as time goes by

Last week, I finished reading Joseph Ellis's American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic. He makes some very interesting points about one factor that served Americans very well in the War of Independence and in the formation of the Constitution: the wide expanse of the early states. If the American territory had been smaller, the strength of the British army would have crushed the former colonists during the war -- as the British army had crushed Britain's European enemies. And if the immense size of the new republic had not created problems for the Confederation, the constitutional convention would never have been called. (It is hard to imagine how immense the eastern seaboard seemed in the late 18th century.)

He makes the same point with the two greatest failures of the early republic: Indian-American relations and slavery. Washington and Knox had a marvelous plan to protect the Indians west of the Appalaichians, but it failed because Georgian settlers could not be prevented from entering prohibited territory; there simply were not enough federal troops for the purpose. The second failure is a fascinating interpretation of what has long been described as one of Jefferson's greatest accomplishments (though, he never thought so): the Lousiana Purchase. The moment the new territory was added to the United States, it doomed all abolition plans because new lands were opened for the evil of slavery -- preventing any dream that it would dwindle away through the operation of agrarian economics.

The book is a very good read, even though it often has the tone of collected articles from popular history magazines.

Mexico, of course, does not enter on stage -- not yet. The book ends with the Louisiana Purchase -- almost twenty years before Mexico finally became independent. The borders of the purchase were to tee up the start of several cycles of violence between the two new republics.

I was hoping to learn something of my new retirement land from this book, but that knowledge potentially awaits in the next book on my reading table: Morton Keller's America's Three Regimes: A New Political History.