Customer Reviews

The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This outstanding book is generally regarded as fundamental to understanding the American Revolution. Wood immersed himself in contemporary writings including a huge array of political pamphlets, sermons, letters, and other texts in an attempt to reconstruct the thinking of the people who made the Revolution and the Constitution. Wood begins with a reconstruction of how colonial Americans perceived the political organization of their societies, their relationship with Britain, and how they conceived politics in general. The initial parts of the book parallel and draw from Bernard Bailyn's outstanding book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Indeed, much of Wood's book can be seen as sequel to Bailyn's book.
Wood begins with a reconstruction of the pre-Revolutionary conception of politics. Like Bailyn, Wood reconstructs this as a compound of several elements but dominated by certain general Enlightenment concepts and the specific framework developed by dissident 18th century British Whig intellectuals. Basic concepts included the idea that political structure reflected basic social structures, that the 'people' embodied by parliamentary representation were opposed and oppressed by the Crown, and an obsession with 'corruption' induced by abuse of the executive power of the Crown.
The successful conclusion of the Revolution, however, did not produce the outcome predicted by this conception of politics. The resulting confederation and states were perceived by many American intellectuals as dominated by greed and self-interest, there was an absence of the expected moral regeneration, and there were increasing concerns about the power of state legislatures causing both abuse of minority rights and threats to social order.
The reaction to these problems produced a wholesale revision of American's conceptions of politics. In the period leading up to the formulation of the Constitution, many ideas that we accept as basic were formulated. The nascent and later explicit Federalists severed the coupling between social and political organization. This gave government an essentially independent role and represented a form of social engineering because the Federalists essentially depended on constructed institutions to guarantee social success rather than the prior emphasis on public virtue. The ideas of constitutionialism, large republics, delegation of sovereignty, mixed government with responsibility divided between states and the Federal government, and emphasis on social contracts as a source of authority all stem from this period.
Wood is careful to emphasize some particularly interesting aspects of this process. In some respects, the Federalist drive to constitutionalism was a reactionary act on the part of traditional elites who felt they were losing out in excessively egalitarian world created by the Revolution. The process was widely diffused. Important and generally recognized figures like Madison and James Wilson figure prominently in the story but Wood demonstrates how a host of other figures, many now obscure, contributed to and articulated this process.
In a sense, there were 2 American Revolutions. The first being actual revolt from the British Empire and the second being the dramatic change in political thought and institutions that followed the successful conclusion of that revolt. Wood does a wonderful job of delineating how this second revolution occurred.

Gordon Wood's celebrated book is the story of the way people thought about themselves and the revolution they had made. It explains in great detail the initial failures of majoritarian democracy and the development of constitutionalism. A glance at the footnotes reveals the genuine source of this book's authority: Professor Wood has drawn his narrative and his conclusions from original sources--newspaper articles, letters, and diaries of the period. The only complaint I have is the glaring omission of any mention of slavery. That word doesn't appear in the index or anywhere else in this book. This is all the more remarkable in light of our growing awareness of just how deeply the Founders struggled with this issue. Nevertheless, this is the single most important book on the period. If you want to know about American Democracy and its intellectual origins, this is the book to read.

Gordon S. Wood is one of the deans of the so-called "intellectual historians" of the Revolutionary era. I just finished reading this book for the third time in the last 15 years, and I am struck by the sweeping nature of it. Wood's thesis is essentially that Americans' thinking about government and politics underwent a remarkable change in the 11 years between the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the framing of the Constitution. In short, through a series of piecemeal changes during this brief period, Americans largely put together a new mode of political thinking. The key to Wood's argument seems to be his discussion of the changes that occurred in the locus of sovereignty, and the separation of political from social authority. "The people" play the key role here. They went from traditionally being "embodied" in one branch of the gov't (the House of Commons in England, for example), to being the source of all governmental authority. This change brought with it changes in the understanding of representation and of separation of powers, and made possible Americans' unique concept of federalism, and the development of an "American science of politics". Wood uses a dazzling array of sources to support his arguments, and in doing so, shows how many hands and brains were involved in this work. The book is long and the general reader may find it a bit difficult, but anyone interested in the development of American political thought cannot neglect it.

