Empire Of Liberty

Sad news today.  Gordon S Wood, the great historian of early America, died when hit by a car in the parking lot of a Shaw's supermarket in Rhode Island.  Though 92, Wood remained active, attending and speaking at conferences this year.

I've read his books Empire of Liberty, Power and Liberty, and Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and have The Radicalism of the American Revolution on my reading list for this summer.  Empire of Liberty is the story of the democratization of the new republic in its first 4 decades to an extent unanticipated by the Founders, and probably unwanted as to at least some of them.

Wood trained at Harvard under the eminent historian Bernard Bailyn.  I've read several of Bailyn's books; The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America (which I wrote about here), Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours, and Illuminating History: A Reflection of Seven Decades.  Another Bailyn book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, is also on my summer reading list.

In 2019, when the New York Times published the ridiculously ahistorical 1619 Project, the World Socialist Web Site, a Trotskyite organization, published the first extensive critique of the project when it interviewed liberal, progressive, and socialist historians of early America, who unanimously panned the publication, including Wood who characterized it as "so wrong in so many ways" (his full interview is here).

Earlier this year, Wood published his thoughts on America's 250th anniversary in National Review, "The Five Greatest Words in the Declaration".  Some excerpts:

In the Declaration of Independence, the 250th anniversary of which we are celebrating this year, the Founders put down five significant words that came to define America’s culture — “all men are created equal.” No phrase could have been more radical, more momentous. Even the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in 1789, with its statement that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights,” does not have the same power and significance.

Equality was based on a new understanding of people’s capacity to transform themselves. Educated people in the late 18th century came to believe — it was the basic premise of all enlightened thinking — that people were not born to be what they might become. 

Many enlightened American slaveholders (but, alas, not Jefferson) assumed that at birth they were no different from their black slaves; they had all started with the same blank slate. William Byrd, a wealthy slaveholder and learned member of the Royal Society, was as much of an aristocrat as Virginia was ever to know, yet he sincerely believed that “the principal difference between one people and another proceeds only from the differing opportunities of improvement.” Lieutenant Governor Francis Fauquier of Virginia, Jefferson’s dining and music partner, made the point more bluntly: “White, Red, or Black, polished or unpolished,” he declared in 1760, “Men are Men.” James Boswell, Dr. Johnson’s great biographer, during his tour to the Hebrides in 1773, was surprised to find a black African servant in the north of Scotland whose manners were no different from those of a white servant from Bohemia. But then he realized that he had forgotten the modern presumption that culture was man-made. “A man is like a bottle,” he observed, “which you may fill with red wine or with white.”

Education, which had been important only to New England Puritans, suddenly became an American obsession.

And not just the education of elites but of all the people. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 put it best, decreeing that “religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.

Americans now began creating numerous learned academies and historical societies and flooded their society with printed matter designed to inform the new republican citizenry. Three-quarters of all the books and pamphlets published in America between 1637 and 1800 appeared in the last 35 years of the 18th century. Between 1786 and 1795, 28 learned and gentlemanly magazines were established, six more in these few years than in the entire colonial period. By 1810, Americans were buying more than 20 million copies of 376 newspapers annually — even though half the population was under the age of 16 and one-fifth was enslaved and generally prevented from reading. This was the largest aggregate circulation of newspapers of any country in the world.

But the most important humanitarian organizations of the revolution focused on slavery. Hereditary chattel slavery — one person owning the life and labor of another person and that person’s heirs — is virtually incomprehensible to those living in the West today, even though there may be millions of people in the world presently still enslaved.

Slavery existed in a multitude of cultures for thousands of years without substantial criticism — until the late 18th century and the American Revolution. Although many modern historians have called the Revolution’s inability to free all the slaves its greatest failure, they have committed the great sin of anachronism by assuming that everyone in the past must have known that slavery was an evil. These historians therefore have not fully appreciated that the Revolution defied a world that for millennia had taken slavery for granted. It was the Revolution that for the first time in history made slavery a problem, and it led to the first instance of states’ abolishing the practice. Not only did eight Northern states abolish slavery in the aftermath of the Declaration of Independence, but slaveholders in the Southern states were thrown on the defensive and, for the first time, had to justify an institution that they hitherto had taken for granted. They fell back on the alleged racial deficiencies of blacks. The antislavery movement that arose out of the Revolution inadvertently fostered an ideology of racism in America.

The meaning of these five words in the Declaration of Independence was expanded in the succeeding decades to the point where every white man felt he was equal to every other such American. Once invoked, the idea of equality could not be stopped, and it tore through American culture and society with awesome power. It became what Herman Melville in 1851 called “the great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy!” The “Spirit of Equality” did not merely cull the “selectest champions from the kingly commons,” but it spread “one royal mantle of humanity” over all Americans and brought “democratic dignity” to even “the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike.”