Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

The newest volume in the estimable Oxford History of the United States series is Gordon S. Wood's Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (Oxford University Press, 2009). Like the other titles in the series this one seeks to synthesize a chunk of American history into a single volume with a coherent narrative, aimed at a general audience - given the tremendous amount of literature which this (ahem, rather key) time period has spawned, the author's task here seems well nigh impossible.

I'm pleased to say that Gordon Wood has succeeded admirably. This is at once a book which offers any interested student of history a "good read" overview of the era, while also providing specialists with an entirely suitable synthesis show more of recent scholarly treatments and debate. Empire of Liberty offers a delicate balance between political, diplomatic and economic histories while also paying heed (and not just lip service) to recent work which encompasses race, gender and social analyses as well.

Wood's treatment of the early republic's political difficulties is evenhanded and fair, as is his explanation of the first party system and its origins. His chapters on the organizational of the first government, the early Supreme Court and the roots of judicial review were clearly two of his favorites to write, and the way he's managed to examine the paradoxes inherent in the way Jefferson and Madison governed was both quite apt and fascinating. His research base was clearly vast (the ten-page bibliographic essay clearly doesn't do it justice, but the footnotes will help), and he's drawn judiciously from the deep, wide pool of recent scholarship to create this far-reaching and able work.

I'm sure that anyone, particularly anyone with an interest in this period, will find "something missing" from this book. I would have appreciated a closer look at literature, books, and libraries, and found the sections covering education rather succinct. I'm sure that others will offer up what they felt were the lacunae in Empire of Liberty. But on the whole, given the great constraints he was under, I can offer up nothing but praise for this effort. It's a delight to read (even though its 750-page bulk does make it a rather uncomfortable book to cart around as frequently as I'd have liked to), and a fine contribution to the series in particular and to scholarship more broadly.

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2009/10/book-review-empire-of-liberty.html show less

The chaos and contradictions of the early American republic (if we can keep it), engagingly told through the lives of specific people, mostly but not entirely white men, famous and not. Reading about this era isn’t just a Hamilton thing for me at this point; it helps reassure me that Americans have always been this confused, vicious, and occasionally great, and that we can probably get through this too. I hope.

In 1789 the United States started what amounted to a national reboot, as a new republic created by the ratification of the Constitution began operation. This was a massive and far-reaching endeavor, one that involved the creation of new offices and branches of government, the redefinition of institutions, and a new assessment of relationships with both the thirteen states and the American people. What was at stake was nothing less than the very survival of the country as a union of states, as all of this took place under the shadow of the failure of the Articles of Confederation to provide for a government capable of tackling the challenges facing the country in the aftermath of the American Revolution, with the likely possibility that show more this would be the last opportunity to make union work before the country disintegrated into thirteen independent states competing with each other —or even being reabsorbed into the British empire.

This effort to launch a new republic is at the heart of Gordon Wood's history of the first two and a half decades of the United States under the federal government. As a preeminent scholar of American political thought and the revolutionary era, there are few historians better suited to the task of writing about this period of the nation's history. What he produces is a sophisticated account that explains the magnitude of the task facing the country during this period, how it was addressed by the men involved, and how their solutions provided the details lacking in the initial framework of the country. To do this, Wood starts with an extended exploration of that framework as it was perceived by the political actors of the era, reflected not just in the recent debates over the Constituton but in how they sought to turn the structure described in the document into reality. This involved filling in the details with laws passed in the new Congress; the actions and tone set by the president, George Washington (who occupied an office with no immediate parallel in the Western world); and the decisions and authority of a new body of judges, who occupied offices viewed with distrust by many people.

As political leaders worked out these details, differences emerged that reflected divergent visions of the nation. Four men in particular stand out in Wood's description of this divergence. Two of them, Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, advocated a strong national government backed by a socially conservative and hierarchical society. The other two, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, soon emerged in opposition to this, arguing for a smaller government that gave more latitude for the lower classes. Around these men coalesced the first national political parties, the Federalists and the Republicans, who fought with a bitterness that reflected the fact that the very concept of political opposition had yet to be established. This gave the politics of this period (which was still very much a preserve of the elite) a uniquely sharp edge.

