Ellis entered the
United States Army in August 1969 and spent three years teaching history at the
United States Military Academy at West Point before being discharged a captain in 1972. Ellis later joined the faculty at
Mount Holyoke College. In 1979, he was made full professor and later became the
Ford Foundation Professor of History. He has also taught at
Williams College and in the Commonwealth Honors College at the
University of Massachusetts. His scholarly work has concentrated on the
Founding Fathers of the United States, including biographies of
John Adams,
Thomas Jefferson, and
George Washington, the
American Revolution, and the history of the
Federalist Era, which lasted from 1788 to 1800. Ellis served as dean of faculty at
Mount Holyoke College in
South Hadley, Massachusetts from 1980 to 1990; following that, he was named by the trustees to the endowed
Ford Foundation Chair in history. Ellis retired from Mount Holyoke in 2012.
Presidential biographies Together with histories of the founding of the republic, since 1993 Ellis has written biographies about individual early presidents and, in 2010, a joint biography of John and Abigail Adams. Interested in how men shaped and were shaped by their times, he writes with a novelist's emphasis on character. Ellis is notable as a respected scholar whose work has also gained popular success; his biography of Jefferson and work on the Founding Fathers have been bestsellers, attaining sales of hundreds of thousands of copies.
John Adams As a result of his research, Ellis believed that
John Adams was underappreciated as the nation's second president; he worked to reveal the man's contributions and character. His book,
Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams, led to a revival of interest in Adams and new appreciation for his achievements.
Thomas Jefferson In his book
American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1996), Ellis explored the character and personality of Jefferson, and his many contradictions. He emphasized how important privacy was to him, and how the president and statesman preferred to work behind the scenes in politics, through letters, meetings and discussions over dinners. Ellis noted Jefferson's success in this style. In relation to one of the major questions about his private life, whether Jefferson had a liaison with his slave
Sally Hemings, Ellis suggested that evidence was "inconclusive." His deep analysis of Jefferson's character led him to conclude that the statesman did not have the liaison. Specifically, Ellis says in the appendix to
American Sphinx: Unless the trustees of the
Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation decide to exhume the remains and do
DNA testing on Jefferson as well as some of his alleged progeny, it leaves the matter a mystery about which advocates on either side can freely speculate... This means that for those who demand an answer the only recourse is plausible conjecture, prefaced as it must be with profuse statements about the flimsy and wholly circumstantial character of the evidence. In that spirit, which we might call the spirit of responsible speculation, after five years mulling over the huge cache of evidence that does exist on the thought and character of the historical Jefferson, I have concluded that the likelihood of a liaison with Sally Hemings is remote. On November 5, 1998, Dr. Eugene Foster and his team published the results of
Y-DNA analysis of Jefferson male-line descendants (he had no known male descendants but Y-DNA is passed on virtually unchanged through direct male-line descendants) and descendants of others reputed to be associated with him. Foster reported that DNA results showed a match between the Jefferson male line and the descendant of
Eston Hemings. Given that and other historical evidence, they concluded that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Eston and probably of Sally Hemings' other children. The study showed no match between the Carr line, named by two of Jefferson's grandchildren as the father(s) of Hemings' children, and the Eston Hemings descendant, disproving the major alternative to Thomas Jefferson as father.
George Washington In
His Excellency: George Washington (2004), Ellis sought to penetrate myth and examine Washington during three major periods of his life. Ellis described how Washington's experiences in earlier leadership contributed to his actions and development as president. Ellis wrote that "we do not need another epic [Washington biography], but rather a fresh portrait focused tightly on Washington's character", which the critic Jonathan Yardley said he had achieved. ==False claims of combat service and anti-war leadership==