Great Silence”: “For more than four centuries, the most
important voices of Western civilization remained mute as a highly
organized program of unspeakable barbarity with genocidal implications
flourished throughout Europe. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Aquinas,
Erasmus, Locke, and all the Catholic popes regarded slavery and the
slave trade as acceptable features of European society.”

Why has Ellis chosen at this late date to break from the pack of
rationalizers and justifiers? The antics of the 47th US president and
his avid followers have clearly left him shaken, but more than that:
They point to a pattern, “an inherently paradoxical pattern,” that
“racism surges only after some semblance of racial equality becomes
foreseeable,” which Ellis now believes runs throughout this
nation’s history. It began, he notes, “during the American
founding,” and “we are currently living through its most recent
manifestation in the movement to ‘Make America Great Again.’”

Ellis does not expand on this explosive point, but he concedes that
the late Edmund Morgan, one of his mentors, got it right, particularly
in his trailblazing _American Slavery, American_ _Freedom_, which
argues that these polar opposites were there from the outset. Much
like Macbeth and Banquo’s ghost, Ellis concedes, the nation cannot
evade the tragedy preordained at its founding.

To begin his story, Ellis starts with the horrors of the Atlantic
slave trade, which accelerated as the settlers landed on these shores
and was “growing exponentially” in the prelude to 1776. He
observes cogently that “creating a [multiracial] society” was not
as pressing a concern in the imperial capitals as it was here.
Abolition would have created such a nation, and this was inconceivable
for most of the founders, he suggests. Likewise, he presents the
expropriation of the Indigenous as being virtually inevitable, given
the pressure from below of land-hungry settlers.

Throughout his account, Ellis continually reminds us that without a
compromise favoring the enslavers, the republic would not have
materialized—to which I say: So what? This could have meant another
Canada, a pleasing alternative to the war-driven status quo. He also
explores the central paradox found in the fact that the republic
depended on the labor of enslaved workers, one that Morgan had put
at the center of his own work—namely that, as Ellis writes, “the
presence of an enslaved black population actually enhanced the
commitment to freedom by the white population of Virginia…. Less
prominent Virginians were spared the task of performing manual labor,
since enslaved blacks filled that role, thereby allowing all white
Virginians to unite racially instead of being divided into upper and
lower classes, as was the case in England and throughout Europe.”

A corrupt bargain indeed: a republic born out of enslaving many so
that some could profit and be free. Naturally, such a society would
engender enormous instability. Enslavers, and those who admired them,
Ellis writes, “were sitting atop an active volcano on the verge of
eruption…especially in the Tidewater [Virginia] counties, where
Blacks outnumbered Whites three to one.”

Virginia was the California of the founding, the largest and most
prosperous settlement, and it produced a disproportionate number of
presidents in the antebellum era. Yet as a place where enslaved
Africans tended to reside, it was simultaneously “the soft
underbelly of the American resistance” to London’s rule. Being the
richest and, at the same time, the most insecure of the 13 states
fomented unsteadiness that ultimately culminated in civil war.

This was especially the case, Ellis writes, when Virginia’s last
colonial governor, Lord Dunmore, created the “Ethiopian Regiment,
numerous and armed,” which began “marching toward isolated
plantations with revenge in their hearts. Any Virginia planter who
harbored doubts about the wisdom of war with Great Britain quickly
discovered a powerful reason to abandon those doubts.”

Simultaneously, the British Empire was becoming ever more dependent on
Black labor. As Ellis writes, “the Caribbean, most especially
Jamaica…provided more revenue to the empire than all the American
colonies put together.” Seeking to keep a lid on Ireland, and
increasingly on India as well, the British felt compelled to enlist
more Black troops, which was not endearing to the settlers.

In sum, the republic was triggered into being in no small measure to
quash Black resistance. As Ellis avers, “the surprising size and
scale of Dunmore’s movement terrified the planter class…. The most
self-evident truth of all was white supremacy.” Or to put it another
way, class collaboration has been the “most self-evident truth,”
still the unmentionable today in divining the country’s elections.
And the unpaid sector of the working class—the enslaved, and then
their descendants—have had difficulty in “integrating” into this
framework, not least because it was sparked into being precisely to
repress them.

“Any frontal assault on slavery,” Ellis writes, “put at risk the
political unity necessary to win the war [and] to assure southern
support for a nation-sized republic…. Consider the alternative
scenario provided by the French and Russian revolutions, where justice
imposed led to justice destroyed.” But didn’t 1776 merely delay
the reckoning that arrived in 1861, which led not only to hundreds of
thousands of lives destroyed in a bloody civil war but to countless
Indigenous lives destroyed thereafter?

Although Ellis devotes much more time to enslavement than to
Indigenous dispossession, some of this book’s most valuable insights
emerge when he discusses the latter.

