Moral of the story

Creation myth

The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789. By Joseph Ellis. Knopf; 320 pages; $27.95.

JOSEPH ELLIS begins his latest book, “The Quartet”, with the observation that Abraham Lincoln’s most famous speech was a fine bit of eloquence but a bad piece of history. Delivering his eulogy on November 19th 1863, over the freshly dug graves at Gettysburg, the president began: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation.” To which Mr Ellis responds, a bit cheekily: “No, not really.”

What follows is a clever framing of a familiar topic. Mr Ellis, a Pulitzer prize-winning historian, points out that the real work of nation-building began later, in the years between the successful conclusion of the revolution in 1781 and the final adoption of the constitution in 1789, and that this epochal achievement was largely the work of four men of genius who stemmed the centrifugal forces set in motion by the rebellion and forged a new nation out of an inchoate mass.

Not only did this quartet—George Washington,...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1caGWck