The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 0807847232, 9780807847237

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The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787

A new science of politics is needed for a new world. —ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, 1 8 3 5

THE

CREATION OF THE

AMERICAN REPUBLIC 177^-1787 by GORDON S. WOOD

Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Virginia, by The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill and London

To My Mother and Father

© 1969, 1998 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wood, Gordon S. The creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 / by Gordon S. Wood. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8078-2422-4 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 0-8078-4723-2 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Political science — United States— History. 2. United States— History— Revolution, 1775-1783. I. Institute of Early American History and Culture (Williamsburg, Va.) II. Title. JA84.U5W6 1998 97-44269 3 — dc2i CIP

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The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture is sponsored jointly by The College of William and Mary and The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

Preface to the 1998 Edition

IF i DID NOT KNOW it thirty years ago when I wrote The Creation of the American Republic, I know it now—that books belong to their readers as much as, if not more than, to their authors. Back in the 19605,1 scarcely foresaw what many readers would do with my book over the succeeding decades. Like any young historian, I hoped my book would have some effect on the profession and on our understanding of constitution-making in the Revolutionary era. But I had little sense that I was participating in what Daniel Rodgers has called a "conceptional transformation" in American history writing. Of course, I was dimly aware that a number of isolated studies had begun to erode the prevailing view, expressed most forcefully by Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), that John Locke's possessive individualism was virtually the only idea that mattered in eighteenth-century or, indeed, all American political thought. But not until I began to immerse myself in the newspapers, pamphlets, and sermons of the Revolutionary era did I begin to appreciate how complicated the creation of American political and constitutional culture actually was. The radical character of the republicanism that the Revolutionaries adopted in 1776, with its stress on corruption, luxury, virtue, and the public good, especially struck me as being at odds with the individualistic and rights-oriented liberalism that Hartz had claimed lay at the heart of American culture. Although I was aware of the importance of the communal values of republicanism to the Revolutionary generation and realized that Hartz had been wrong in his exclusive emphasis on American liberalism, I was still not at all prepared for the emergence of what Robert Shalhope in 1972 labeled the "republican synthesis." My book was linked with Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, which was published in 1967 but had appeared as an introduction to a volume of Revolutionary pamphlets in 1965, and with J. G. A. Pocock's Machiavellian Moment, published in 1975. For [v]

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better or for worse, in the 19705 and 19805 our three works were picked up and cited by an increasing number of scholars who had all sorts of interpretative needs and political agendas to promote. Not only did historians of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America extend the "republican synthesis" into their own periods of study, but other scholars—political scientists, sociologists, philosophers, and legal thinkers of all sorts—imaginatively exploited republicanism and republican values for their own particular purposes. Indeed, the use and abuse of republicanism over the past several decades provides an object lesson in the power of politics to influence scholarship. Surely much of the remarkable presence of the "republican synthesis" in scholarly writings over the past several decades came from the peculiarities and frustrations of our contemporary politics. Since neo-Progressive and neo-Marxist historians were traditionally suspicious of attributing importance to ideas (in 1969 one of them thought my book represented a "dead end"), they were initially hostile to republicanism and what they referred to as the "ideological" interpretation of the Revolution. But with social history's turn to cultural history in the 19705, the ideology of republicanism suddenly became respectable even to leftist and neo-Marxist historians. Republicanism seemed to offer an acceptable communitarian alternative to the excessive emphasis on private interests and individual rights of liberal, capitalistic America that Hartz had described—an alternative, moreover, that, unlike Marxism, was an authentic part of America's heritage, indeed, central to its Revolutionary beginnings. Suddenly, the left had something in the American political tradition to appeal to other than the rapacious, moneymaking justifications of liberal capitalism. Before long many historians were appropriating republicanism in order to explain everything from working class solidarity to ideas of motherhood, from the jurisprudence of John Marshall to the politics of the Jacksonians, from the antislavery crusade to Southern secession. "Having once been identified," declared Joyce Appleby in 1985, republicanism suddenly was "found everywhere." And not just in historical accounts but in political and legal theory as well. Law professors in particular used republicanism's emphasis on an active civic life and common public purposes to deal with a host of legal problems created by liberalism's apparent obsession with procedural justice, neutrality, and individual rights at the expense of the community and its needs. Anyone seeking to understand the fascinating story of how law professors in the 19805 and 19905 enlisted republicanism on behalf of their legal agendas can find it, spelled out with

