Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (Oxford History of the United States) [Hardcover]

Other reviewers have provided thoughtful and comprehensive reviews of the content of this excellent book. I'll focus my own on the book as a Good Read. It's perhaps the best on U.S. history that I've read since Daniel Howe's What God Hath Wrought, the next one in the Oxford series, which has the same virtues. It is beautifully written and flows well; the style is precise and compact rather than elegant, but a model of measured exposition. The examples mesh beautifully into its superbly modulated flow of argument. Just about every paragraph has a point to make that is convincing and clear. This slows it down in some ways, all good ones. First, it's long and it will take months rather than days to go through and it needs active engagement and reflection by the reader. It's not skimming material. Second, it builds its picture in a way that precludes fast skipping.

It doesn't have an axe to grind. It's a fairly centrist analysis that has no debunking and takes the leading political figures as essentially honorable individuals - almost all male, of course - working their way honestly to make the transition from the society and social hierarchies they were brought up in to the creation of a unique republic that fused the many interests and differences of American diversity. He places less emphasis than Howe on the economic and social dynamics underlying the cancerous issue of slavery, though his chapter, Between Slavery and Freedom, is a fine summary of how and why the Revolutionary leaders were so misguided in their conviction that it would just fade away. The last paragraph of the over 700 pages concludes that "The Civil War was the climax of a tragedy that was preordained from the time of the Revolution."

He shows how the new "middling class" became so pivotal in the shaping of a new society. He talks of this as the momentous social struggle that underlay so much of the moves to create a republic of law and freedom but also of liberal values. There is a superb balance between the political, social and judicial portrayals and a downplaying of the Great Men psychodramas, with a more useful analysis of their beliefs and intentions. The book is perhaps a little light on economic development and its political dimensions.

As other reviewers note, it requires a fairly solid prior knowledge of US history. It's not academic in the pejorative sense but neither is it a quick guide. It assumes that the reader has a fair understanding, for instance, of the personalities and biographies of Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and Hamilton (whose restoration as a major figure seems to be a common thread in recent scholarship.) I would not expect students or casual readers to enjoy it. I am not a specialist in the field, though I read widely and often in it. I found that it crystallized and threw new light on what I already knew and pointed to many aspects of the period that I did not know.

I hope you get as much out of it as I have. It's a model of how to fuse "popular" and scholarly history.

Thesis and Summary:

In this, the 8th volume of Oxford's History of the United States, Gordon Wood weighs in on the Washington through Madison administrations, and gives a broad perspective analysis of the burgeoning American and American culture. Indeed, Wood's thesis can be summed up to say that by 1815 America was a thoroughly transformed nation from the one that initiated the revolution in 1776: a nation that had gone from gentleman leaders to a far more inclusive- albeit brutish- democracy.

Woods begins his journey to American Democracy by explaining the "middling" class of Americans that emerged with the ratification of the Constitution. This new class of Americans did not personify the classical notion of virtue that Federalists found necessary to lead. They were a people possessed of a native congeniality for the sake of prosperity. They were fond of money making (and good at it), they weren't Harvard or Princeton educated, and they voted. It is this middling class that is the protagonist (for lack of better word) of Wood's work. He sees their growth as the Federalists' death and he sees Jefferson as their chief advocate and the man responsible for their ascendance to power. Herein one finds Wood's bias. He simply adores Thomas Jefferson and makes bare faced obeisance to him at every turn of the page it seems while looking to traduce Federalists as much as possible. As I read this substantial work, I couldn't help but to constantly contrast it with Elkins and McKitrick's The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800. Both works are monumental in scope, but one is sympathetic to Federalists and the other to Republicans.

Chapters 3, 4 and 5 together offer a perplexing and contradictory view of the Washington administration. One the one hand, Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists ignored the middle class as beneath them. On the other, it was Alexander Hamilton's policies that brought tremendous prosperity that led to Federalist popularity in the wake of the Jay and Pickney treaties and the Whiskey Rebellion. Indeed, throughout the work, Wood never discredits the policies of the Federalists; he just merely gives them no credit for those policies.

