The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 PDF
Preview The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787
The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787 By Gordon S. Wood The Creation of the American Republic, 1776—1787 The Radicalism of the American Revolution T H E C R E A T I O N OF T H E A M E R I C A N R E P U B L I C 1776-1787 by GORDON S. WOOD W • W NORTON 8c COMPANY New York • London To My Mother and Father Copyright © 1969 by the University of North Carolina Press First published as a Norton paperback 1972 by arrangement with The University of North Carolina Press; reissued 1993 Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Virginia All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Wood, Gordon S. The creation of the American Republic, 1776- 1787. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Political science— History— United States. I. Title. {JA84.U5W6 1972] 320.9'73'03 72-4595 ISBN 0-393-31040-X W W Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 W W. Norton & Company Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WC1A 1PU Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 A new science of politics is needed for a new world. —ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, I 835 Preface Joel Barlow, in his Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe, published in 1792, suggested that what really separated the free from the oppressed of the world was simply a “habit of thinkingIndeed, said Barlow, the mind of man was “the only foundation’* for any system of politics. Men never submitted to a king because he was stronger or wiser than they were, but because they believed him bom to govern. And likewise men have become free and equal when they have thought they were so. When men asserted that nature had established inequalities among themselves, and thus had given to some the right of governing others, what they actually meant, said Barlow, was cultural nature, not physical. Therefore Aristotle was as right in teaching that some were bom to command and others to be commanded as the French National Assembly was in de claring that men were bom free and equal. What men believed, said Barlow, was what counted. Many “astonishing effects... are wrought in the world by the habit of thinking.” It was custom, mental familiarity, culture, not force, that supported social grada tions and distinctions, and even tyranny itself. But “let the peo ple have time to become thoroughly and soberly grounded in the doctrine of equality, and there is no danger of oppression either from government or from anarchy.” In the final analysis, con cluded Barlow, it was the Americans’ habit of thinking “that all men are equal in their rights” which had created their Revolution and sustained their freedom. It was a profound insight, and one that I have attempted to exploit in this study of American political culture between 1776 and 1787. It was not, however, an insight with which I originally set out. I began simply with the intention of writing a mono graphic analysis of constitution-making in the Revolutionary era; [vit] [vin] Preface yet I soon found that I could make little or no sense of the various institutional or other devices written into the constitutions until I understood the assumptions from which the constitution-makers acted. I needed, in other words, to steep myself in the political literature of the period to the point where the often unspoken premises of thought became clear and explicit. What I discovered was much more than I anticipated; my reading opened up an in tellectual world I had scarcely known existed. Beneath the variety and idiosyncrasies of American opinion there emerged a general pattern of beliefs about the social process—a set of common as sumptions about history, society, and politics that connected and made significant seemingly discrete and unrelated ideas. Really for the first time I began to glimpse what late eighteenth-century Americans meant when they talked about living in an enlight ened age. As I explored this pattern of beliefs, it became evident that many of the historiographical problems involved in interpreting the Revolution and the formation of the Constitution stemmed from a failure to appreciate the distinctiveness of the political culture in which the Revolutionary generation operated. The ap proach of many historians to the American Revolution, it seemed, had too often been deeply ahistorical; there had been too little sense of the irretrievability and differentness of the eighteenth- century world. Although the vocabulary of the period was famil iar, I found the meaning of much of that vocabulary strange and peculiar, and I learned that words such as “liberty,” “democ racy,” “virtue,” or “republicanism” did not possess a timeless application. Indeed, even within the very brief span of years that I was studying, it soon became clear that the terms and categories of political thought were undergoing rapid change, beset by the strongest kinds of polemical and experiential pressures. When I began to compare the debates surrounding the Revolutionary constitution-making of 1776 with those surrounding the forma tion of the federal Constitution of 1787, I realized that a funda mental transformation of political culture had taken place. The Americans of the Revolutionary generation had con structed not simply new forms of government, but an entirely new conception or politics, a conception that took them out of an essentially classical and medieval world of political discussion into one that was recognizably modern. Of course this trans formation of political thought had its origins deep in the colonial
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