Gordon S Wood: The American Revolution

Gordon S. Wood's first book, The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787, instantly moved him to the forefront of the period's historians. I was hugely impressed by the book when it first came out in 1969, but I never got around to reading his subsequent books, except for occasional glances at The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), a book I still hope to get back to some day. US history is something I read so extensively c. 1970 that I have rarely felt the need to dig further. But it occurs to me that it might be useful to sketch out a chapter on the progressive ideals that form one strain of American history before focusing on the rise (and hopefully the fall, certainly the Bush debacle) of the right. Then I noticed Wood's short primer, The American Revolution: A History (2003; paperback, 2003, Modern Library), and figured that would be an ideal refresher course.

The revolution was prefigured by the usual inept efforts of an occupying army to establish order (p. 34):

Hillsborough, believing that Massachusetts was in a state of virtual anarchy, dispatched two regiments of troops from Ireland. They began arriving in Boston on October 1, 1768, and their appearance marked a crucial turning point in the escalating controversy: For the first time the British government had sent a substantial number of soldiers to enforce British authority in the colonies. By 1769 there were nearly 4,000 armed redcoats in the crowded seaport of 15,000 inhabitants. Since the colonists shared traditional English fears of standing armies, relations between townspeople and soldiers deteriorated. On March 5, 1770, a party of eight harassed British soldiers fired on a threatening crowd and killed give civilians. The "Boston Massacre," especially as it was depicted in Paul Revere's exaggerated engraving, aroused American passions and inspired some of the most sensational rhetoric heard in the Revolutionary era.

The British rigged the law to help enforce order, furthering the rebellion (pp. 37-38):

To the British the Boston Tea Party was the ultimate outrage. Angry officials and many of the plitically active people in Great Britain clamored fora punishment that would squarely confront America with the issue of Parliament's right to legislate for the colonies. "We are now to establish our authority," Lord North told the House of Commons, "or give it up entirely." In 1774, Parliament passed a succession of laws that came to be known as the Coercive Acts. The first of these closed the port of Boston until the destroyed tea was paid for. The second altered the Massachusetts charter and reorganized the government: Members of the Council, or upper house, were now to be appointed by the royal governor rather than elected by the legislature, town meetings were restricted, and the governor's power of appointing judges and sheriffs was strengthened. The third act allowed royal officials who had been charged with capital offenses to be tried in England or in another colony to avoid hostile juries. The fourth gave the governor power to take over private buildings for the quartering of troops instead of using barracks. At the same time, Thomas Gage, commander in chief of the British army in America, was made governor of the colony of Massachusetts.

On British arrogance, or the failure of American military tactics to conform to British expectations (p. 54):

Two months later, in June 1775, British soldiers attempted to dislodge the American fortification on a spur of Bunker Hill in Charlestown, overlooking Boston. The British assumed, as one of their generals, John Burgoyne, put it, that no numbers of "untrained rabble" could ever stand up against "trained troops." Under General William Howe, British forces attempted a series of frontal assaults on the American position. These attacks were eventually successful, but only at the terrible cost of 1,000 British casualties -- more than 40 percent of Howe's troops. At Bunker Hill -- the first formal battle of the Revolution -- the British suffered their heaviest losses in what would become a long and bloody war. "Never had the British Army so ungenerous an enemy to oppose," declared a British soldier in the aftermath of Bunker Hill. The American riflemen "conceal themselves behind trees etc till an opportunity presents itself of taking a shot at our advance sentries, which done they immediately retreat. What an unfair method of carrying on a war!"

On the Declaration of Independence and slavery (pp. 56-57):

Congress removed a quarter of Jefferson's original draft, including a passage that blamed George III for the horrors of the slave trade. As Jefferson later recalled, South Carolina and Georgia objected to the passage, and some northern delegates were also a "little tender" on the subject, "for though their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers."

Indeed, all the colonists had long been implicated in African slavery. Of the total American population of 2.5 million in 1776, one fifth -- 500,000 men, women, and children --w as enslaved. Virginia had the most slaves -- 200,000, or 40 percent of its population. Although most of the slaves were held by southerners, slavery was not inconsequential in the North. Fourteen percent of New York's population was enslaved. New Jersey and Rhode Island held 8 percent and 6 percent of their populations, respectively, in lifetime hereditary bondage. Slavery was a national institution, and nearly every white American directly or indirectly benefited from it. By 1776, however, nearly every American leader knew that its continued existence violated everything the Revolution was about.

