Nature of the American Nation: Analyzing Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution
In The Radicalism of the American Revolution Gordon Wood seeks to explain both the origins and nature of American society by way of juxtaposing the colonial and early republic periods of American history in order to exemplify the sweeping changes which occur as American gains independence and forms a nationhood. This approach yields an account of thirteen distinct colonies that experience a simultaneous unification and restructuring, on a scale of which had not been known in any nation or colony at that moment. In searching for a valid explanation for the unique combination of events that befall the early American nation, Wood offers neither politics or the Revolutionary War, but a wave of social radicalism; a philosophical phenomenon that he asserts predates the commonly noted political rationale for these changes. Furthermore, Wood believes the social revolution he describes in detail should supersede the physical revolution against Great Britain in defining the history of the Early Republic; Wood proposes previously ignored strata of historical events—those he terms radical—are in fact the foundation of the American nation.
Wood moves in this direction despite the traditional tendency of historians to focus on the Revolutionary War and parallel political (republican) rhetoric as the key to understanding the transition between the colonialism and independence. In fact, Wood excludes the physical conflict—the Revolutionary War—from his analysis in preference for a revolution that was just as “radical and social as any revolution in history.” Instead of explaining the emergence of the American republic as being rooted in the Revolutionary War, Wood proposes instead that an American Revolution transpired simultaneously—a half century of social radicalism. In excluding the War, Wood moves away from the historical narratives that explain America as rising in the wake of a noble rebellion, instead suggesting the War for Independence is merely a and taking a bold and welcomed step in the direction of social history. First, Wood’s seeks to re-establish the meaning of the phrase American Revolution from a physical event to a philosophical one.
Wood is quite successful in demonstrating how in such a breviloquent epoch thirteen muddled colonies—each with different histories, philosophies and demographics—came to share a solidarity that first breaks with monarchial traditions, then embraces republicanism, and finally yields to democratic influences. Accordingly, Wood supports this thesis in three parts which focus respectively on those periods of monarchy, republicanism, and democracy. This format implies and allows for both a pattern of chronology and thematic change, but Wood is not implying a universal relationship between time and progress in the American nation. Wood’s argument relies on the emergence of the so-called “common man” as the American Republic dawns out of Monarchial society but subsequently consumes itself and leaves behind a commercially and self-interested dominated Democratic society. It is this result—democratic, self-interested, mob rule—that Wood asserts sent the founding fathers to their deaths unsatisfied with the state of the American nation.
Wood’s thesis is not invulnerable, however rich and colorful Wood’s scholarship might be. He fails to resolve any of the paradoxes which betray the American republic; namely women and African Americans. Wood also seems to underestimate the American aristocracy in placing an emphasis on the rise of the middle-class order and overstating the decline of elitist interests in American politics. While he successfully argues many valid points in establishing his radical revolution, the unresolved issues—slavery and treatment of women—reveals cracks in the foundation of his thesis.
Nowhere does Gordon Wood place more emphasis than on the significance of societal changes that occur in the early American republic. The societal baseline—from which Wood will demonstrate a radical shift away from—in this investigation is colonial or Monarchial America. Wood presents colonies truthfully as lower-hierarchical elements part of the English social system. One generation or so removed from feudalism, the English system for governing the colonies, according to Wood, is based more on patriarchal dependence than sheer monarchism. Missing from Wood’s colonial description, notably, is the American penchant for self-government that dates to the earliest colonization. While not universal, the existence of limited self-government in the colonies is significant to (but absent from) Wood’s argument. Regardless, Wood’s description of a “Truncated Society”—lacking both the extreme wealth and extreme poverty characteristic of a society—makes American both unique from all other societies and the likely host for the radicalism that will bring liberty and egalitarianism to a former dependent. It would be logical that in a band of colonies where the difference between the social poles is significantly smaller than say France or England a radically equal society could in fact emerge. Wood likens this movement, the republican revolution, to a “utopian movement” with the goal of destroying the bonds of holding older monarchical society together: kinship, patriarchy, and patronage. What is more is that the movement comes to fruition (if only for a partial generation) and “[w]ithin decades following the Declaration of Independence, the United States became the most egalitarian nation in the history of the world, and it remains so today, regardless of its disparities of wealth.” The radical legacy of the American Revolution, Wood argues well, is hard to appreciate in the twenty-first century where American egalitarianism and middle-class (working) virtue has become status-quo.
