English colonists in America were ruled — and protected — by an accumulation of laws set down in (and between) the Magna Carta, 1215, and the British Bill of Rights, 1689.
That’s what the best educated of these early colonists believed. But it didn’t turn out that way. Someone, in discussing Gordon Wood’s enlightening and Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Radicalization of the American Revolution,” recently characterized the “English adventure” in that part of the New World that would become the United States as being similar, though not nearly as bad, as setting out to colonize an area and depending on the graces of the present United States Congress for sound-minded support, aid and navigational assistance.
Wood — eccentrically, it once seemed to some — has concentrated his career since the 1960s on a previously ignored period of U.S. history, 1760-1828. Even today, most Americans know very little about the nation-changing era following the triumph of the Colonies’ Revolution over England. Up until “The Radicalization of the American Revolution,” the risky revolt by colonists against the world’s best trained military was perceived as a “conservative” uprising.
Compared to other revolutions before and after, relatively little blood was spilled. Wood, now the Alva O. Way University Professor Emeritus at Brown University, not only dissents brilliantly, and with excellent writing, but displays an immense store of (evidently unplumbed) research. He has vigorously, resolutely taken advantage of today’s store of primary documents as well as instructive mountains of monographs. For a resolute researcher let loose in the libraries and archives of universities not just in the United States but abroad, these are a gold mine, if at times seemingly an often obscure treasure. And he seems to have “read and reread nearly every pamphlet, sermon and tract concerned with politics that was written in the Revolutionary era,” one fellow scholar has said.It is due to such treasure troves that Wood has been able to take a keen bead on the shifting ideas, the intellectual, social, and instinctual developments of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period. And his instincts and supple mind has been able to “fuse” them into a “seamlessly” persuasive and riveting conclusion. That conclusion: The American Revolution was not what it has long been pictured — not a conservative revolution, but one that unleashed a middle class. The upheaval it turned out to be in the wake of the surrender by British Major Charles, Earl Cornwallis, at Yorktown October 19, 1821, seems to have been missed for an amazingly long time.
What was missed: The American Revolution was the most “radical and far-reaching event in American history.” It achieved numerous un-envisioned things, he writes in “Radicalism.” It “made possible the antislavery and women’s rights movements of the 19th century, in fact all our current egalitarian thinking.” It “destroyed aristocracy,” and inaugurated “an entirely new kind of popular politics,” “made the interests and prosperity of ordinary people — their pursuit of happiness — the goal of society and government.” In the democratic age that followed, public opinion mattered infinitely more than the public virtue that the Founders valued above attributes. The founders — who in hindsight should have known better — believed something altogether different would be created.
Before the Revolution broke out, all was English-minded throughout the British realm of the North American colonies. Wood points out that the British empire was unique in that the people there embraced notions of liberty, much more than the French, for instance. These English people enjoyed their liberty, confident in the knowledge that liberty was safeguarded in established English law, customs, privileges, established by a natural authority vested in the crown. In addition, Wood emphasizes, that English custom carefully divided the populace into two groups. The top was occupied by the patricians, those who had titles as “gentlemen” and exemplified the qualities most valued by mankind. They were, of course, mostly wealthy. But they also were always virtuous, honorable, and had a calling to greatness to serve the public in a conscientiously disinterested manner.
It’s true that once in office, these virtuous citizens patronized their friends and supporters and filled other available offices with like-minded public servants. Wood notes that those patricians did not regard such a patronage system as selfishly rewarding friends. This support of their peers was a duty for it insured uninterrupted service through “constant personal sacrifice” — one that obliged them to fill seats of power with other civic-minded members of this elite. Thus, only the brightest, most scrupulous were chosen to serve in office, and the public could take comfort that the most respectable leaders were getting the job done.
The rest of society was well defined by a lack of education, manners, and both social and professional skills. And by different laws. The elite were subject to a set of laws, and punishments that set them apart from what George Washington unfortunately once referred to as “the grazing multitude.”
The consequences of the Revolution — an evolving “republicanism,” meaning a wide and deep democracy — freed a new “middle-class” that overturned the founders’ dream that the original British-America social, and legal “balance” would be maintained, but without the interference (taxation without representation, etc.) of the Crown. It created a nation now free of the claims and supervision of the English Empire, one in which evolving new petite-bourgeois notions of what values were highly prized. Writes one scholar in praising Wood’s revelatory work, “The self-sacrificing political virtue that had been the supreme attribute of a ‘gentleman’ fragmented into the private virtues of honesty, temperance, charity and piety.” It was a society in which the homely daily virtues of shopkeepers, clerks, workmen, farmers and “even women” counted more than ever. But in creating this new society, the Founders made themselves obsolete.
Perhaps this originally alarming concept is what has made Wood so attractive to bright young people — his overturning of conventional assumptions. In the film, “Good Will Hunting,” Matt Damon and Ben Affleck placed a brisk intellectual duel in a Harvard student hangout; it had to do with a cutting discussion of Wood’s work. In another film his name was morphed into a synonym for serious scholarship in general. “Wicked awesome ... all that Gordon Wood business.”
This text, sweeping as it does from 1760 to 1825, brilliantly shows the American Revolution was “as radical and social as any revolution in history,” as one admirer says. And of course it was radical and social in a very special 18th Century sense. Wood himself says that “one class did not overthrow another; the poor did not supplant the rich. But social relationships, the way people were connected one to another were changed — decisively ...” and forever. Wood’s work has changed the way historians think about and view history.
Because of the Revolution the world would never be the same. We are fortunate in great part due to the fact that Wood doesn’t ask “why people do things, but what they think they are doing.”
And with these people, in that time, in those circumstances, that inquiry makes for a bracing, mind-stirring adventure.