The Improbable Republic

In 1765 there was no such thing as an American. There were British subjects scattered across thirteen fractious colonies, loyal to a distant king, suspicious of one another, and utterly unprepared for what was coming. Within a single generation those same people would declare their independence, defeat the most powerful empire on earth, and invent a new kind of nation founded not on blood or crown but on an idea — that governments derive their power from the consent of the governed. It should not have worked. Again and again, it very nearly did not. E.B Cohen tells the whole sweep of that improbable achievement in one gripping volume. Here is the world that made the founders and the crisis that radicalized them; Thomas Paine's pamphlet that set a continent on fire; the fifty-six men who signed their own death warrants in Philadelphia; Washington's ragged army surviving the winter at Valley Forge; Franklin charming a French court into an alliance that won the war; the sweltering summer of 1787 when a few dozen men argued a Constitution into existence and nearly walked out a dozen times; Hamilton building an economy from nothing; and the bitter feud between Jefferson and Hamilton that split the founders into the parties we live with still. But this is also an honest book. It keeps in view the Founding Mothers who shaped the men, the enslaved people — Sally Hemings, Ona Judge, and hundreds more — whose lives exposed the founders' greatest hypocrisy, and the contradictions the founders could not resolve. Even-handed, vivid, and unflinching, this is the story of the most consequential experiment in self-government the modern world has known — and of why we are still arguing about what it meant.