The Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world. To go from these few facts to create such an enormous argument is a problem.
The West Indies planters were too weak in the end to resist abolition. They did try to, but if they had had all those planters in the South still being part of the British Empire with them, that would have made it more difficult for the British Parliament to move toward abolition.
Of course, there are great ironies in our history, but the men and the documents transcend their time. That Jefferson, a slaveholding aristocrat, has been—until recently—our spokesman for democracy, declaring that all men are created equal, is probably the greatest irony in American history.
But the document he wrote and his confidence in the capacities of ordinary people are real, and not myths. Jefferson was a very complicated figure.
He took a stand against slavery as a young man in Virginia. He spoke out against it. Despite his outspokenness on slavery and other enlightened matters, his colleagues respected him enough to keep elevating him to positions in the state. North of the Mason-Dixon line, in every northern state by , slavery is legally put on the road to extinction. But in the northern states, the massive movement against slavery was unprecedented in the history of the world.
So to somehow turn this around and make the Revolution a means of preserving slavery is strange and contrary to the evidence. As a result of the Revolution, slavery is confined to the South, and that puts the southern planters on the defensive. For the first time they have to defend the institution. He took his slaveholding for granted. Southerners began to feel this anti-slave pressure now. They react to it by trying to give a positive defense of slavery.
They had no need to defend slavery earlier because it was taken for granted as a natural part of a hierarchical society. We should understand that slavery in the colonial period seemed to be simply the most base status in a whole hierarchy of dependencies and degrees of unfreedom. Indentured servitude was prevalent everywhere.
Half the population that came to the colonies in the 18th century came as bonded servants. Servitude, of course, was not slavery, but it was a form of dependency and unfreedom that tended to obscure the uniqueness of racial slavery. Servants were bound over to masters for five or seven years. They belonged to their masters, who could sell them. Servitude was not life-time and was not racially-based, but it was a form of dependency and unfreedom.
The Revolution attacked bonded servitude and by it scarcely existed anywhere in the US. The elimination of servitude suddenly made slavery more conspicuous than it had been in a world of degrees of unfreedom. The antislavery movements arose out of these circumstances. As far as most northerners were concerned, this most base and despicable form of unfreedom must be eliminated along with all the other forms of unfreedom.
These dependencies were simply incompatible with the meaning of the Revolution. After the Revolution, Virginia had no vested interest in the international slave trade. Quite the contrary. Virginians began to grow wheat in place of tobacco. Washington does this, and he comes to see himself as more a farmer than a planter.
He and other farmers begin renting out their slaves to people in Norfolk and Richmond, where they are paid wages. And many people thought that this might be the first step toward the eventual elimination of slavery. In fact, there were lots of manumissions and other anti-slave moves in Virginia in the s. But the black rebellion in Saint-Domingue—the Haitian Revolution—scares the bejesus out of the southerners.
Many of the white Frenchmen fled to North America—to Louisiana, to Charleston, and they brought their fears of slave uprisings with them. Of course, I think the ultimate turning point for both sections is the Missouri crisis of — Up to that point, both sections lived with illusions. The Missouri crisis causes the scales to fall away from the eyes of both northerners and southerners.
Northerners come to realize that the South really intended to perpetuate slavery and extend it into the West. And southerners come to realize that the North is so opposed to slavery that it will attempt to block them from extending it into the West. From that moment on I think the Civil War became inevitable. Reading his writings between and his death in makes you wince because he so often sounds like a southern fire-eater of the s.
Whereas his friend Madison has a much more balanced view of things, Jefferson becomes a furious and frightened defender of the South. His friend Adams was, of course, opposed to slavery from the beginning, and this is something that Hannah-Jones should have been aware of. John Adams is the leading advocate in the Continental Congress for independence. He hates slavery and he has no vested interest in it. The same, too, I think can be said of our current historiographical paradigm.
Hall, and other participants in the Wingspread Conference is an attempt to bridge the gap between intellectual history and social history. Thanks much for this post, Michael. In other words, Woods has always made a point of communicating with the educated lay public.
What is new is the scorn of a newer generation of historians who find themselves increasingly alienated from their countrymen and unable to communicate with them as Wood and his predecessors, e. Bancroft, Morris, etc. When we speak of Whigs are we referring to the 19th Century interpretation of history as the envelopment of freedom and liberalism through the ages?
Again, many thanks. Thanks for the comment, Alec. By neo-Whig I generally mean the group of historians in the late s and s who began taking the ideas of the Revolution seriously after a long period in which ideas were dismissed by Progressive historians. By old-school Whig, I do indeed mean 19th-century historians of whom Bancroft is the archetype, who portrayed the history of America as an inexorable and divine march toward democracy and freedom.
I personally have great admiration for Wood, though I do feel that in the last decade or so he has kind of jumped the shark, in a sense.
To me, Wood symbolizes someone who is attempting to reach larger audiences with much more nuanced sophisticated history. I shudder to think of a world with nothing in between. That is quite true. His NYRB writings, though, have really turned sour in the past few years. What on earth could be responsible for their bizarre need to put slavery at the center of American history? Gillan points out above. I agree, Matt. I too have gotten my fair share of strange looks when trying to defend Radicalism.