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great verve and clarity, in Laura Kalman's Strange Career of Legal Liberalism (1996). If I were to write this book now, I might do it somewhat differently. I might add some material on religion and political economy, which critics have called for and which subsequent scholars have more than amply supplied. But I would not change the book's central argument, and I could not make it shorter even if I wanted to. Although I have had requests over the years to turn out a popular abridged version, I have resisted the temptation. Anyhow, I would not know where to begin condensing the text. I have been consoled in my failure by Edward Countryman's too generous comment that "the book could not have been one word shorter." If I wrote it now, one subject I probably would treat differently would be republicanism. Since republicanism has come to seem to many scholars to be a more distinct and palpable body of thought than it was in fact, perhaps it needs to be better set in its eighteenthcentury context. I certainly know more about the character of eighteenth-century republican thinking now than I did in the 19605, and I have described that character in my more recent book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992). Although monarchism and republicanism had different values, they were mingled in people's thinking perhaps more than I implied in 1969. Classical republicanism was certainly not the besieged ideology of a few revolutionary intellectuals. It was not a body of thought exclusively identified with radical Whigs or Bolingbrokean Tories, with the extreme left or right, or with any fringe groups whatsoever in British and American politics. Republican values were not marginal; they spread everywhere in the culture of the Western world, not just among the English-speaking peoples but on the continent as well. For most educated elites in the eighteenth century, monarchism and republicanism often blended and blurred to the point where the two at times seemed virtually indistinguishable. To be sure, few persons talked openly of deposing kings and instituting elective republican governments. Such seditious thought was not only dangerous, it was beside the point. People, even good aristocrats, could be loyal monarchists and still ardently promote republican values. Few of those aristocrats celebrating the humanistic and egalitarian values of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro in the iy8os believed that they were thereby undermining monarchy and their future existence. Monarchical and republican values thus existed side by side in the culture, and many loyal monarchists adopted what were in substance if not in name classical republican principles without realiz-

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ing the long-term political implications of their actions. As the historian Franco Venturi pointed out, republicanism by the eighteenth century could no longer be reduced to a form of government; it had become "a form of life," a set of ideals and beliefs entirely compatible with monarchy. Montesquieu and other enlightened thinkers praised the English constitution precisely for its liberal mixture of monarchy with a republican spirit. Although they seldom mentioned the term, good monarchical subjects nonetheless celebrated republicanism for its morality, its freedom, its sense of friendship and civic duty, and its vision of society. Republicanism as a form of life was too pervasive and too much involved with being liberal and enlightened to be seen as subversive or as antimonarchical. In essence, republicanism was the ideology of the Enlightenment. In the eighteenth century, to be enlightened was to be interested in antiquity, and to be interested in antiquity was to be interested in republicanism. Although the classical past could offer meaningful messages for monarchy, there is little doubt that most of what the ancient world had to say to the eighteenth century was latently and often manifestly republican. Like so many South Sea tribes for twentieth-century anthropologists, classical republican Rome became the major means for enlightened Britons to get some perspective on their society and criticize it. Thus Dr. Samuel Johnson found that the best way to condemn the corruption of eighteenth-century London was to imitate Juvenal's third satire on Nero's Rome. Most of the age's invocations of classical antiquity were covert and sometimes unwitting invocations of republicanism. As literary scholars have long been telling us, mid-eighteenth-century Britain did not much celebrate the imperial age of Augustus. After 1688 and especially after 1714, most Britons, even aristocrats close to the court, criticized Augustus and looked to the Roman Republic for values and inspiration. Cicero and Cato, not Augustus, were the Romans to be admired, and Tacitus's anti-Augustan republican view of Roman history was the one most read and cited. Augustus, whose very name became a code word for tyrant, was attacked as such by nearly everyone except royal absolutists. The Tories, thinking of George I, called Augustus a despot, but the court Whigs and defenders of the Hanoverian setdement, thinking of the Stuarts, did likewise. From 1688 on, the need for the government to defend the Whig settlement and to attack the Stuart pretensions to the crown meant that a quasi-republican, antiroyalist bias was necessarily built into the official center of English culture. During Walpole's era, court and country writers alike con-

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demned Augustus as an imperial dictator, the murderer of Cicero, and the destroyer of the Republic. Everyone invoked republican values; even the Tories, said David Hume, had been so long obliged to talk "in the republican stile" that they had at length "embraced the sentiments as well as the language of their adversaries." All these appeals to republican antiquity made anything other than a classical conception of government and governmental leadership difficult if not impossible to justify. Who dared speak against the politically correct republican values of independence and virtue? Older monarchical practices and privileges of course lingered on, but their traditional justifications were gradually eroded by new republican principles. Charges of corruption now came easily to people's lips, as the traditional assumptions that once had legitimated the exploitation of public office for private gain faded from memory. Republicanism did not overthrow monarchy from without but transformed it from within. And it often did this by co-opting the values of monarchy itself. One of the most important historical discoveries that has taken place in the decades since I wrote my book has been the discovery of the importance of politeness to eighteenth-century Anglo-American culture. Late-seventeenth-century Englishmen knew from their brief experience with republicanism that the severe public virtue of antiquity would never hold a modern commercial society together. Something else was needed, and that something came to be called politeness or civility. This politeness began as a central attribute of monarchical court life, but in the eighteenth century it was steadily popularized and republicanized to the point where it seemed to many to be crucial to social life in general. By the middle of the eighteenth century, at least in the English-speaking world, republican values, especially virtue, had become more closely identified with politeness and sociability. For many thinkers, republicanism offered new polite adhesives for holding people together in place of the older monarchical reliance on patriarchy, kinship, and patronage. People, it was said, ought to relate to one another in kinder, gentler ways—through affection, love, and "friendship," which became the ubiquitous euphemism to describe almost every relationship, including even the most severe and unequal dependencies. To the most enlightened, like Thomas Jefferson, sociability became the contemporary substitute for classical virtue. The antique virtue of self-sacrifice was now seen by some as too austere, too forbidding, too harsh for the civilized eighteenth century. People needed a virtue that demanded less in the way of service to the state and more

