The works of Gordon Wood are not light reading. Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (Oxford, 2009) measures 2 1/2" thick and if thrown could put a clean hole in your drywall. Wood's research, which has won a Pulitzer Prize for a different book, looks into every nook and cranny of the early American experiment: military, cultural, religious, political, and economic. His writing moves easily across sweeping landscapes of history without forgetting to zoom in on illustrative individual stories. For the reader with endurance, I recommend Wood's work.
There is no way to wrap up the contents of this book in a little package, so I will share a few insights that struck me enough in the moment to dog-ear a page for later.
--The early decades of the American republic were persistently and oddly rural and agricultural. Much of the political leadership "assumed that American society would eventually become more like that of Europe and that what Franklin had once called the 'general happy Mediocrity' of America would generally disappear" (p318). Instead, America became a country in which most of us are part of a "happy mediocrity." And as a republic, Wood argues, this continues to be one of America's defining features. "Happy mediocrity." I'm sitting with that phrase for a while.
--American constitutional law was unique in the world. (It may still be, but I'm not qualified to make that assertion.) In other countries, constitutions were documents of theory, but after 1787 "American judges could now construe the all-too-brief words of the Constitution in relation to subject matter, intention, context, and reasonableness, as if they were the words of an ordinary statute" (p448). I have had front-row seats to this phenomenon through one of my favorite podcasts, Advisory Opinions (which I recommend to you), and Wood puts it in historical perspective.
(Aside: another favorite podcast of mine, The Rest Is History, has asserted that having a constitution that we try to take literally is bonkers. Tom and Dominic are incorrigible Anglophiles, making their opinion even more interesting with respect to early American history.)
(Another Aside: I find it fascinating that just as what we might call "statutory constitutionalism" was making its start in early American law, American evangelicalism also starting putting down roots. I see a parallel, perhaps related, between constitutional textualism and biblical literalism in Christianity.)
--The shift across the Atlantic from a monarchical to a republican world-view changed how social betters viewed social inferiors. In European culture, Wood writes, one has a station, a class, which is granted and from which one cannot hope to move. Thus royalty and nobility are called to take care of the lower classes regardless of how those lower classes are conducting themselves. They would never change. Early America, however, developed the view that since social standing was fluid, to help ones inferiors meant expecting them to better themselves and rise with the assistance. "The new reformers waned to imbue people not with deference or dependency but with 'correct moral principles'; they aimed to change the actual behavior of people. These middling reformers had transformed themselves, often by strenuous efforts at self-improvement and hard work. Why couldn't others do the same?" (p489). To embrace republicanism meant rejecting both the stuckness of social classes and charity for charity's sake.
-- The War of 1812 was conducted in strange, sloppy, and disastrous fashion, in large part because President Madison stuck to his republican guns. "Better to allow the country to be invaded and the capital burned than to build up state power in a European monarchical manner. It was a Republican war that Madison sought to wage in a republican fashion" (p698). He would not take action in lieu of Congress, usurping its prerogatives. He would not siphon money toward the war effort without Congress' approval. So concerned was Madison about concentrating executive power (the Republican party's great concern at the time) that the war was inefficient, unnecessarily lethal to American soldiers, and perhaps unnecessary in the first place. And it went on longer than it had to. It is worth comparing and contrasting this history with how the United States has conducted its wars in the past 70 years.
-- The feelings of opposition between Federalists (who saw top-down government authority as useful) and Republicans (who saw only bottom-up governance as virtuous) were so strong in this period that violence resulted--including one of the very few instances of assault inside the chambers of Congress. In our present time when folks assert that "we've never been as politically polarized as we are now" Wood's writing is a useful corrective. We may say that American culture goes through cycles of political amiability and violence, and perhaps we're at the bottom of the cycle in 2026. But we've got a solid history of believing that our fellow Americans hold viewpoints that need to be silenced with physical force. We may be good at unity, but we're also good at making each other into enemies.
-- In spite of the radical and inspiring emergence of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, the early republic was a hot mess. On every axis there existed great hopes, profound uncertainty, bitter disagreement, and stunning failures. No one knew what he was doing, really. One of Wood's closing reflections is on Thomas Jefferson's disbelief that the next generation of Americans could consider the question of slavery to be a moral question (p737). Yet it would become the defining moral question of the next violent convulsion of American history.
I recently went with a passel of middle-schoolers on a camping trip. It was amazing to me how much time (and sometimes material) was spent on discovering just how flammable spray sunscreen is, how fast a punctured soda can will spray out its contents, and what qualifies as a "pocket" in spike ball. As an adult, I could have told them the rules, of course (and there had to be some of that, for safety's sake), but they were determined to discover the rules by experimentation rather than fiat.
Is the American republic still an experiment? It certainly was in the first 40 years, with all the slop, damage, and discovery of experimentation. Thanks to Gordon Wood for opening up new vistas of understanding. About a week ago, as I was getting into the last fifth of this book, I heard on the radio that Gordon Wood died at 92 years of age. I hope he has gone to glory.
love,
emrys