Founding Crimes examines how America’s founders challenged British authority while also allowing injustices such as slavery, Native dispossession, political exclusion, and corruption to persist. Why was it important for you to write this book?

I wrote Founding Crimes because I don’t believe you can love a country honestly without being willing to look at all of it.  For most of my life I understood the founding of our country heroically, simply as courage, genius, liberty, and stopped there.  The Revolution produced some of the most radical language of freedom ever written, but the same men who risked everything also built a new nation that  was built and sustained by systems of unfreedom — slavery, dispossession, exclusion, and the ordinary corruption of men protecting their own interests.   Founding Crimes examines that contradiction as its central subject rather than an obscure footnote.  I wanted to give readers a founding they could actually reckon with: the daring and the crimes in the same frame, told with enough honesty that the achievement ends up meaning more, not less.

Why was it important to include “witnesses” such as Phillis Wheatley, Abigail Adams, Elizabeth Freeman, Benjamin Banneker, and Robert Carter III alongside better-known founding figures?

Because they were there, and they saw it clearly — often more clearly than the men we usually quote.  History told only through the powerful is only half a history.   It’s easy to dismiss a modern critique of the founders as hindsight. But Phillis Wheatley was writing about liberty while she was enslaved. Abigail Adams told her husband at that time to “remember the ladies” while the new government was still being imagined. Elizabeth Freeman heard the words “all men are born free and equal” and walked into a courtroom to hold Massachusetts to those ideals. Benjamin Banneker wrote directly to Thomas Jefferson and named the hypocrisy to his face. Robert Carter III freed more than four hundred people when almost none of his peers would free one. These weren’t anachronisms. They were contemporaries and people who saw the gap between the words and the deeds and said so out loud.   Their witness is what makes this a story about choices, not just circumstances. 

How did you approach writing about historical figures who are often celebrated while also acknowledging their contradictions and failures?

I approached them the way I’d want to be approached — honestly, and as an adult.  I resisted the urge to resolve the contradiction, because the contradiction is the point. A founder can be both a liberator and an enslaver; saying so plainly isn’t an attack, it’s accuracy.   It would have been tempting either to excuse everything because of what these men built, or to reduce them to their worst acts and throw the rest away. Neither does justice to history or to the modern reader. So my rule was to hold the greatness and the guilt in the same hand: for example, to let Jefferson write the most luminous sentence in the language and to keep the salves he owned.  A founder can be both a liberator and an enslaver.  I was careful not to characterize anyone as just a hero or even a villain.  Real people don’t come that way.   We all go through life with flaws and weaknesses and, yet, heroically.  I resisted the urge to resolve the contradiction because the contradiction is the point of being human.

Some readers may approach the book with strong opinions about the founding era. What would you say to readers who feel uncomfortable examining the contradictions you explore? 

I understand the discomfort.  I felt it when I realized the flaws and weaknesses of the great men we celebrate.   I’m not asking anyone to stop loving this country or admiring what the founders accomplished. I’m asking us to love it the way you love a real person — with open eyes.  A patriotism that can only survive if we hide half the story is a fragile thing. The one I’m after is sturdier: it can hold the greatness and the crimes together and still believe the American promise is worth keeping. You can honor the founders and still tell the truth about them; I think that’s the only honor worth giving.

Author Links: Amazon | GoodReads