The radicalism of 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

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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.

2 Edmund S. Morgan counterposes Adams's and Rush's ideas in "Challenge and Response: Reflections on the Bicentennial," in The Challenge of the American Revolution (New York, I976), I97-I98.

3 Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, 276. 4 Ibid., 86.

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Within pages, however, those patriots' achievement melts into air. Readers learn that the Revolution was not republican at all. Those famous leaders who presided over the first of its movements, so lately praised for their vision, are revealed to have accomplished little. Independence itself was a "clarifying incident," Wood says, and in the face of powerful demographic and market forces the Revolutionaries' goal of a virtuous citizenry and reformed society rapidly gave way.5 In the aftermath of the Revolution, with the coming of the Jacksonian age, Americans faced the limits of human virtue, dismissed their utopian ideals, and accepted the invisible hand of self-interest as the basis for social and political life. The radicalism of the Revolution, it emerges, was not republicanism but its abandonment.

This construction of historical events and this version of radicalism depend on a selective, often rosy-tinted reading of sources. One example is the way Wood turns to William Byrd to illuminate Americans' commitment to equality. "When someone as aristocratic as William Byrd could write of the natural equality of all men, even those of different nations and races, . . . then we know the force of this enlightened republicanism."6 Replace "force" with "impotence" and the argument holds as fully. Wood's depiction of American society would be far more persuasive if he acknowledged such dilemmas. Moreover, though common people would contribute antiaristo- cratic sentiments and soon come into their own, to a striking extent Wood keeps "the Revolution" in the hands of an elite. It is not simply that elite and privileged sources are the ones Wood generally cites, the ones whose opinions he trusts. On more than a few occasions, he quotes their testimony, then takes their observations as realizations or discoveries-the truth and not opinion, the whole and not the part. Beyond that, Wood seems to believe his own argument only halfway: having said that the real revolution occurred despite their aspirations and often beyond their lifetimes, still it is leading republicans-the Founding Fathers, the old standbys-whom Wood means when he speaks of "the revolutionaries" throughout the book. Many historians have worked to broaden and deepen that term, and Wood's usage has conspicuous constraining effects.

Reserving the term "revolutionaries" for an elite makes it possible, even necessary, for Wood to leave out significant parts of the resistance move- ment. There is a gap at the middle, at the heart, of his dual revolution. If he offers more than the usual college course on Revolutionary America, he also offers less. A section entitled "Revolution" occupies twenty out of 369 pages of text. Neither there nor elsewhere do readers learn substantial amounts about these topics and events: the Boston Tea Party, the Boston Massacre; the gathering of Sons of Liberty; women mobilizing to disuse tea and take up the spinning wheel; merchants and artisans negotiating over terms of nonimportation; committees of correspondence feverishly linking inland vil- lages and seaports; committees of inspection cementing a cross-class patriot

5 Ibid., I25. 6 Ibid., 235-236.

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coalition by enforcing the Continental Association of I774; wartime antitory mobs and struggles against monopolists and price gougers. In this revolution there is no heroism, delinquency, or treason; no one fought this revolution (save George Washington, who took no salary for it). Although the federal Constitution comes in for discussion, the bulk of what counts as "the Revolution" in many courses and monographs is barely here.

Readers receive no picture of the unfolding of resistance, the moves and countermoves of different actors, the reluctance of merchants and the energy of artisans; the fears of indebted slaveholders as they faced fervent evangeli- cals and unruly African-American workers. Wood doesn't march us through the familiar course of events, and for that we might well be grateful, save for this effect: he has thereby omitted the means by which the patriot coalition, a coalition across region, rank, interest, and belief, was achieved. Although Wood touches base with much of the work that has been done in social and cultural history, although he takes on board information about family struc- tures, relations of labor, evangelical religion, and other topics of recent scholarship, still, we might object, he sets sail leaving Jack Tar on shore. Historians have explored the experience, actions, and evolving political con- sciousness of the middling and plebeian, often precisely in order to illumi- nate the Revolution's radical sources and aspects. Wood does not grapple with that literature; often he acknowledges the presence of such groups, then leaves them out of account.

There is too little here, for example, about popular ideas of liberty and popular political forms. Wood does not consider whether the relatively hum- ble patriots who joined the Revolution actively shaped the coalition and con- tributed their own understandings of events. If there was something radical about the era, it seems, it could not be the plebeian capacity for interracial alliance, for running away, rising up, contesting the law, and otherwise pre- suming their own competence to occupy a public terrain. If there was some- thing radical about patriot leaders, it could not be their capacity to ally themselves and hence negotiate with those beneath them on the social scale. So the long sweep of Wood's Revolution, from colonial society to Jacksonian America, takes place at the surface, absent a careful account of revolutionary events, absent the agency of artisans, sailors, and foot soldiers, absent the full daring of elite patriots, who staked their all on their inferiors' competence to resist constituted authority and to commit themselves to liberty.

When Wood does note the agency of ordinary people, it is ultimately to dismiss the significance of their actions. Take, for example, toryism. True, Wood tells us, some 8o,ooo loyalists left during the Revolution, and a good many more-close to half a million, or 20 percent of the white population- stayed but were removed from positions of prominence.7 True, they were disproportionately from the ranks of the influential, the officeholding, and the well-to-do, and true, excising them was partly the project of mobs, often plebeian in composition, arguably excessive in their tactics, and sometimes

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controversial in their selection of targets. Yet there was no "social struggle" against "entrenched elites," Wood says in his overview.8 There is a defensive and narrowing effect to this disjunctive thinking: whatever antitory crowds were doing, it seems, it was not the American Revolution. To accept much of Wood's argument, to follow his use of terms, readers must absorb an imperative: although many things have happened in this history, we allow only some of them to count. In this context, it seems to me, only some his- torical actors, only some historical radicalisms, can even be visible.

Indeed, it is noteworthy that what interests Wood most about African- American slavery is whether that institution was conspicuous to eighteenth- century Euro-Americans. (His preoccupation with that issue underscores how greatly the book is about what only some Americans saw.) Other histo- rians have taken the denial of slavery as a historical fact of extraordinary sig- nificance; Wood takes elite subjectivity as unproblematic. Most slaveholders and others saw no evil, Wood tells us, as if that were all we need to know about them or as if theirs were the only subjectivities that mattered. Surely African-American slavery was conspicuous to some Americans: it depends on who was looking. Yet a host of people remain throughout Wood's account merely the object of others' acknowledgment or denial.

We might imagine a radical revolution in the eighteenth century, centered in the vision and the acts of those Americans-patriot and tory, black and white-who extended the imperatives of liberty from the imperial contro- versy to relationships at home. The radical moment in some Americans' rev- olution came when they looked anew at slavery. Although some Founding Fathers would still figure as revolutionaries in this story and although the narrative would still unfold in the nineteenth century, its center would sub- stantially shift outside elite hands and elite vision.