Although dramatic and sweeping, the American Revolution is ultimately unsuccessful in bringing the liberty spoken of in the Declaration of Independence to all those living amidst the new nation. In particular, women and African-Americans were among those curiously excluded from the distribution freedoms and denied enfranchisement. Wood admits that the wholesale exclusion of both women and blacks seems to contradict the momentum that his thesis necessitates, and he attempts to maneuver out of this trap by asserting that abolition, civil rights, and women’s rights are consequences of the American Revolution instead of omissions.
One obvious dependency the revolutionaries did not completely abolish was that of nearly half a million Afro-American slaves, and their failure to do so, amidst all their high-blown talk of liberty, makes them seem inconsistent and hypocritical in our eyes. Yet is important to realize that the Revolution suddenly and effectively ended the cultural climate that had allowed black slavery, as well as other forms of bondage and unfreedom, to exist throughout the colonial period without serious challenge…The Revolution in effect set in motion ideological and social forces that doomed the institution of slavery in the North and led inexorably to the Civil War.
This logic is too convenient for Wood, and ignores the truth that republicanism—or democracy for that matter—is just as capable of endorsing tyranny as monarchical society. Wood is guilty of exclusively associating monarchy and tyranny, despite the fact flaw in said argument. Tyranny is tyranny, plain and simple; and the disfranchisement of African Americans and women represents as tyrannical an element (conservative and not radical) in the American republic as any colonial policy legislated in London.
The failure to dissolve the practice of slavery represents the greatest shortcoming of the founding generation. Despite the presence of anti-slavery sentiment and relaxed conditions among slaves, the undeniable truth is that African Americans were consciously designated private property instead of citizens by legal consensus. It remains inexcusable that as dedicated as such men may be have to both the concept of liberty and republican virtue, neither George Washington nor Thomas Jefferson could fully commit to emancipation of his slaves while still alive—regardless of economic implications or in light of their “moral” treatment of slaves. For all the rhetorical nobility ascribed to the physical revolution (the Revolutionary War) against the tyranny imposed by a monarchial England, little sympathy was aroused when Gabriel’s Rebellion occurred in Virginia, 1800. An artisan-slave who was probably motivated by the taste of freedom offered by the newfound physical mobility and financial semi-independence of black artisans, Gabriel’s attempt to foment a slave rebellion marks an event more fitting of the descriptor “radical” than many of Wood’s anglo-exclusive socio-political examples. Had Gabriel’s revolt (or any of several other noted slave revolts) succeeded in bringing forth debate and serious consideration for the liberty that founders described as characteristic of the early American republic, perhaps the founding generation would have been forced to explaining how the rhetoric of the Declaration and the law of the Constitution did not apply to African Americans. Since this did not occur, the founding generation may be apologized for by the likes of Wood, and is all too often exonerated from labels of hypocrisy. Yet the execution of Gabriel and some twenty-six co-conspirators for crimes similar those committed by participants in Shays’s rebellion (whom were granted amnesty) should suffice for proof of the founding hypocrisy.
The same radicalism that breaks the patriarchal and monarchal chains and distributes liberty to the “common (white) man” fails to invite the wives and daughters of those common men. Considering Catherine Allgor’s scholarship on contributions made by the women of Washington City during the first generation of federal politics, it would seem Wood, like the founding generation, comes up short in giving ladies their due credit (and opportunity) in the formation of the American nation. Typically relegated to a domestic role, most women in the early republic where denied political autonomy. Wood either overly optimistically or apologetically spins this reality, in similar fashion to his dealings with slavery, by asserting that women made tremendous gains during this period.
However retarded it may appear to us, this shift in meaning gave women a new sphere of significance separate from that of men. Since they now had become the principal civilization agents of a new and raw society…they needed to be educated in the liberal arts even more than men.
While surely the likes of Dolly Madison and Abigail Adams were pleased to see this increased emphasis on education for women, it is not satisfactory to dismiss the countless contributions that such educated women could have made on the local, state, an federal levels of politics during these critical years of social-political development. Any momentum to involve women in federal politics that was built by the levees hosted by Martha Washington and Abigail Adams was stamped out with the arrival of Thomas Jefferson’s “Republic” in 1801.
