These Truths: A History of the United States, LePore - B+, Incomplete

          The US Constitution "was meant to mark the start of a new era, in which the course of history might be made predictable and a government established that would be ruled not by accident and force but by reason and choice." The question of this book is whether our history shows that the self-evident truths of political equality, natural rights and the sovereignty of the people have been proven or belied. This book is  a civics primer, a political history, and "an explanation of the nature of the past."

          I. The Idea 1492-1799        Desperate and poor, outflanked by Islam, the nations of western Europe sailed west to find markets to trade with. The extraction of the wealth of the Americas was accomplished by 2M Europeans migrating west along with the 12M African slaves they forced to the Americas. In the section that became  British America, white settlers, between 1600-1800, numbered about 1 million. The imported Africans were 2.5M. The English were latecomers, over a century behind the Spanish, and decades behind the French. The Europeans, appropriately, asked themselves by what right did they come and conquer. The Spanish simply decided that God was on their side because the indigenous peoples did not worship as they did. Thus armed with right, they pillaged and plundered central and southern America. The English, at least, came as settlers and those settlers brought with them their rights as Englishmen. In Virginia, they came with James I's  charter. In 1619, twenty Englishmen were elected to the House of Burgesses, America's first elective body. Simultaneously, twenty Africans were sold into slavery in Virginia. Those who went to Massachusetts, the Pilgrims, were religious dissenters fleeing their perception of tyranny. They were followed during the reign of Charles I with thousands more leaving as England descended into Civil War. Ultimately, almost all the colonies were formed under the guise of religious freedom and toleration. Throughout the 17th and into the 18th century, British America, from the Caribbean to Massachusetts, slaves rebelled again and again, as did the indigenous Indians, both raising the question of by what right do you rule.

          Up until the 1760's, Parliament had set the rules of trade and the colonies and taxed themselves. With the Sugar and Stamp Acts,  Pitt and the parliament attempted to change the established practices. The road to revolution was open.  And in New England, "the zeal for liberty raised the question of ending slavery." Many in the north wondered about the relative tyranny of imposing taxes versus enslaving a human being. After a year of war, the colonies published their Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. During the war, one in five slaves attempted to join the British, who offered them freedom. The Revolution saw slavery bend but not break.

          What we now know as the Constitutional Convention was convened in 1787 for the purpose of amending the Articles of Confederation. It was agreed quickly that the Articles needed to be set aside and some semblance of a national government needed to be established. "Slavery became the crucial divide in Philadelphia because slaves featured in two calculations: the wealth they represented as property and in the population they represented as people." The eventual compromises on the topic of representation was two votes for each state in the Senate and the three-fifths compromise for the House of Representatives. Ratification was put to the people for approval in their state legislatures.  The new government, led by Washington, began the process of ruling by choice and not power. A decade later when Washington died, a popular print was of he and the Archangel Gabriel giving the Constitution to the American people.

       With 640 pages to go, I'm pausing, likely stopping, as I don't have the patience for this. It is very, very good, but it is too long. Also, I am not certain I wish to spend close to 18 more hours grappling with our 'original sin'. I acknowledge wholeheartedly that it remains unresolved today. I've long thought that it is our signal failure as a nation. But my view is that the immigrants who poured into America in the sixty years after the Civil War, and then again in the last half century, built our phenomenally successful society with those here before them, and together they forged a nation that delivered these self evident truths from coast to coast.