Gordon wood the american revolution pdf

Review: The Adequate Revolution Author(s): Barbara Clark Smith Reviewed work(s):

The Radicalism of the American Revolution. by Gordon S. Wood Source: The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Oct., 1994), pp. 684-692 Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2946926 Accessed: 01/06/2009 15:05

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The Adequate Revolution

Barbara Clark Smith

t v f HE Radicalism of the American Revolution is a powerful and ambitious work, a synthesis that aspires to reinterpret events that Americans have long seen as central to their identity as a nation. Gordon Wood

states his purpose in the title: his book will explicate ways in which the American Revolution was radical, establishing that it was, in fact, "as radical and as revolutionary as any [such upheaval] in history."1 But if the radical- ism of the era is crucial to Wood, it remains in his hands an elusive and unsatisfying characterization. Seventeenth-century English revolutionaries toppled a king and embraced startling, leveling, and millennial ideas. Eighteenth-century French revolutionaries went so far as to abolish slavery and consider the rights of women as citizens of the republic. And in early nineteenth-century Peru, an anticolonial revolution produced the impulse to include Native Americans as "Peruvians." In the light of such events, how are we to understand Wood's repeated emphasis on the radicalism of the American case? He clearly does not mean that it brought substantive change in the lot of those who were most oppressed, subjugated, or marginal in the society. Wood credits the Revolution with ending slavery in the North and, in the long run, raising the status of all African Americans and women; he notes that Revolutionary events generated notions of social leveling among a few. Yet these developments are not central to his story. The liberation of those at the bottom, the inclusion of those left out, the amelioration of con- ditions for the "have-nots" of eighteenth-century American society-these are not Wood's criteria for measuring the radicalism of the era.

I want to explore what Wood means by radicalism-radicalism American style, a very particular make and model. While his book promises a more inclusive and expansive view, in the end, I think, it offers a narrow under- standing of eighteenth-century experience and works to limit our sense of political possibility. I take that action of constraint and limitation to be the most consequential element of the book.

What were the characteristics that made the Revolution radical? Most obviously, perhaps, Wood means that it was extensive and sweeping. No quick explosion of colonial resentment, American Independence had roots deep in the colonial past and came to fruition in the experience of subse- quent generations. As Wood constructs it, the American Revolution con- sisted of more than the two decades of turmoil that consume a full semester

Barbara Clark Smith is a curator at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, I992), 5.

The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, Vol. LI, No. 4, October I994

ADEQUATE REVOLUTION 685

in many college courses. His synthetic account, he suggests, will offer a larger view. Some historians cite John Adams, who said that the Revolution took place well before Independence in the hearts and minds of the American people; others quote Benjamin Rush, who declared that the Revolution would not be complete until the institutions of American society were transformed in accordance with the premises of liberty. Wood deftly and ambitiously incorporates both emphases; his revolution is a long revolu- tion and it happens twice.2

It happens first to a society steeped in the principles of monarchy. Colonial America was obsessed with dependencies, premised on patriarchal authority, caught up with degrees and subordinations, organized around per- sonal connections and political influence, committed above all to hierarchy. That society had republican aspects nonetheless, for the colonies suffered from a weak aristocracy, unruly commoners, and a mobile population increasingly given to commerce and consuming. These elements of republi- canism became so pronounced that the Revolutionaries were able to slough off monarchy rather effortlessly when the time came. Here Wood agrees with Adams: before the conflict with Britain, republicanism was already pre- sent in the social relationships and, one presumes, in the hearts and minds of those (barring tories among others) who would come to qualify as "the American people." But Wood's revolution occurs decades later as well, in a democratic phase, as republicanism (which, after all, was already pervasive in American society and, as such, is not easily posed as an agent of sweeping change) yielded to democracy, as the pretensions of aristocracy fell and the defense of gentlemanly merit increasingly fell on deaf ears. In this moment Wood finds the "real revolution," a transformation that took place in the nineteenth century, the time frame suggested by Benjamin Rush, and that continued, sadly for his generation, beyond.3

As to what was radical about this, readers receive various and conflicting indications. Patriot leaders, Wood points out, adopted a radically new way of seeing themselves and their world. Born in a society that reserved political authority for men of birth and breeding, they imagined and dared to embrace the notion that men of humble origins might merit political rule. Such a vision was more sweeping and transformative than may first appear, given the traditional premises from which the patriots began. "No presump- tion about politics was in fact more basic to this society" than the identity of social and political authority.4 It follows that what later generations read as political rhetoric in fact contained prescriptions for substantial social change. Wood's account of elite patriots' commitment provides some of the best pages of his book: leading colonists made a visionary leap when they chanced their future on republicanism.