American women who were not the wives of federal politicians none-the-less rebelled socially against the patriarchal restraints being imposed during the supposedly radical American Revolution. In Philadelphia, for example, these individual rebellions were made by women who used sex and sexuality to both combat their patriarchal suppression and explore their own individuality. Wood is aware of such activity, but cites the “greater say over their of marriage partners” as a radical improvement within the patriarchy. While factual, Wood fails again to resolve a major paradox of the American Revolution.
Historian Joanne Freeman, like Gordon Wood, finds the concept of honor played a particularly central role in the political and social transformations of the early republic. Wood perceives honor—particular that which he refers to as the classical virtue—as the dominate motive behind the actions of the political vanguard. In the case of George Washington—Virginian aristocrat and anglophile—Wood cites the first President’s lifelong obsession with manners, as well as an affinity with the living up to the ideals cast by Roman General Cincinnatus. Perhaps no moment is more significant to the early republic than Washington resigning his commission and handing his sword to congress on December 23, 1783; an act that has been aptly compared to the Roman dictator who embodied virtue and simplicity. In Washington’s action, the omnipotence of classic virtue manifest itself in the highest form. However, General Washington is not the only subject moved to extremes in the name of honor. Washington’s Vice-President and second American President, John Adams, took somewhat drastic—Adams developed a uncontrollable neurosis about the status of his name and honor—measures in courting public recognition, protecting his reputation, and seeking retribution against those who would sully his name.
Perhaps no better example exists of a political figure ruined by questionable republican virtue than Aaron Burr. The ultimate American pariah for several generations, Burr demonstrated the price of violating classical virtue in the early republic. There exists no dearth of criticism; Burr came to be ostracized for his impiety, ambition, hyper-sexuality, and treason. His most significant offense, from which his reputation would never recover, was an attempt to obtain the Presidency during the 1800 electoral logjam. With the exception of Burr’s bizarre treason episode, the man’s offenses seem somewhat trivial, especially when viewed through a twentieth or twenty-first century lens. For example, Burr’s earliest malfeasance was to physically seek political office. This violated the Cincinnatus embodiment exemplified by Washington and Jefferson; who never publicly sought political offices but retired to their Virginia estates and waited for the offices to seek them. In the wake of Burr’s transgression against the established code of honor, he was to find himself a ruined man even before his infamous duel with Alexander Hamilton.
The argument which Wood briefly elaborates on and Freeman dedicates an entire scholarly work to, is the declining role of honor as the American Revolution is realized. Both scholars rely on the steady decline of dueling from politics as evidence of the overall abrogation of honor as a governing dynamic in both politics and society. According to Freeman, the significance and aftermath of the Hamilton-Burr Duel is often overstated in this decline because dueling was already unpopular at the time 1804. Yet given the participants and the outcome, it is no surprise that any discussion of dueling is dominated by Hamilton-Burr. Whereas attributing the decline of dueling as an institution to the death of Hamilton might be tempting, Wood suggests that egalitarianism—a critical component of the American Revolution—destroyed dueling and eventually honor codes.
Although Aaron Burr’s killing of Alexander Hamilton in 1804 in a duel did much to intensify condemnation of the practice, it was the spread of egalitarian sentiments that most effectively undermined it. When servants began challenging others to duels, many gentlemen realized that the code of honor had lost its meaning.
While the institution of dueling—and the concept of honor codes for that matter—continued sparingly well into the nineteenth century, it is clear that a social transformation occurred between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and left a wake of egalitarian—democratic even—sentiment that is incompatible with previously exclusively aristocratic practices. Where Aaron Burr is ruined for trying to “steal” the presidency in 1800, Martin Van Buren shamelessly pursues the highest office in 1836 and succeeds with little or no criticism.