I agree with the observations of all of your other reviewers, though I read this book in graduate school and didn't have trouble staying awake. I think R. Albin of Michigan comes closest to the gist of Wood's central thesis, but I would like to elaborate. The Founding Fathers were steeped in 18th century hierarchical society and resented the inherited privilege of Europe's aristocracy because they believed themselves to be the equal of the gentlemen who ruled England. A hallmark of such a society was a requirement that the elite assume the reins of government and exercise power for the benefit of everyone in society. They were required to act "Virtuously" in 18th century parlance. They did not really intend to change this hierarchy with the Revolution and they fully expected that the common men they mobilized as their ground forces would govern the country virtuously. The common man certainly being capable of governing his own affairs, Adams, Madison and the others found that the rustics who controlled the state legislatures during the Revolution and after had no inclination to govern for the larger society. They pursued their own interests and gave little thought to the greater issues at hand, such as the need for organizing a national government and integrating the economy. Because of that sour experience with "direct" democracy, the Founders created a constitution, based on what they saw as the structure of "checks and balances" implicit in the English constitution, that they hoped would restrain the common man and his lack of virtue. Wood's book is the history of their transition through, and adaptation of, highly sophisticated political theories to arrive at that result. Because of their superior understanding of politics and how to control the forces they unleashed, the US passed through its revolutionary era without the full-blown civil war that plagued both the French and Russian Revolutions.

This is a wonderful book that any student of the American Revolution should read. Gordon Wood does a great job of highlighting the fact the our founding fathers were brilliant scholars and historians. I also love how they are placed in the context of the Enlightenment and the Glorious Revolution and how their knowledge of these events shaped American history. Gordon Wood is brilliant, as are our founding fathers. Gentle warning though, this book doesn't have that great of a rhetoric style to it and is rammed full of details, so expect reading it to put you to sleep after a while.

This classic work from 1969 is an outstanding work of original scholarship that provides an essential overview of the origins of America's political system. Like Bernard Bailyn's "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution", it covers the Greek, Roman, and British political ideas that influenced the American Revolution and its ultimate result, the federal system created by the U.S. Constitution. But Wood goes much deeper than Bailyn did in analyzing the development of American political thought and systems of government in the years between 1776 and 1787. This is a long book - over 600 pages - with lots of details, so it might be too much for casual readers; but readers who really want to understand the early development of America's political system will find it very valuable and learn a lot from it. It won the prestigious Bancroft and John H. Dunning prizes for American history in 1970.

Since other reviewers have done a good job describing the book, I won't do so myself. However, I would like to talk about the differences between it and Wood's "The Radicalism of the American Revolution" from 1991 which won the Pulitzer Prize in History. You might be wondering whether you really need to buy and read both of these books. If you're interested in this period of American history, then my answer is an unqualified "yes". The two books are actually quite different in their focus. While this book tracks the political developments that occurred during the American Revolution, the other book focuses much more on the social changes that took place, which Wood follows all the way to the 1830s.

You might also wonder which of these books to read first. Since this one was written earlier, reading it first has a certain logic and is what I did; but you could read them in either order, perhaps guided by your personal interest or time constraints. (RotAR is under 400 pages.) Neither book is a prerequisite for the other.

The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 written by Gordon S. Wood is about the intellectual origins of the formation of the federal Constitution. This book makes us understand where the constitution-makers acted, i.e. where in the political literature of the period to the point where the often unspoken premises of thought became clear and explicit.

We begin to understand and get a glimpse of what late eighteenth-century Americans meant when they talked about living in an enlightened age. Reading this volume fine tunes our focus, beneath the variety and idiosyncrasies of American opinion, there emerged a general pattern of beliefs about social process... a set of common assumptions about history, society, and politics that connected and made significant seemingly discrete and unrelated ideas understood and relevant. We see and better appreciate the distinctiveness of the political culture in which the Revolutionary generation operated.

We begin to appreciate the Americans of the Revolutionary generation had constructed not simply new forms of government, but an entirely new conception of politics, a conception that took them out of an essentially classical and medieval world of political dicussion into one that was recognizably modern.

I found this book to be very well written and profoundly thoughtful, being very comprehensive in that it brings to the forefront the political thought of the Americans during the period of constitution-making. Without understanding the thought process involved in writing the Constitution you have little chance in thouroughly understanding the fundamental issues, political culture, for reexamining ideas of the revolutionary era.

This is a perceptive study into these fundamental issues, giving us a greater appreciation for the Founders and the thought processes involved in the creation of the American republic.

Godron S. Wood, Bernard Bailyn, Forrest McDonald and Daniel Boorstin all have made great progress in defining this tranformation of political thought of the Revoultionary era easily understandable, lively and penetrating. We should be ever in debt to these men for their intellectual prowess with regard to this time in our history.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It helped me gain a deeper and more accurate understanding of the principles embodied in the U.S. constitution, the nature of American politics, and the structure of American government, both state and federal, as well as the relationship between the federal government and the states. It's a must-read for any serious student of American history, government, and politics.

I read the Creation of the American Republic for my U.S. Consitutional History Class. Admitedly it is very long, and it is not a book that you can skim through, but every single page has something that will make you think, I have never marked up a book as much as I did while reading this book. This book will definately influence your view on how the constitution was formed and how the the Constitution helps to shape our lives. I would recomend it to anyone and everyone, though if you are not interested in history the subjects may go over your head.

