A COUNTRY WITH NO NAME: Tales From the Constitution.<i> By Sebastian De Grazia</i> .<i> Pantheon: 432 pp., $27.50</i>

Most Americans hold fast to their view that the heroes of our history--particularly the country’s Revolutionary War leaders--were paragons of patriotic virtue. Like children feigning belief in Santa Claus long after they suspect the truth, Americans would rather accept than question their heroic stature.

We treat the Constitution as similarly beyond challenge. It is our civic bible. Like the Good Book, it is more respected than read and, more often than not, misinterpreted. Efforts to surmount these barriers of self-inflicted ignorance seldom make a dent. In this area, as in so much of our public life, Americans prefer comforting fantasy to disquieting facts.

In “A Country With No Name,” Sebastian De Grazia, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Machiavelli, challenges the orthodox history with some rather bitter truths that he attempts to sugarcoat with a contemporary romance. His plan: Construct a series of fictional tales about major legal decisions and well-known figures in American constitutional history and have them told by a fictional character, Claire St. John, a knowledgeable young Englishwoman.

St. John, an attractive graduate student in early American history, has been hired to tutor a 19-year-old boy, Oliver Huggins, who has traveled widely with his highly placed father and is now preparing for college. The tutoring sessions are conducted in Huggins’ otherwise empty home.

St. John arrives for their first session and formally announces that she is Huggins’ “teller of tales.” There are, she tells him, to be 12 daily lectures, delivered as tales, because, she reports, “My view of history is that it consists of tales.” St. John, a learned Scheherazade, shows up each day and discusses the roles George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, John Calhoun, Abraham Lincoln, Henry Thoreau and several others played in the development of our Constitution, its amendments and interpretations. Her lectures offer a rather more critical view of the men, who most Americans believe lived lives of selfless patriotic perfection.

The book’s recurring theme--the basis for its title--contends that for much of its early history, this country had no official name, a shortcoming that De Grazia deems a “curious and important deficiency.” At the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, the victorious colonies considered themselves independent countries. Under the “Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union”--De Grazia refers to it as the First Constitution--the colonies became states with little apparent loss of their autonomy. Each had definable borders, a constitution and a name.

When the framers recognized that the government under the Articles of Confederacy was not working, they secretly drafted a replacement, the Constitution of 1787. In doing so, they were careful not to disturb the states’ sense of independence any more than was necessary, yet still they wanted to create a federal government strong enough to protect their economic and political interests. During the nation’s early years, names for the country like Columbia (for Columbus) and Yankees (from the tune “Yankee Doodle”) were bandied about. None stuck. Rather than denote a country, for a long period, the United States of America described a place.

Citizens identified with a state rather than with the country, a fact that detracted from a sense of unity that, according to De Grazia, might have prevented the Civil War. At the least, it might have denied the South the war’s greatest general. When, at the outset of hostilities, Lincoln asked Robert E. Lee to head the Union forces, Lee replied: “I’m sorry, sir. I cannot fight against Virginia.”

George Washington is described in the tales as wealthy, well-known and able to command a respect that gave legitimacy to the framers’ draft of a new Constitution. He also gave stability to the nation when he agreed to serve two terms as the first president.

Washington had been a strict disciplinarian, ordering swift punishment by flogging for minor offenses and even swifter executions for volunteers who threatened not to march until they were paid. As De Grazia describes Washington: “His traits of stiffness or gravity and of pleasure in dress and pomp lent solemnity to any meeting and later, as some say, helped hedge the presidency with majesty.”

De Grazia’s book presents Chief Justice John Marshall, the most revered of American jurists, a “legal razzle-dazzle” artist who used his considerable argumentative powers to find in the Constitution authority for the Supreme Court that the framers probably never intended and, if intended, they most assuredly did not set out to establish in our civic bible.

Lincoln fares least well in De Grazia’s stories. In a chapter titled “Lincoln Wants a Nation of Blood Brothers,” the nation’s most respected president is portrayed as a very clever, even slick, lawyer and perennial politician who early on learned that he could win over an audience with well-chosen phrases and homespun fables. Known as a plain-speaking man of the people, he successfully represented railroads and other major entities whose interests were in direct conflict with those of the people.

Long before Lincoln was elected, relations between the southern and northern states had been degenerating over the issue of whether new states should be slave or free. De Grazia describes in some detail the north’s enactment of trade and tariff policies that enriched the north at the expense of the south. John C. Calhoun crafted major arguments advocating states’ rights that provided an intellectual basis for secession.

Several southern states had already seceded when Lincoln became president, but rather than negotiate, he called for 75,000 volunteers to recapture the fallen Ft. Sumter. Finding no authority in the Constitution to justify using force to keep the Union intact, he created this authority by sampling the ideas of political philosophers and the wording of the Declaration of Independence, giving a quasi-religious importance to terms like “fundamental law” and “perpetual.” In this fashion, Lincoln created a “union” from which no state could secede, a necessity in a war that consumed quantities of blood and treasure far beyond either side’s expectations.

De Grazia accurately shows that the Great Emancipator’s priority was to save the Union rather than to free the slaves. Lincoln hated slavery but shared the views of most whites during the period about the superiority of their race over that of Africans. Even so, he used the immorality of slavery as a major argument to support the Union.

Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation as a means of strengthening the north and weakening the south. The Confederacy, toward the end of the war, also offered freedom to slaves willing to fill its gaping infantry ranks. In the end, the north’s victory, such as it was, came as the result of its vastly superior resources rather than of any monopoly of principles.

De Grazia devotes his book’s final two chapters to the “Star-Spangled Banner,” showing how, despite its unsingability, it became the national anthem, and to our Constitution, showing how it changed through interpretation rather than amendment. There are worthwhile points here, but they are muddied by the tale teller and her tutee, who have been drawn to each other more and more each day.

As the stories proceed, St. John begins to flirt with Oliver--opening two buttons on her blouse, swinging her leg with an ankle bracelet and similarly provocative behaviors that served to arouse the 19-year-old student. While intended to lighten the fairly intellectual tone of the stories, I found the tutor’s tempting comments and actions and her student’s too-eager response unbecoming and inappropriate, enfeebling rather than enhancing the author’s major points about American history. By book’s end, the two display their readiness to sublimate historical enlightenment in favor of sexual communion.

Far more disquieting is the relatively minuscule role played by race in these historical tales. St. John’s stories tend to mirror rather than reform the orthodox view that slavery, while horrible, was a subordinate rather than a major theme in the country’s development. In fact, without the productivity and profit of slavery, the colonies--all of which benefited economically, directly or indirectly--would not have been able to finance the Revolutionary War.

De Grazia does point out that most of the founding fathers were slave owners who owed their wealth to speculation in slaves and lands. But there is no discussion of the key role as social stabilizers that blacks--slave and free--have played in this country. Through the subordination and disparagement of blacks as the easily identifiable “other,” a nation of immigrants gained a sense of cohesion and belonging that enabled working-class whites to accept a vast economic and class chasm between themselves and the rich.

While Jefferson and Lincoln predicted that blacks and whites could not co-exist as equals in this country, the presence of blacks has given the boast that America is a melting pot whatever validity it has. Perhaps that is another story, but it is one that De Grazia’s book leaves untold. The country, over time, found its name: America. Without acknowledging its racial history, though, America will never find its soul. In that quest, De Grazia’s book, despite its many fine aspects, will be of little help.