To avoid the mistake of examining only the actors who stared in federal politics, it is prudent for historians to examine the lives of average citizens; those that Wood labels “common men.” In shoemaker George Robert Twelves Hewes—a witness to the Boston Massacre, Boston Tea Party, and Revolutionary War—history has the rare biography of such a man. As a shoemaker in Boston, Hewes would be characterized by Wood as a colonial plebian: near the bottom of the Anglican hierarchy and subject to the whim of superior members of the patriarchy. Alfred Young’s scholarship on Hewes confirms Wood’s description of the pre-Revolutionary social structure, particularly the extreme level of dependence the lower classes had to the landed gentry. As a young man, Hewes demonstrates the requisite deference in the presence of such aristocratic types as master silversmith Paul Revere. But in his early adulthood Hewes verbally offends John Malcolm, a fiery loyalist Bostonian former Sea Captain, Army officer and customs official. Malcolm, who in his opinion requited the respect of gentleman by the lowly Hewes, takes such extreme offense to Hewes conduct that he takes it upon himself to attack Hewes, partially impaling his skull with a walking cane. Malcolm is subsequently tarred-and-feathered. After then the American Revolution occurs, and by the 1830’s Hewes becomes the subject of two separate historical biographies on what becomes known as the Boston Tea Party. The poor shoemaker who goes from the paradigm of humble deference in the face of aristocracy to stubborn and brash defiance in the face of the same aristocracy, and yet further to “hero” status yields a brilliant subjective microcosm that shows changing attitudes consistent with Wood’s.
Wood charges commerce and self-interest with co-opting the radicalism of the American Revolution and creating a middle class dominated, self-interested democracy. While this assessment probably gives the American republic too much credit, there is no doubt that commerce brings radical change to the America physically and socially. While the American Revolution sought to distance federal government from its Anglican predecessor, commercially, the new American nation was desperate to emulate the economic greatness of its former superior. Despite calls to cut ties to the Old World, American participated in industrial espionage and what is contemporaneously known as intellectual piracy; as America great efforts to rob emerging European industrial nations of both labor and technology that meant profit for America. Nor would Americans waver in the process of participating in the paradox of emulation European nations to gain independence from them.
In the domestic sphere of commerce, the federal and state governments were given the task of increasing the “common good” by means of providing whatever internal improvements would increase trade. In New York between 1819 and 1825 sections of the Erie Canal were completed culminating in the much discussed “marriage” between the waters of Lake Erie and the Hudson River. In the process a great section of the American frontier or wilderness was thus connected with the older and more established American coastal and inlet societies. The result was a market explosion and economic windfall that results from the new ability of frontier and coastal markets to exchange goods. Carol Sheriff’s scholarship on the canal contends that while the emergence of the canal and all subsequent commercial endeavors certainly meant success or “progress” for a select group of well-invested merchants and developers, there is no dearth of evidence to suggest the canal caused irreversible destruction to the way of life and property of many citizens. In question during this and other parallel commercial episodes was that question of how a hybrid state/local body interpret the goal of “common good” in the process of administrating the construction, expansion, maintenance, and operation of the Erie Canal.
Market expansion, class stratification, taxation, moral values, religion, and division of labor—Wood’s “interest groups”—all manifest themselves in the Canal Boards numerous rulings. In the Canal Board, which altered the lives and livelihood of untold hundreds of New Yorkers, Sheriff presents a detailed example of what Wood refers to as a “celebrated economic interest…the best adhesive a society could have.”
While the emergence of joint-stock companies as “minor republics” carrying out such entrepreneurial endeavors such as banks, canals, insurance, manufacturing, and other business characterize the emergence of self-interested democracy, the history of personal debt defines the common man. In Wood’s description of colonial America, personal debt separates the aristocracy and gentry from the commoners. Proprietary wealth allowed the gentry and above a residual income and subsequently spared them the task of earning a living. However, those below the gentry were subject to borrowing with interest from these “leisurely gentleman” in order to earn their own living. Although reckless gentlemen could incur massive debt, it was most often the commoner who relied on this system of patriarchal dependence. As such, if the American Revolution truly breaks the patriarchal dependence, as Wood suggests, personal finance needed to be radically altered. Wood offers that inflation and “laws passed protecting debtors were devastating to creditors, but we have not always appreciated precisely what this meant to the gentry socially and morally. …stable and static proprietary wealth was the principal source of the gentry’s authority and independence. Bruce H. Mann’s scholarship focuses precisely on debt in the early republic period, and affirms Wood’s portrayal of a society where the changing meaning of debt means the changing meaning of social class. Mann identifies a group of well-minded lawmakers and public figures who recognize the harsh eighteenth century economic realities and subsequent frequency of debt, or more appropriately, insolvency. In the eyes of this progressive minded consortium, bankruptcy was a logical and moral step for the fledgling Republic to undertake. The other discernible contingency argues for strict punitive reprisals for gross debtors; and rails against the morally corrupt who brought such shameful predicament unto themselves. However, like with all great dichotomies, there is an inevitable grey area. In this case, it occurs in the difference between those who become bankrupt as a result of uncontrollable market factors and those who become bankrupt as a result of vices like greed, naiveté, or excessive consumerism. This gray area, in essence the questions of creating a—perhaps legally defined—two tired definition of bankruptcy (or at least eligibility for the leniency that could be granted by the federal government) emerges. This type of double standard often meant that despite being equally bankrupt, wealthy merchants or businessman were perceived as victims of natural business forces, while bankrupt farmers were seen as morally corrupt. While ultimately the Bankruptcy Act of 1800 is repealed, a greater sense of economic independence—or egalitarianism—remains the legacy of this piece of early republic radicalism. In the wake of this economic radicalism, the common man will gain not only respectability, but dominance in the American nation.