In chapter 3, The Federalist Program, Wood makes the somewhat dubious claim that Hamilton did not have the foresight to see the future of American manufacturing. I would think that both of Hamilton's foremost biographers (McDonald and Chernow) would strongly disagree, as would Hamilton himself. Further, Wood makes an attempt to characterize Federalist policies as a Walpoleon spoils system without admitting that this was the first federal government instituted in the United States and suffered the exigencies of such: authority, legitimacy and revenue. Should they have appointed people who wanted nothing more than to undermine federal power in favor of state power? Also, for all of Wood's conjecture of a spoils system, no evidence is presented of a corrupt appointment process.

Chapter 4 shows us the emergence of Jefferson and Madison as the opposition to Federalist policy. They fight the assumption of state debts, the chartering of the Bank of the United States (which they let expire in 1810), and Hamilton's stance on foreign policy. As has become a common theme by this point in the book, Wood manages to find a way to justify Jefferson and Madison's actions with Philip Freneau while he has the time to take umbrage with the tone used by Alexander Hamilton (page 154) in totally destroying Jefferson's erroneous fears of his financial system. It really came as no surprise that Wood came down softly on the Republicans in respect to the Genet mission as well.

Wood does a much better job with the Adams administration than his predecessor. Adams fits the Federalist mold that Woods has pigeonholed them all into. He was a monarchist, a self appointed aristocrat and someone who couldn't have foreseen a use for Wood's "middling" class. Wood's makes an excellent case in chapter 6 that the disinterested aristocrat was not possible in America. American land speculation was terribly risky and none sans John Jay could hope to uphold the image of the landed English gentry. He also hits the nail on the head with the "X,Y, Z Affair" and the "Quasi War." He rightly concludes that Federalist gains were offset by their paranoid fears of the "Jacobian" influence. He does not, however, identify the split in the Federalist camp soon enough. Some time before Adams' failed second run at the Presidency the Federalists had already split between he and Hamilton. Hamilton was, in fact, vehemently against the Alien and Sedition Acts and had already brought many Federalists away from Adams.

Having done away with the Federalists, Wood now turns to Jefferson. Certainly no one writing since Dumas Malone has had a better grasp of Jefferson, but Wood's admiration of the man simply leads to what only can be viewed as equivocating on many points. It seems Woods gives Jefferson credit for the entire Revolution on page 287! Wood does correctly point out Republican ideology on page 311 when he quotes Wartman. When Wartman claims that public opinion leads to egalitarian truth, he basically is laying the groundwork for justifying anything. Of course, this is the same ideology that would be used to justify slavery some decades later. It is this that killed the Federalists. They never had a blind devotion to public opinion because they never viewed themselves as a political party. Republicans began as the opposition party to the first administration, they had always acted as a party whether they admitted it or not. When Jefferson had won power, Federalists were already dissipated enough as to never constitute an opposition party. It was not the "middling" class as Wood assumes that killed the Federalists, but the fact that Federalists never saw themselves as a political party.

Woods two chapters on the law (11 and 12) represent the two strongest chapters in the book. Beginning with his proper distinction of colonial judges against their English counterparts, Wood explains the extraordinary power that has always existed in the U.S. judiciary except under the Articles of Confederation. With the adoption of the Constitution and the Federalist administration, Federalist judges began to bring unified law to all people in the U.S. Wood rightly credit John Marshall as bringing judicial review to the U.S. by using an ex post facto explanation in the Marbury v. Madison case. Woods shows how Marshall treated the constitution as law. Fundamental law to be sure, but law nonetheless, and subject to judges' review as all laws are. Wood also correctly points out the significance of the Dartmouth College case. It single handedly did more to protect the "middling" class and the money making endeavors than any legislation passed by a Republican. Once again, it seems, that Federalist policy and decision making is in fact what allows this "middling" class to emerge, and not the high minded idealism of Thomas Jefferson. In fact, I am hard pressed to find one piece of legislation cited by Wood and enacted by Jeffersonian-Republicans that helped this "middling" class emerge that Wood is so sure was dependent upon them.