This book is a fascinating study of the transformation of political thinking in America from the time of the Declaration to the formation of the US Constitution. The political concepts that are embodied in the Constitution and clarified in the Federalist papers remain today as our fundamental political principles.

The English government of the 18th century, regarded as the most enlightened in the world, embodied the "mixed" government concept, in which monarchial (the king), aristocratic (House of Lords), and democratic (House of Commons) elements of the government represented the social divisions of the supreme power, the aristocrats, and the people. English sovereignty resided in the government. There existed an implied contract between the rulers and the ruled, of which a bill of rights was part, that ensured liberty.

As the author develops, Parliamentary and ministerial excesses towards the colonists began a process of new political thinking among colonial intellectuals, which first questioned notions of dual sovereignty (colonies being under both colonial assemblies and Parliament) and the virtual representation of Parliament, but eventually led to far more extensive questioning of the British conception of society and government. At the time of Independence, colonial thinkers posed "republicanism," or a virtuous society, in contrast to British corruption. Also, in forming state constitutions, they emphasized legislative superiority as best representing citizens, even to the extent of eliminating executive and judiciary elements. However, those notions proved to be chimeras. Elites of the new states, especially creditors, bond holders, etc, felt "tyrannized" by state legislatures that, under the sway of a so-called unscrupulous element, passed stay and tender laws, among other "democratical" measures. Legislative excess combined with the ineffectualness of the Articles of Confederation in interstate and international dealings spurred nationalists like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton to orchestrate the calling of a Convention to completely revamp the Articles.

The author little discusses the specific issues of the Convention (see Decision in Philadelphia by Christopher Collier): the structure of Congress regarding big vs. small states; the terms of entry of new states, slavery considerations, taxation, and commerce; and the distribution of power among three branches. As the author notes, much of the innovative thinking that came out of the Convention was scarcely understood at first. The Constitution, certainly as the nationalists, or Federalists, explained it, rejected the incorporation of social distinctions in the Constitution. Furthermore, no longer was it held that the government embodied the nation, per se. Now, the people collectively represented the nation and retained all sovereignty. All branches of the government: the President, Senators, Representatives, judges, etc, represented all the people. The people retained all power and merely temporarily and partially delegated authority to the government, supposedly to be withdrawn at the behest of the people. State sovereignty was essentially minimized. Again the states were mere creatures of the people. John Adams is seen by the author as a tragic figure. He could not understand that the separation of powers found in the Constitution is not an example of mixed government that he continued to espouse, but was a check and balance of power.

The debate over the Bill of Rights demonstrates the confusion at the time of what the Constitution actually represented. Bills of rights had, at least since the Magna Carta, been regarded as inviolable contracts guaranteeing that rulers would respect the liberty of the ruled. But with this new Constitution, no longer was such a distinction valid: there were no rulers and ruled. The Federalists scarcely thought to incorporate a bill of rights because of their belief that all rights remained with the people and were not a grant from a king, or such. Eventually, the Federalists came to see the practicality of the Bill of Rights, not the least of which was the passage of the Constitution by the various state ratifying conventions. The idea of a contract was confined to the hypothetical agreement among the people to form a nation and the requisite supporting structures, like a Constitution and a government.

The Convention also overturned the long-held idea that republics had to be small consisting of a homogeneous population. Madison essentially turned that notion on its head, by positing that large republics would have offsetting minorities that would prevent the tyranny of a well-formed majority. In addition, in contrast to the relatively small electoral districts of states, the US Congress had large districts which would more likely result in the "better" sort getting elected, a major concern of the nationalists.

The author certainly acknowledges that, in some sense, there is some superficiality in the democratic aspects of the Convention and the Constitution. The nationalists clearly wanted to curb democracy. However, more recent works, such as Woody Holton's "Unruly Americans," make the claim that the massive breakdown of the US financial system in the decade after 1776 and the dire straights in which many found themselves, makes the efforts to ameliorate their situations through state legislatures seem far less irresponsible than the claims of the nationalists. In addition, the actual empowerment of the people by giving them complete sovereignty goes unexamined. Assertion of power invariably requires the focus of organizations or institutions. Merely accumulating votes of scattered voters every few years seems to be a minimalist, if effective at all, means of actually effectuating power. The author touches not at all of the immense potential for the people being propagandized by elites.

The book is quite interesting. There is no lack of quotes from all manner of sources throughout. The book is also long and, it must be said, repetitious. Chronology is mostly ignored: the author roams back and forth across the period and across geographical bounds. However, as one reviewer noted, there is much to highlight. It would be hard to see anyone wanting to understand the American break from Britain and the creation of a unique political entity ignoring this book.