In the end, the Republicans got the better of the argument, largely due to the broader changes taking place throughout the country. Wood describes well the evolution of American society during this period, which created a more egalitarian country than was envisioned by most of the Federalists. Yet by controlling the federal government for the first twelve years the Federalists were able to imprint their vision upon the country in ways that subsequent Republican Congresses and administrations were unable to alter. This was due in part to Republican disagreements as to how to undo the Federalist design, and to events overseas which underscored the need for a national government capable of expanding the nation and defending its interests abroad. The War of 1812 served as the embodiment of this need, as President Madison found his ability to wage war hampered by the underdevelopment of the country and the Republican limitations on government. Nevertheless, the nation's emergence intact from the war served as an affirmation of the success of the Constitution, reflecting its success in addressing the problems of the previous quarter-century.

In describing the history of this period, Wood displays the insights gained from a lifetime of scholarly study. This comes through on every page of the text, as he fills the book with carefully argued analysis backed by a wealth of scholarship. While Wood leans a little too heavily on his strengths as a historian of political ideology, his book untangles the complex issues of a vitally important period in American history. It makes for a sterling contribution to the Oxford History of the United States series, one guaranteed to endure as the standard text on the era for decades to come. show less

In a recent revision of the state standards in social studies, the Texas Board of Education removed Thomas Jefferson from "a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th and 19th century." As the New York Times reported, "Jefferson is not well-liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term 'separation between church and state.'" If the conservative members of the board had read Gordon S. Wood's remarkably thorough and balanced history of the early Republic, Empire of Liberty, they would have known that in the early nineteenth century, Jefferson's notion of "a wall of separation between church and state" was popular among the growing evangelical denominations, such as the Baptists and show more Methodists, because it severed the connection between the the former established churches, the Congregationalists in New England and the Anglicans in the South, and political power. Evangelicals were, in fact, among Jefferson's most enthusiastic supporters. But as Wood writes: "It was not enlightened rationalism that drove these evangelicals but their growing realization that it was better to neutralize the state in religious matters than run the risk of one of their religious opponents gaining control of the government."

Wood's book, the latest volume in the magnificent Oxford History of the United States, beautifully elucidates the complexities of American politics and culture in the crucial years 1789 to 1815, when the young United States was struggling to survive and to define itself as a nation. The book is a perfect antidote to those who seek to make history a vehicle for promoting their own narrow political ideology.

Wood's thorough treatment of Jeffersonian Republicanism, for example, shows that Jefferson was at the same time an aristocratic intellectual and a fervent champion of the common man; he was an agnostic who had a strong following among evangelical Christians; he was a ideological proponent of limited government who, through the Embargo Act, was responsible for a breathtaking expansion of Presidential power; he was a fiscal conservative who paid $15 million for the Louisiana Territory; he was a prophet of freedom and equality, and an owner of slaves; he wanted America to remain primarily rural and agricultural, but through his embargo he hastened the development of American industrialism.

History is seldom as simple or as ideologically straightforward a narrative as our politically motivated "standards" attempt to make it. Any serious student or teacher of American history will benefit from Wood's admirably balanced account. The book covers the Presidencies of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, with thorough and lucid treatments of religion, slavery, the position of women, diplomacy, economy, Western expansion and relations with native Americans, and artistic and literary culture.

Wood, a distinguished historian of the early Republic and a professor at Brown University, writes clearly and cogently, and his volume (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize this year) is a worthy companion to the other volumes in this series.