With the chapters in Republican Diplomacy and the War of 1812 not even a scholar of Wood's stature can prevaricate enough to hide the disaster of the Republican administrations.
1) Allowing the Bank of the United States to expire was a total failure and had to be re chartered
2) Decreasing the size of the Army and Navy in 1810 was not justifiable
3) Non importation and embargo act were abject failures
4) War of 1812 resulted in the burning of the U.S. Capital and status quo ante
In every case Wood attempts to use the idealism of Madison and Jefferson as a buttress against their poor decisions, even going so far as to compare their trade sanctions with modern day ones (page 633), but it runs rather shallow. Expecting the reader to level out the trade sanctions from a nascent economy to those exercised by the megalith that is the modern U.S. economy is a bit much.

In the end, the conclusion Wood reaches- that Thomas Jefferson was almost singly responsible for the emergence of the new American- simply does not follow from the 738 pages of fact he presented. The heroes that come through are George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall.

Style:

Wood's writing is superb and his scholarship is sound. Although I disagree with his conclusions, there is no mistaking the quality of his work. The simple readability of this work is amazing for a tome of this length and depth. To be sure, it is not a simple breeze through over the weekend, but it is not so arduous that you dread having to pick it up each night. Indeed, it is a joy to pick up night after night and read. I took almost 12 pages of notes as I read this book and welcome any comments. I put time and effort into this review, and do recommend this book even though I give it only 3 stars. I hope you find this review helpful even if you do not agree.

What an odd, brilliant, and maddening book. Wood is a very distinguished historian: his The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia) is required reading for any student of the revolution, and after several years' hiatus, he has come back with several outstanding works, most notably The Radicalism of the American Revolution and The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. But like many great scholars, he has become infatuated with his own thesis, namely, that the revolution represented the beginning of a radical cultural transformation of America based on liberty and equality.. And because of this, in Empire of Liberty he makes several judgments of both coverage and assessment that are blinkered and often grotesquely unfair. The bottom line, as other reviewers have suggested, is that in order to adequately appreciate the politics of the early national period, you really should read Wood's work together with Elkins and Mckitrick's The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800 or Joseph Ellis' Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation and/or American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. That's a tall order, but Wood unfortunately makes us do it.

First, the good news. Empire of Liberty brilliantly succeeds in avoiding the "high politics" focus of traditional narrative history while also steering clear of dreary, overly technical and quantitative social history. Wood is at his best in this book as a CULTURAL historian, shrewdly demonstrating how the quarter-century between 1789 and 1815 manifested a transformation of American culture. His central organizing concept is that of the growing dominance of "middling sorts," who were neither aristocrats nor mere laborers but rather energetic men on the make (virtually always men), who used their wits and hard work to succeed, and who rejected the traditional deference to political and social elites. Again and again, Wood takes us into small farms and tinkerers' shops, across the Alleghenies and into new land subdivisions, and shows how the first generation of Americans embraced social mobility and a fluid upwardly mobile society. He is particularly brilliant in his discussion of religion, showing how new Protestant sects emerged and rejected the hierarchical nature of traditional Anglican and Congregationalist establishments.

It doesn't hurt that Wood is a superb writer. It is no small feat to actually explain Alexander Hamilton's financial program coherently and clearly, but Wood does it. He is able to keep the reader on the big picture of politics without drowning us in minutiae. And I believe he is particularly persuasive in breaking us out of the old "northern Federalists versus southern Jeffersonians" narrative of the period. Instead, his heroes are the NORTHERN Republicans, who embraced a commercial society and the acquisition of wealth while rejecting what they saw as Federalist condescension.

