What an odd, brilliant, and maddening book. Wood is a very distinguished historian: his The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia) is required reading for any student of the revolution, and after several years' hiatus, he has come back with several outstanding works, most notably The Radicalism of the American Revolution and The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. But like many great scholars, he has become infatuated with his own thesis, namely, that the revolution represented the beginning of a radical cultural transformation of America based on liberty and equality.. And because of this, in Empire of Liberty he makes several judgments of both coverage and assessment that are blinkered and often grotesquely unfair. The bottom line, as other reviewers have suggested, is that in order to adequately appreciate the politics of the early national period, you really should read Wood's work together with Elkins and Mckitrick's The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800 or Joseph Ellis' Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation and/or American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. That's a tall order, but Wood unfortunately makes us do it.
First, the good news. Empire of Liberty brilliantly succeeds in avoiding the "high politics" focus of traditional narrative history while also steering clear of dreary, overly technical and quantitative social history. Wood is at his best in this book as a CULTURAL historian, shrewdly demonstrating how the quarter-century between 1789 and 1815 manifested a transformation of American culture. His central organizing concept is that of the growing dominance of "middling sorts," who were neither aristocrats nor mere laborers but rather energetic men on the make (virtually always men), who used their wits and hard work to succeed, and who rejected the traditional deference to political and social elites. Again and again, Wood takes us into small farms and tinkerers' shops, across the Alleghenies and into new land subdivisions, and shows how the first generation of Americans embraced social mobility and a fluid upwardly mobile society. He is particularly brilliant in his discussion of religion, showing how new Protestant sects emerged and rejected the hierarchical nature of traditional Anglican and Congregationalist establishments.
It doesn't hurt that Wood is a superb writer. It is no small feat to actually explain Alexander Hamilton's financial program coherently and clearly, but Wood does it. He is able to keep the reader on the big picture of politics without drowning us in minutiae. And I believe he is particularly persuasive in breaking us out of the old "northern Federalists versus southern Jeffersonians" narrative of the period. Instead, his heroes are the NORTHERN Republicans, who embraced a commercial society and the acquisition of wealth while rejecting what they saw as Federalist condescension.
But he is so focused on these northerners and their Republicanism, so committed to his account of the rise of the middling sorts, so devoted to seeing the time as these people saw it, that he begins to lack all perspective. Jefferson is the hero of this book, and Wood spares no effort in somehow connecting Jefferson to all that was good and true in America during the period. He tries to see Jefferson as Jefferson saw himself. But that's a problem, for few figures in US history have been capable of such thoroughgoing self-deception as The Sage of Monticello. What we wind up with when it comes to assessing republicanism begins to look less like history and more like a propaganda exercise.
The searing, brutal contradiction at the heart of the Jeffersonians' world-view was, of course, their embrace of the slave system. "Why is it that we hear the loudest yelps for freedom from the drivers of Negroes?" asked Dr. Johnson, and while Wood snidely says that Jefferson understood the contradiction and needed no lecturing, he never really grapples with the way in which slavery affected, conditioned, influenced, and controlled every aspect of the Jeffersonian vision. We really hear nothing about slavery until more than 2/3 of the way through the book; Wood provides us with a superb chapter on slavery, and then basically forgets it again until a couple of paragraphs at the conclusion.
He consistently ignores, downplays, elides, or just overlooks what slavery meant politically to the Jeffersonian movement. He never considers the possibility that a key to Jefferson's hatred of national governmental power was the threat of controlling or removing the slave system. Throughout the book we read confident assertions about the meaning of America and Jeffersonian Republicanism, and then with the tag line "at least in the north." But what Wood conveniently fails to face squarely is that the Jeffersonian operation was based on SOUTHERN power: for all his talk about northern Jeffersonians, Jefferson himself and the others at the center of the Republican Party made very sure that the Virginians remained firmly in control. That was why they made sure to destroy Aaron Burr, the only northern Republican who could possibly have threatened them.
If that isn't bad enough, his treatment of the Federalists is just shockingly unfair. The majority of quotes concerning the Federalists, what they believed, and how they behaved comes from their Republican opponents. Virtually every time the word "Federalist" is mentioned, the adjective "aristocratic" precedes it. To hear Wood tell it, you'd never know that at the end of the day, much of the Federalist policy program survived because Jeffersonian attempts to dismantle it were met with catastrophic policy failure. Wood says that the War of 1812 was a triumph of Republicanism without ever getting around to the fact that, say, President Madison reconstituted the Bank of the United States in 1816 because getting rid of it in 1811 drove the country into bankruptcy. Or that the idea of a coherent American NATIONAL identity that eventually emerged was a central FEDERALIST policy goal. Or that the Federalists' insistence on a balanced economy with a substantial manufacturing base eventually came about; instead, you only hear that the manufacturing that emerged was bottom-up, not top-down, as the Federalists wanted. Except that they were far more diverse in thinking than that. No matter: the Federalists were aristocrats, and thus ANY development that was not aristocratic must have been Republican. He insists that northern middling sorts were were Republican because they hated taxes; but it was the success of Hamilton's financial program that enabled the states to reduce taxes. Wood talks about how building roads helped the middling sorts: but it was the Federalists, not the Jeffersonians, who supported it.
Wood mentions Federalist antislavery, but only in passing; why? Because paying more attention to it would have forced him to admit that many Federalists worked hard against slavery, defended Toussaint L'Ouverture's regime in Haiti, and that Jefferson undercut him. You would never know from Wood's account that Jefferson only triumphed in 1800 because of the south's inflated electoral vote total from the 3/5 clause (otherwise, Adams would have remained in office). But Wood can't tell you that, because that would undermine his assertion that there was huge popular love for Jefferson -- a fact that we know because, well, Jefferson said so!
I've gone on too long. This is an important and very good book. It is required reading. But beware. Wood has an agenda, and it's best that it not remain hidden.
