MANY YEARS AFTER PLAYING THEIR famed roles in promoting revolution and republicanism among the dispersed peoples of colonial North America, John Adams and Benjamin Rush engaged in a lively correspondence about the importance of human agency in determining the course of history. “I shall continue to believe that ‘great men’ are a lie,” wrote Rush, “and that there is very little difference in that superstition which leads us to believe in witches and conjurers.” Adams agreed heartily and even went a step further: “The feasts and funerals in honor of George Washington is as corrupt a system as that by which saints were canonized and cardinals, popes and whole hierarchical systems created.” Adams meant no disrespect to Washington, a man he had known for 25 years and in whose administration he served two terms as Vice President. On the contrary, said Adams, were Washington still alive, he would surely be mortified by the “pilgrimages to Mount Vernon as the new Mecca or Jerusalem.”

In his new book, American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph Ellis engages the founders’ own ruminations on human agency to launch a wide ranging and fascinating investigation of the early years of the American republic. Though no less a figure than Washington credited the revolution’s success to (in Ellis’s words) “large-scale historical forces beyond human control”—namely, time and space—“rather than the actions or decisions of men,” Ellis, the author of several important books on the founding generation, views these claimswith a skeptical eye. The revolutionary generation knew they were writing for posterity, he reminds us, and so they purposely downplayed their own achievements–and, by extension, their own missteps.

Ellis’s new book is less a cohesive monograph than a collection of related essays that balance narrative and analysis. If any one argument can be said to weave together the separate pieces of American Creation, it is that the founding generation had five central achievements: first, they defeated the most formidable military power in the modern world; second, they “established the first nation-sized republic”; third, “they created the first wholly secular state”; fourth, they created a system of overlapping sovereignty; and fifth, they institutionalized political parties, entities that were thought to destabilize republics but that ultimately strengthened the American system of self-government. Importantly, Ellis emphasizes two signature failures of the founding generation, namely, their failure to strike a just arrangement with several million American Indians and to eradicate the institution of slavery.

The chapters that compose American Creation walk the reader through seminal moments in the nation’s founding: the debate over independence that consumed the Continental Congress in 1775 and 1776; the Continental Army’s terrible winter at Valley Forge (1777–78); the debate over the ratification of the Constitution in the late 1780s; the formation of the Democratic-Republican party in the early 1790s; the federal government’s bad-faith negotiations with American Indian tribes in this same period; and the Louisiana Purchase.

Ellis covers a lot of old ground, but he often brings fresh