But he is so focused on these northerners and their Republicanism, so committed to his account of the rise of the middling sorts, so devoted to seeing the time as these people saw it, that he begins to lack all perspective. Jefferson is the hero of this book, and Wood spares no effort in somehow connecting Jefferson to all that was good and true in America during the period. He tries to see Jefferson as Jefferson saw himself. But that's a problem, for few figures in US history have been capable of such thoroughgoing self-deception as The Sage of Monticello. What we wind up with when it comes to assessing republicanism begins to look less like history and more like a propaganda exercise.

The searing, brutal contradiction at the heart of the Jeffersonians' world-view was, of course, their embrace of the slave system. "Why is it that we hear the loudest yelps for freedom from the drivers of Negroes?" asked Dr. Johnson, and while Wood snidely says that Jefferson understood the contradiction and needed no lecturing, he never really grapples with the way in which slavery affected, conditioned, influenced, and controlled every aspect of the Jeffersonian vision. We really hear nothing about slavery until more than 2/3 of the way through the book; Wood provides us with a superb chapter on slavery, and then basically forgets it again until a couple of paragraphs at the conclusion.

He consistently ignores, downplays, elides, or just overlooks what slavery meant politically to the Jeffersonian movement. He never considers the possibility that a key to Jefferson's hatred of national governmental power was the threat of controlling or removing the slave system. Throughout the book we read confident assertions about the meaning of America and Jeffersonian Republicanism, and then with the tag line "at least in the north." But what Wood conveniently fails to face squarely is that the Jeffersonian operation was based on SOUTHERN power: for all his talk about northern Jeffersonians, Jefferson himself and the others at the center of the Republican Party made very sure that the Virginians remained firmly in control. That was why they made sure to destroy Aaron Burr, the only northern Republican who could possibly have threatened them.

If that isn't bad enough, his treatment of the Federalists is just shockingly unfair. The majority of quotes concerning the Federalists, what they believed, and how they behaved comes from their Republican opponents. Virtually every time the word "Federalist" is mentioned, the adjective "aristocratic" precedes it. To hear Wood tell it, you'd never know that at the end of the day, much of the Federalist policy program survived because Jeffersonian attempts to dismantle it were met with catastrophic policy failure. Wood says that the War of 1812 was a triumph of Republicanism without ever getting around to the fact that, say, President Madison reconstituted the Bank of the United States in 1816 because getting rid of it in 1811 drove the country into bankruptcy. Or that the idea of a coherent American NATIONAL identity that eventually emerged was a central FEDERALIST policy goal. Or that the Federalists' insistence on a balanced economy with a substantial manufacturing base eventually came about; instead, you only hear that the manufacturing that emerged was bottom-up, not top-down, as the Federalists wanted. Except that they were far more diverse in thinking than that. No matter: the Federalists were aristocrats, and thus ANY development that was not aristocratic must have been Republican. He insists that northern middling sorts were were Republican because they hated taxes; but it was the success of Hamilton's financial program that enabled the states to reduce taxes. Wood talks about how building roads helped the middling sorts: but it was the Federalists, not the Jeffersonians, who supported it.

Wood mentions Federalist antislavery, but only in passing; why? Because paying more attention to it would have forced him to admit that many Federalists worked hard against slavery, defended Toussaint L'Ouverture's regime in Haiti, and that Jefferson undercut him. You would never know from Wood's account that Jefferson only triumphed in 1800 because of the south's inflated electoral vote total from the 3/5 clause (otherwise, Adams would have remained in office). But Wood can't tell you that, because that would undermine his assertion that there was huge popular love for Jefferson -- a fact that we know because, well, Jefferson said so!

I've gone on too long. This is an important and very good book. It is required reading. But beware. Wood has an agenda, and it's best that it not remain hidden.