A little bit on the asymmetry of imperialist and insurgent warfare (p. 78):

Washington for his part realized at the outset that the American side of the war should be defensive. "We should on all occasions avoid a general Action," he told Congress in September 1776, "or put anything to the risque unless compelled by a necessity into which we ought never to be drawn." Although he never saw himself as a guerrilla leader and concentrated throughout on creating a professional army with which he was often eager to confront the British in open battle, his troops actually spent a good deal of time skirmishing with the enemy, harassing them and depriving them of food and supplies whenever possible. n such circumstances the Americans' reliance on amateur militia forces and the weakness of their organized army made the Americans, as a Swiss officer noted, more dangerous than "if they had a regular army." The British never clearly understood what they were up against -- a revolutionary struggle involving widespread support in the population. Hence they continually underestimated the staying power of the rebels and overestimated the strength of the loyalists. And in the end, independence came to mean more to the Americans than reconquest did to the English.

On General Washington (p. 84):

As the war went on year after year, his stature only grew,a nd by 1779 Americans were celebrating his birthday as well as the Fourth of July. Washington always deferred to civilian leadership and never lost the support of the Congress, even when exaggerated rumors of a cabal involving Thomas Conway, an Irish-born French officer, and General Horatio Gates, the victor at Saratoga, seemed to threaten his position int he fall and winter of 1777-78. He was always loyal to his fellow officers in the Continental Army and they to him; they trusted him, and with good reason. What he lacked in military skill he made up with prudence and wisdom. When in the wake of the French alliance the French nobleman the Marquis de Lafayette, who had been in the struggle since 1777, proposed a Franco-American scheme for conquering Canada, the excited Congress readily agreed. Washington, however, pointed out that France had her own interests and was scarcely to be trusted in the retaking of Canada, and the scheme quietly died.

On the philosophical shift of the revolution (p. 93):

Republicanism challenged all these assumptions and practices of monarchy. By throwing off monarchy and becoming republicans in 1776, Americans offered a different conception of what people were like and new ways of organizing both the state and the society. The Revolutionary leaders were not naïve and they were not utopians -- indeed, some of them had grave doubts about the capacities of ordinary people. But by adopting republican governments in 1776 all of them necessarily held to a more magnanimous conception of human nature than did supporters of monarchy.

On government vs. society (pp. 105-106):

Unlike liberals of the twenty-first century, the most liberal-minded of the eighteenth century tended to se society as beneficent and government as malevolent. Social honors, social distinctions, perquisites of office, business contracts, legal privileges and monopolies, even excessive property and wealth of various sorts -- indeed, all social inequities and deprivations -- seemed to flow from connections to government, in the end from connections to monarchical government. "Society," said Paine in a brilliant summary of this liberal view, "is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness." Society "promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections," government "negatively by restraining our vices." Society "encourages intercourse," government "creates distinctions." The emerging liberal Jeffersonian view that the least government was the best was based on just such a hopeful belief in the natural harmony of society.

On equality, wealth, and status (p. 121):

This growing egalitarianism did not mean that wealth was distributed more evenly in post-Revolutionary America. On the contrary: Wealth was far more unequally distributed after the Revolution than it had been before. Nevertheless, Americans felt more equal, and that was what mattered. After all, wealth as a means by which one person claimed superiority over another was more easily accepted than birth, breeding, family heritage, gentility, or even education, and it was the one most easily matched or overcome by exertion. Relationships were now more and more based on money rather than social position. Towns, for example, stopped assigning seats in their churches by age and status and began auctioning the pews off to the highest bidders. Wealthy men began to brag of their humble origins -- something nor commonly done before. When a South Carolina politician in 1784 was praised in the press for being a self-established man who "had no relations or friends, but what his money made for him," a subtle but radical revolution in thinking had taken place. When Benjamin Franklin's autobiography was posthumously published in the 1790s, the nineteenth-century celebration of the "self-made man" was born.

On post-revolutionary reforms (p. 125):

Jefferson and other Revolutionary leaders drew up plans for liberalizing the harsh penal codes inherited from the colonial period. Pennsylvania led the way by abolishing the death penalty for all crimes except murder. Instead of, as in the past, publicly punishing criminals by such bodily penalties as whipping, mutilation, and execution, Pennsylvania began the experiment of confining criminals in solitary cells in penitentiaries that were designed to be schools of reformation. Other states soon followed with these new kinds of prisons. Nowhere else in the Western world were such penal reforms carried as far as they were in America.

Schools, benevolent associations, and penitentiaries -- all these were important for reforming the society and making it more republican. But none of them could compare in significance with that most basic social institution, the family. By rejecting monarchy and the older paternalistic ties of government and asserting the rights and liberties of individuals, the Revolution inevitably affected relationships within the family. It abolished the older English patterns of inheritance and the aristocratic legal devices that had sought to maintain the stem line of the estate (entail) and to sacrifice the interests of younger children to the eldest son (primogeniture). Many of the states passed new inheritance laws that recognized greater equality among sons and daughters. Everywhere novelists and others writing in the post-Revolutionary years stressed the importance of raising children to become rational and independent citizens.

posted 2007-07-08