That said, I think your characterization of his use of charges of presentism is spot on. We can all argue about how successful he was and about what he left out but, for me, even the attempt merits respect. And while Radicalism is far from being a complete account, it surely is PART of whatever a complete account would be. The move from Monarchy to Republicanism to Democracy has all the tension and interest of watching an episode of the Love Boat.
I agree with Mr. Wood in two successive paragaraphs, dual passages that present his central contentions. His microhistory illuminates, confounds, and enlivens radicalism and rootlessness on both sides of the liberty coin. WCT is a formidable book for both advocates and opponents of Gordon S. Wood, as well as students of research, interpretation, and purpose in the noble dream.
I think this aptly illustrates the historiography within the historical profession itself. I like what Gordon Wood has written. While writing my thesis on Jefferson and Adams I went back to Empire and noticed things that I had not been aware of the first time I read it.
Specifically the lack of gender, race, and class. His focus is on a different aspect of the historical era. Good grief! The rest of us out here need something to write about too. The simple truth is that Gordon Wood and others are reaching the American public. In case no one noticed it the historical profession took a massive hit in the last five years due to budget cuts on all levels.
You can bet good money that the failure of American historians to connect with the American people played a strong role in that. Let us not kid ourselves about who reaches the great American public when it comes to the Early Republic.
If Amazon can be trusted not perfect, but better than other things we have , the top sellers in the Revolution are journalists, exactly whom you would expect, people like David McCullough and Ron Chernow. Poor Gordon Wood makes his first appearance on the list at number 40, with Radicalism.
To me, Chernow is different than McCullough. His work is more original and scholarly. I thought his recent work on Washington was a stellar example of someone who write clearly while incorporating the latest scholarship. Perhaps his book on Paris was more archival in nature. The former strikes me as much more of a McCullough while the latter produced works of immense scholarship.
Think, for example, of Joy Jenkins. The scribbling Pakenhams, on the other hand, strike me as being more in the McCullough category. I agree completely, Herb. The majority of readers who devour books by McCullough and Chernow on whom I also agree with you read them not because they are narratives per se but because they are a particular kind of narrative about the founding and the founders.
Everyone uses, cites, and celebrates books fitting that description. In fact, nearly every other author whose name has come up in this post or discussion has written books like that sometimes exclusively. Synthesis looms large in the field due to its fragmentary nature. That said, is it not understandable that when a synthesis of a period is written and large swathes of the historiography of the last 30 years has been left out that those who helped create that historiography would be upset as if it was an implicit rejection of the importance of their work?
In other words, say you spent your whole career working on race in the early republic and then when the Oxford volume comes out one that will reach far more people than my academic work ever could it ignores not just your own work but your entire topic. Also, Brooke touched on there being an inherent responsibility in the Oxford series due to its prominence and its reach.
The two books of his that I have read so far were definitely gender, class, and race oriented. That period is definitely a gap in my repetoire. Michael, I think you are right in pointing to a return to the study of elite institutions and people. Amanda, I too have seen variations of that occur. Does it not also say something about the failure of historians who work on gender to effectively integrate it into the larger narrative? This is NOT a level criticism at everyone who works on gender in any way whatsoever.
But I have read fantastic works on gender history in early America that left me struggling to think of truly significant ways in which it might impinge on the rest of the field. It would be almost impossible to be in the academy these days and be largely unfamiliar with gender studies in your field. But if you are the kind of person who would say things like you mention in your comment, I suspect that it is less because of a sense of superiority than a sense of gender studies as isolated from the broader political and cultural history of your period.
Great post and discussion! In addition, not only do these essays render what the volumes under review are about, but they also show how the books' subjects place in a larger historiographical context. Most of the books he reviews are well chosen, for they represent the most controversial or significant volumes written on American topics in the last twenty-five years, including Simon Schama's Dead Certainties; Pauline Maier's American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence , and Joyce Appleby's Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans.
Perhaps the most valuable quality of this book is the willingness of the author to be critical, though elegantly so, of the fads and follies of many historians, while at the time recognizing their merits. His fundamental aim is to expose what he calls "presentism" in history, that is, the use of the discipline to advance a variety of political and cultural agendas.
History, the author also makes clear, is about the complexity of the past: how the thoughts and actions of concrete individuals respond directly to the surrounding circumstances of their time and place.
Using history to advance positions on current issues, professor Wood tells us, is not only a bad idea: it is also a sure way to write bad history. Indeed, he quite strongly states, quoting Rebecca West, that "when politics comes in the door, truth flies out the window," wryly adding that "historians who want to influence politics with their history writing have missed the point of the craft; they ought to run for office" p.
At the same time, it is clear that Wood is also concerned about the implications of the "cultural history" that has dominated the field since the s: "Many of the new cultural historians seem not to want to destroy memory as much as reshape it and make it useful to their particular cause, whatever it may be.
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