The Creation of the American Republic by Gordon S. Wood
Book Review
The first three hundred pages of Gordon S. Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic: 1776 – 1787 (1969) cover a broad scope of some of the intellectual, cultural, and legal history of revolutionary-era North America. More specifically, Wood explores the republican themes that permeated Colonial American culture in the 1760s and 1770s. These themes wrestle with ideas concerning the proper role of the state and the duty of a population’s culture to act as a binding agent that promotes virtue and contemplates the benefit of the people broadly.
This work is noteworthy in the canon of American intellectual history for its de-emphasis of the influence of seventeenth century English political philosopher John Locke. Instead, Wood argues that classical republicanism was responsible for the ideological motivations of the American Revolution. This is an interesting assessment and not merely for the circumvention of Locke’s impact on the political thinkers of the age. Wood’s thesis casts the protagonists of the American Revolution into a more collectivist light. Lockean individual rights are downplayed in favor of a sort of republican virtue that instead asserts the cultural necessity of a philosophy that considers the group over the individual and the majority over the minority.
The Creation of the American Republic is an important work in the historiography of the American Revolution and American intellectual history largely because of the fact that Locke’s influence is minimized. Wood uses a plethora of sources to bolster his argument, and this historical revisionism has been, for the most part, beneficial to the field. That said, this writer sees it to some extent as Wood inventing a new angle that is at best incomplete and at worst a form of careless disregard for inconvenient historical facts. It seems, to some degree, that Wood’s avoidance of Locke (which is considerable but not wholly done) is a device to present his thesis as more solid than it is. To be clear, Wood’s thesis is quite valuable. Shining a light on a different cultural/political ideology and analyzing its influence, especially when it in so many ways is antithetical to the individualism of Locke, is certainly an esteemed addition to the historical canon. Ignoring Locke, however, to the extent that Wood does seems to be a mistake, and not an insignificant one.
Nevertheless, Wood does an enviable job of illustrating the cultural and political moment of this time. He notes the sense of a neo-classical age emerging, including the trend of public writers utilizing names of ancient republican heroes, and other classical references alluded to by prominent members of society. This is useful to the reader, as it reveals the way politics and culture were so overlapped and intertwined; indeed, that politics and culture were to some degree one and the same in eighteenth century America.
Perhaps the most valuable aspects of this work in the first half, is Wood’s analysis of the evolution of legislative powers among Americans through this era. This is also true of the evolution in thinking of what embodies executive powers and the judiciary, but Wood demonstrates that executive and judicial powers evolved more or less as a result of the evolution in thinking regarding the role of the legislature. Wood skillfully demonstrates that legislative powers were, as a consequence of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the emergence of a dominant English Parliament, virtually a catch-all for government power. It is in this that one can begin to recognize the growing demarcation between English and American thought regarding the proper role of Parliament. The English saw no real limits on Parliamentary power, while Americans did. This divergence in ideology only grew throughout the revolutionary period and underscored further the difference in how both viewed the concept of representation. Wood notes that the British saw no essential difference between the people and their representatives while Americans believed more and more that the people and their representatives were not one and the same. This discrepancy helps to explain some of the ideological tension between the Americans and the English. It also helped to define something new and unique in American political thought, inspired by philosophical writings like Cato’s Letters in the mid-eighteenth century: what may be good for the people may not be good for the government, and vice versa.
American political thought found its defining quality in this idea that governmental motivating interests and the interests of the people may not only be out of step with each other; they may well be diametrically opposed. Representation, thus, does not necessarily erase those differing motivations. This was a decidedly non-English way of viewing government, the English Parliament specifically, and contributed to the collapse of relations between the colonies and the motherland. It is this detail, above all, that Wood examines in the first half of The Creation of the American Republic that makes this work so compelling for those interested in the intellectual underpinnings of the American Revolution.
Some of Wood’s prose in his other works can be very dry. This is not the case with this book. That said, I found the first hundred pages or so less interesting than the two hundred that followed. Overall, the first half of The Creation of the American Republic is a great work of early American intellectual and cultural history. The avoidance to take on Locke directly seems like a mistake and a way to avoid his profound influence. However, by deciding to give Locke merely an occasional honorable mention, it allows Wood the space to demonstrate the tremendous impact civic virtue and other aspects of classical republicanism had upon Americans in the late-colonial and revolutionary periods. This combined with Wood’s ability to point to a specific difference in intellectual thought between Americans and the English, and note its profound implications, makes The Creation of the American Republic a must-read for scholars of the revolutionary era.