Final note: Thomas Jefferson, who spoke of separation of church and state, as President regularly attended church services that were held in the House of Representatives. show less

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

It's hard to beat Oxford University Press when it comes to authoritative yet lively looks at highly detailed periods in history; and here's their latest in their modern series about the history of America, written by former Pulitzer winner Gordon S. Wood and in this case covering just the years 1789 (when our modern Constitution was written) to 1815 (the end of the War of 1812, essentially a stalemate but the conflict that proved that Europe could no longer bully the US around). And indeed, this is one of the more fascinating periods of US history show more to look at, precisely because most Americans know so little about it; a quiet and inconsequential span at first glance (known conventionally as the years when America simply recovered from the Revolution), in actuality it was the 25-year period that saw the formation of the first political "parties" in human history, the collapse of the country's first attempt at federal administration (the "Articles of Confederation," which at first set up the US more like the current European Union, and was a complete disaster), and the quiet campaign to purge the new national government of the very radicals who helped the revolution succeed in the first place, whether radically liberal in nature (like Thomas Paine and his French-Revolution-loving pals, who wanted to do away with capitalism and the upper-class altogether) or radically conservative (such as Alexander Hamilton and his Federalist buddies, who promptly attempted to create a nobility-based "American ruling class" the moment the revolution was over, and were eventually shunned out of existence because of traitorous activity during the War of 1812).

Along the way, then, Wood shows us in glorious detail how this was also the period that first established the myth of the "Protestant work ethic," that first exalted the middle-class into the most important slice of American society, and that incidentally first established the rift between the industrial, everyman North and the agricultural, aristocratic South that would eventually explode into the Civil War, and that still heavily defines regional relationships to this very day, all of it told through a wealth of anecdotes and literally hundreds of pieces of trivia about early American history that I never knew. It's a doorstop of a book, don't get me wrong, but well worth the armchair historian's time, and I'm now thinking seriously about tackling all the rest of the volumes in this massive series as well.

Out of 10: 9.8 show less

At 700 plus pages not for the faint-of-heart. At first I thought 26 years was such a short period of time that how could a book about the history of one nation occupy so many pages, but the events of the Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison Administrations were momentous, and important evolutionary developments in our young republic cemented themselves into place that are still with us today, such as the development of an independent judiciary as a co-equal branch of government and the doctrine of judicial review. There's too much material to be covered for the book to have a perfectly harmonious interwoven narrative flow, so sometimes it reads like an edited book of articles by multiple authors, but that's probably the curse of any show more book covering everything significant that occured during this important time. Certain key themes do run through the book, such as the passing of leadership FROM a well-to-do class of well-educated gentlemen of the Englightenment (the Founders) who misguidedly assumed that they and their ilk would forever be deferred to when it came to wielding political power TO the "middling" sorts of commercial entrepreneurs and inventors who eschewed the powdered-wig types and took as their favorite founder the "self-made man" Benjamin Franklin. The troubling undercurrent of slavery - the problem that would not go away - is the other thematic continuity in the book. Some reviewers see this book as a "love letter" to Thomas Jefferson but I don't see it that way at all. If anything, it reaffirms for me some of the idealistic silliness of the man and how wrong he was about how the US would evolve. That said, he was a very significant individual for US historical and political development. If you have the time and interest in this period, defintely read the book. Especially if you are a Tea Party adherent - it may change your thinking about the Founders. For one thing, most Founders wouldn't want to be in the same room as an ill-educated, bumpkinish, anti-intellectual, sloganeering politician. For another, it becomes obvious that the Constitution was not handed down from God on stone tablets - it represented a set of political compromises. The Bill of Rights itself was a politically-motivated document designed by Congressman James Madison to get critics of the new Constituion to shut up and to stave off a second Constitutional Convention. According to author Wood, no one (including the Supreme Court) paid much attention to the Bill of Rights for over 100 years after its adoption. show less

It turns out, back in 1805, graduates of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton thought they were entitled to positions of leadership in society by virtue of their superior level of enlightenment and cultivation, and back then, too,
what was then called the "middling sort" of people resented them for it.

200 years ago, these people were called "Federalists" and "Republicans," but really, plus ça change...