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in the way of getting along with others in the society. Unlike the classical virtue of the past, which was martial and masculine, this new virtue was soft and feminized and capable of being expressed by women as well as men. It was much more Addisonian than Spartan, and much more social than political. Classical virtue had flowed from the citizen's participation in politics; government had been the source of his civic consciousness and public spiritedness. But for many in the eighteenth century, virtue now flowed from the citizen's participation in society, not in government, which the most enlightened increasingly saw as the source of the evils of the world. "Society," said Thomas Paine, "is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness: the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions." It was society, not politics, that bred the new domesticated virtue of politeness. Mingling in drawing rooms, clubs, coffeehouses, and even counting houses—partaking of the innumerable interchanges of the daily comings and goings of modern life, including those of the marketplace—created affection, fellow feeling, credit, and trust that bound people together in the natural harmony of the social world that was as marvelous to the eighteenth century as the discovery of the force of gravity in the physical world. As the ideology of the Enlightenment, this kind of modernized republicanism had to mean more than the restoration of a balanced constitution and the maintenance of a certain kind of disinterested political leadership and civic-minded political citizenship. In its origins, classical republicanism may have looked backward and scorned the making of money (and in this book I stress some of its anticapitalistic impulses), but increasingly in its updated, more radical and liberal version it became anything but nostalgic, pessimistic, and anticommercial. Far from dreading modernity, republicanism helped to reconcile people to it. It prepared people, in other words, for the transition to what we call liberalism. Just as monarchy was transformed rather than supplanted by republicanism, so too was republicanism transformed rather than supplanted by liberalism, and, as Joyce Appleby has pointed out, it was being transformed even before the Revolution began. Although eighteenth-century American republicanism still assumed a hierarchical society—a hierarchy, however, based on talent and led by a disinterested leisured patriciate—it was never as severely or as thoroughly classical as perhaps I and others sometimes suggested. To picture the republican Revolution of 1776 as something undertaken

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in a pervasive mood of anxiety over corruption and the loss of virtue misses all the optimism and exuberance of the period. Although many clergymen and secular leaders did see the Revolution as an opportunity for moral reformation (and I have described their hopes in my third chapter), most ordinary Americans joined the Revolutionary movement not out of fear of the future but out of the desire to expand their rights and to pursue their happiness. At the outset of the Revolution, Americans saw nothing incompatible between republicanism and what they had referred to as the traditional rights and liberties of Englishmen; if anything, they saw the civic responsibilities and republican participation of the people in government as the guarantor of their rights and liberties. Only later, in post-Revolutionary America, when doubt arose over whether this republican participation of the people in government, especially in their state legislatures, was the best guarantor of their rights and liberties, did an opposition between republicanism and what we have come to call Lockean liberalism arise. And even then none of the historical participants had any sense of having to choose between two identifiable traditions, between Machiavelli and Locke. Jefferson could express simultaneously, and without any sense of inconsistency, the classical republican fear of America's eventually becoming corrupt and the modern liberal need to protect individual rights from government. It is important to remember that the boxlike categories of "republicanism" and "liberalism" are essentially the inventions of us historians, and as such they are dangerous if heuristically necessary distortions of a very complicated past reality. I probably contributed my mite to this distortion of past reality and to the mistaken notion that one set of ideas simply replaced another en bloc by entitling a section of my final chapter "The End of Classical Politics." I meant by that phrase less than has often been assumed. I intended only to say that after the debates and discoveries of 1787-88 most Americans (John Adams was a conspicuous exception) more or less ceased talking about politics in the way theorists since Aristotle had—as a maneuvering and mixing of three social entities or forms of government—and began talking about politics in recognizably modern ways—as a competition among interests or parties in the society for control of a quasi-autonomous state. But some readers have interpreted the phrase to mean that the entire republican tradition came to end in 1787-88 and was abruptly replaced by something called liberalism. Cultural changes of that magnitude do not take place in such a neat and sudden manner.

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