The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789

From Pulitzer Prize–profitable American historian Joseph J. Ellis, the sudden story of why the 13 colonies, having simply fought off the imposition of a distant centralized governing energy, would determine to subordinate themselves anew.

Everyone knows the well-known opening phrase of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Deal with: “4 rating and 7 years in the past our fathers introduced forth on this Continent a brand new Nation.” The reality is completely different. In 1776, 13 American colonies declared themselves unbiased states that solely briefly joined forces to be able to defeat the British. As soon as victorious, they deliberate to go their separate methods. The triumph of the American Revolution was neither an ideological nor a political assure that the colonies would relinquish their independence and settle for the creation of a federal authorities with energy over their autonomy as states.

The Quartet is the story of this second American founding and of the boys most accountable—George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. These males, with the assistance of Robert Morris and Gouverneur Morris, formed the contours of American historical past by diagnosing the systemic dysfunctions created by the Articles of Confederation, manipulating the political course of to power the calling of the Constitutional Conference, conspiring to set the agenda in Philadelphia, orchestrating the talk within the state ratifying conventions, and, lastly, drafting the Invoice of Rights to guarantee state compliance with the constitutional settlement.

Ellis has given us a gripping and dramatic portrait of one of the crucial essential and misconstrued durations in American historical past: the years between the tip of the Revolution and the formation of the federal authorities.
The Quartet unmasks a delusion, and as a replacement presents an much more compelling fact—one which lies on the coronary heart of understanding the creation of the US of America.