The second half of Gordon S. Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic (1969) begins with Chapter VIII, “Conventions of the People.” This part of the book includes an important aspect of American intellectual and legal history as it marks the moment when American constitutional thought emerged in a form that is recognizable today.
In the 1770s and 1780s, a new legal interpretation developed: constitutions are to be changed by the people themselves and not by their legislative representatives. Furthermore, that constitutions are a higher form of law and supreme to that of simple statute, and conventions “are the only proper bodies to form a Constitution, and Assemblies are the proper bodies to make laws agreeable to that Constitution” (338). Wood notes the momentous impact this evolution in constitutional thought had in the United States going forward. Sovereignty belonged not in part but fully by the people, and their representatives are given license to enact legislation only so far as conforms with what the people have consented to in their constitution. This evolution in political thought, which occurred during the constitution-making process of the individual states during the revolution, created such far-reaching changes to American life that the very participants in this process seemed not to understand how profound its impact would be.
Succeeding chapters of the book outline further the evolving view of sovereignty and notes that some colonists, including Thomas Jefferson, by 1774 were contending that Parliament’s acts over America were void not because they were unjust, as James Otis had argued in the 1760s, but because the British “has no right to exercise authority over us” (352). Also interesting but understandable during the revolutionary years is how little the rebel/independence literature spoke of the nature of an American union being formed. Wood skillfully tracks the growth of belief in the people’s sovereignty and its relevance to American constitutional origins. He also demonstrates how these same impulses wore out their welcome by the mid-1780s when many began to believe that such ideas had begun to go too far. The revolutionary spirit that informed the cause in the 1770s gave way to a cynicism of such anti-authoritarian thinking by 1787. A lack of faith in representatives, which in no small part informed a shift in American constitutional thinking, also began to corrode a belief in government broadly.
Chapter X, “Vices of the System,” and especially Chapter XI, “Republican Remedies,” feature perhaps the most vital intellectual history analysis in the entire book. This fear of overwhelming democratic sentiment mentioned above is underscored in Chapter X in James Madison’s correspondence with Thomas Jefferson, where Madison states his concern with majoritarian tyranny, asserting that in “our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents” (410). To many in Madison’s sphere, republican virtue needed to be cultivated and democratic impulse needed to be reined in.
Chapter XI is most valuable for its analysis of a growing sense of judicial independence. Wood demonstrates that notions of natural justice were influential in North America at least as far back as Cato’s Letters in the early eighteenth century. Also of value is Wood’s analysis of court decisions, including Rutgers v. Waddington, which reveal that concepts of judicial review existed long before Marbury v. Madison, and even prior to the drafting of the U.S. Constitution in 1787. Another case, which preceded the new constitutional government of 1789, Trevett v. Weeden, the lawyer James M. Varnum defined the essence of judicial review and an independent judiciary when he stated “the powers of legislation, in every possible instance, are derived from the people at large, are altogether fiduciary, and subordinate to the association by which they are formed” (460). The fact that judicial review is an antidemocratic check against the legislative branch in order to champion the original charter of the people (i.e. the Constitution) comes full circle with the impression that in American constitutional thought, the people and the people’s representatives are not one and the same. In this way, the legislative branch represents the people, but the judicial branch represents the limits of legislative powers by acting as representatives of the people’s values through its defense of constitutional principles. This aspect of Wood’s research has been instrumental to my own work, which focuses even more deeply on the intellectual history of judicial review.
Finally, the one other criticism I would offer about The Creation of the American Republic, both the second half and the book as a whole, is that there is very little said about the amendment process. This was both a surprise and a disappointment. Considering how much detail and scholarship Wood offers in regard to the different processes of development regarding state constitutions and the evolution of ideas regarding sovereignty, the proper role of the legislature, and judicial independence, Wood’s near silence on the amendment process makes little sense. With any work, a writer is forced—for one reason or another—to leave certain things out. Nevertheless, the amendment process is no small aspect of the American constitutional system, thus absence of any substantial discussion of the topic seems to me a missed opportunity. That said, The Creation of the American Republic is an incredible work of intellectual history. Its breadth and scope are to be admired, as is its immense influence over the past fifty-plus years. Whether one is a fan of Wood’s republican thesis or not, The Creation of the American Republic is a work which must be contended with by any serious historian of the revolution and the early republican era.