“Indian removal,” Ellis writes, “was the inevitable consequence
of unbridled democracy in action.” While many in this nation might
prefer to think otherwise, the foundations of popular government
rested on the unraveling of Indigenous self-rule. The republic rests
on the brutal fact that “ordinary American citizens seeking a better
life and a parcel of land” colonized a continent with people already
living on it. If US radicals and liberals had done a better job over
the centuries in explaining this aspect of the nation’s history,
perhaps Ellis would have been able to spend less time focused on it
and to instead explore some of its subtleties—such as how settler
colonialism in North America was not just an elite project, but one
that involved “class collaboration”—unity across class lines by
the interlopers—as well as a construction of whiteness that included
even many born outside of Europe, particularly if they were Christian.

But to his credit, Ellis is determined to fill in many of the elisions
in North American history that exist today. For example, he points out
that George Washington was “in current currency…a
multimillionaire” as well as a substantial landowner. A goodly
number of the sainted founders were similarly endowed, thanks to
Indigenous dispossession.

Ellis is also dismissive of the increasingly popular “antislavery
interpretation of the Constitution as Abraham Lincoln viewed it.
Lincoln, of course, had some powerful political reasons to downplay
the proslavery side,” he observes in one of his endnotes, “which,
as I see it, was shaped by powerful political reasons to defer the
slavery question until the infant American republic had outgrown its
infancy.” Instead, he focuses on the Constitution’s “fugitive
slave clause,” which “explicitly endorsed slavery” and
“required all the states to publicly acknowledge the abiding
existence of slavery.”

Unlike today’s judicial “originalists,” who purport to ascertain
the original understanding of the Constitution, and the overly
confident historians who perform a similar role, Ellis stresses our
inadequate surviving record of the Constitution’s creation. “We
know very little about the covert deliberations,” he observes,
“the arguments, concessions and compromises that generated and
shaped those words.”

I confess to being torn while reading Ellis’s account. On the one
hand, when a scholar of his eminence begins to raise searching
questions about such a foundational matter, one is tempted to stand
and cheer. On the other hand, I wish Ellis had gone further in this
slim volume, particularly since the heroic Nikole Hannah-Jones, in her
estimable 1619 Project, had already played a vanguard role in opening
up these vistas by suggesting that a revolt led by enslavers may have
had something to do with preserving slavery.

One such area where I wish Ellis had gone further is in resurrecting
the other side of his tale: those Black writers, past and present, who
sought to raise searching questions about the republic’s roots.
It’s a subject recently explored in _Black Writers of the Founding
Era_, a volume edited by James G. Basker; and it’s also at the
center of the film _Belle_, directed by the British Ghanaian auteur
Amma Asante and starring the British South African actor Gugu
Mbatha-Raw, which tells the backstory of the landmark “Somerset’s
Case” of 1772, which blocked the forcible removal from England of an
enslaved African to return him to bondage in Virginia. The role of
Black critics of slavery is also portrayed in the Canadian–South
African–BET coproduced docudrama _The Book of Negroes_, which
features a classic scene in which the heroine confronts none other
than George Washington himself as he is basking in victory in
Manhattan.

In general, a deeper appreciation of Black studies and the scholarship
it has produced would have aided _The Great Contradiction_
immeasurably. More scrutiny of this now-besieged field would have
helped Ellis and his readers understand why Black people “fled to
[Benedict] Arnold’s army by the thousands,” or why—by his
counting—“twice as many” of this beleaguered minority served
under the British Union Jack than with George Washington’s forces.
This tendency contributed to a significant reversal by Washington, who
at first had “issued an order ‘to reject all slaves and to reject
Negroes altogether’” and then concurred that the independence
forces should accept them.

In _The Great Contradiction_, Ellis seems to be pessimistic about what
the future holds as well. “In or about 2045, when demographers
predict that the white population of the United States will become a
statistical minority,” we will see yet another backlash, he writes,
this time more pernicious.

Given the alarm bells sounded by the otherwise sober Ellis, one
wonders if it might be time for liberals to revise many of their
presuppositions—not only those that relate to the myths of the
country’s founding, but also those that concern US power. For
example, what Ellis condemns as “white supremacy”—and what I
elaborate as “class collaboration”—requires analysts to view
“Trumpism” not as aberrational but as endemic. If we are not
surprised by the rightward profile of settlers in the West Bank or
their comrades in today’s South Africa, then why should we be
surprised by the performance of their historical counterparts, and
their descendants, in this republic?

To his credit, by having the courage and wisdom to rethink his
life’s work, Ellis has provided a grand service for us all.

_GERALD HORNE is the author of The Counter-Revolution of 1776 and,
most recently, The Counter-Revolution of 1893: The Hawaii Coup and the
Roots of U.S. Imperialism in the Asia-Pacific Basin._

_Copyright c 2026 THE NATION. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without__ permission_
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Distributed by__ PARS International Corp_
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_Founded by abolitionists in 1865, The Nation has long believed that
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