In the absence of a patriarchal society and in the presence of a new commercially dominated society that held few if any dependencies, a vacuum emerges which is filled by a religious rising referred to as the Second Great Awakening. The extreme religiosity and revivalism of this era marks the beginnings of Methodism, Baptism, Presbyterianism, and Mormonism in America. Wood explains the American religious phenomenon in a similar fashion to that of self-interested politics: cohesiveness. “People cut loose from traditional social relationships…were necessarily thrown at a considerable distance from each other, and into a very diffused state of society…Many others came to believe that Christianity might be the best means of tying Americans together.” Wood additionally draws on the role of religion as a moral institution that George Washington mentions in his Farewell Address. While the Second Great Awakening meant the unification of many previously isolated or minority citizens within a religious context, the differences between the different sects served to paradoxically isolate these groups. According to Wood, the other side to the religious fervor was further separation of citizens. In scholarship focused on Robert Matthews (Matthias) Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz provide a just such an example of religion taking a turn for the worse during the Second Great awakening. In this process of portraying and analyzing Robert Matthews and his bizarre cult-following, Johnson and Wilentz provide the reader with an enlarged view of both the role of “new” religion and gender roles in early 19th century America. Yet while the austere environment—or kingdom—created by Robert Matthews in upstate New York may seem on the surface like a desperate attempt to escape the traditional vices of a city—prostitution, gambling, and alcohol—it is then ironic that Matthias’s kingdom breeds a far more dangerous social vices in polygamy and domestic violence. Perhaps Wood is correct in asserting that religion accelerates the disintegration of the republic rather than strengthening it.
Ultimately the pendulum of judgment swings more toward Gordon Wood’s idea of the American Revolution than away from it. The social upheaval and countless layers of redefinition and refinement experienced during the first generation of the American nation are evidence of that omnipresent trait: malleability. The goals of the Revolution changed in the middle of the revolution itself; the Constitution changes; the body politic sheds a layer of skin every year; and the even American history itself changes over time. The one great consistency in the American nation is, paradoxically, inconsistency. Given this, Gordon Wood has created an exhaustively researched body of scholarship that demonstrates how dramatic—how radical—these changes can be and just how flexible the American nation is. The early American republic takes on many different forms to many different inhabitants. While the Revolution itself eventually escapes from the control of the founders who intended it steer it in a republican direction, this does not spell failure for the Revolution itself. On the contrary, the winds generated in this period serve to level the social structure of the nation, leaving behind a level arena for all those left standing.
Works Cited
Allgor, Catherine. Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of the Washington Help Build a City and a Government. Charlottesville and London: University Press of the Virginia, 2000.
Ben-Atar, Doron S. Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004.
Egerton, Douglas R. Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 & 1802. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.
Ellis, Joseph J. American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
Freeman, Joanne B. Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001.
Isenberg, Nancy “The ‘Little Emperor’:Aaron Burr, Dandyism, and the Sexual Politics of Treason” in Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic. ed. Jeffery L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, 129-158. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. p
Johnson, Paul E. and Sean Wilentz. The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th Century America. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Lyons, Clare A. Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender & Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
Mann, Bruce H. Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Richards, Leonard L. Shays’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
Shefiff, Carol. The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996.
Smith, Barbara Clark. “The Adequate Revolution.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 51, No. 4. (Oct., 1994), pp.684-692.
Weinstein, Allen and David Rubel. The Story of America: Freedom and Crisis from Settlement to Superpower. New York: DK Publishing, 2002.
Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.
Young, Alfred E. The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999.
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