A new nation

In the aftermath of the American Revolution, no question haunted the founders more than whether the young, precarious US could survive. Would the country last in perpetuity? Or was it fated to be a bold experiment in republicanism that would ignominiously fail?
As the founders knew all too well, the examples from the rest of the world were not encouraging: with bewildering rapidity republics came and went, ever ready to disintegrate into bickering, fragmented entities, or collapsing through conquest, or dying through despotism. James Madison perhaps put it best, moaning that the US was “in a wilderness without a single footstep to guide us”.
Quite true. Yet as Gordon S. Wood demonstrates in Empire of Liberty, his superb new account of America’s pivotal first quarter-century, these inchoate Americans were audacious from the very start. Madison called America an Arcadian “paradise” while Thomas Jefferson labelled the nation “the world’s best hope”. And when they gazed over at the decadent, decaying monarchies of France and England, Americans concluded they were on the cusp of a new age, destined to be “an asylum to the good, to the persecuted and to the oppressed”.
In fact, however, the obstacles a debt-ridden America faced were monumental. Under the Articles of Confederation, its Congress had been a feeble instrument that could barely muster a quorum. Its 13 states acted like 13 independent countries, and squabbling ones at that. Laws were, as Vermont officials put it, “altered — re­altered — made better — made worse” with such dizzying speed that people scarcely knew what the law was. The national government could not tax, could not raise an army and could not suppress internal insurrections.
Nevertheless, in 1787 the founders would fashion the Constitution, which Wood, recalling Madison’s thinking in particular, rightly labels “one of the most creative moments in the history of American politics”. Then somehow, against all the odds, they would go on to establish the institutions and habits of democratic self-government that, more than two centuries later, still lie at the core of the American political system. It is a remarkable story, and in Wood’s masterly hands, it is told with enormous insight and unmatched scholarship.
In one of the many fascinating tidbits that Wood recounts, we learn that George Washington spoke of himself in the third person, like the monarchs of Europe, and that many Americans actually thought the president would hold office for life, much like the elective king in Poland. In the first of countless gambles, the founders made the presidency powerful and kinglike precisely because they expected Washington to occupy the office.
Over the next quarter-century, the founders were forced to improvise time and again. They had to wrestle with the tumult brought about by the unexpected rise of political parties or factions, as they were then called. They confronted deep dissension at home over the French Revolution, a quasi war with France and a hot war with Britain, as well as fears about foreign invasion. They were concerned about sedition from opposition parties, and from popular democratic societies cropping up all around the country. There was even a recurrent spectre of secession to worry about. Much of this may be familiar, yet Empire of Liberty is as elegant a synopsis of the period as any I know, no small achievement given how sprawling and complex these early years were.
Wood’s central characters are familiar too, but presented in admirably nuanced portraits. We see the austere George Washington, whose inordinate strength was his realism; we see the perplexing Thomas Jefferson, who so eloquently championed the rights of the common people while remaining publicly silent about the evils of slavery; we see Alexander Hamilton, who helped give us capitalism and who also had profound reservations about the revolutionary tide sweeping Europe; and we see James Madison, who Wood thinks may well have been the most intellectually gifted figure the nation has ever produced.
One area where Wood makes a particularly noteworthy contribution is in tracing the surprise development of America’s democratic identity. “Surprise” is the word. Too often forgotten is the fact that America’s patrician founders harboured great fears about the “excesses of democracy”. Though the new country was to be a daring trial in self-government, it was expected to be guided less by egalitarian impulses than by the aristocratic beliefs of well-bred gentlemen. That day, however, was quickly waning.
In the fleeting time span of some two decades, a new era in democratic politics and culture transformed the nation, effectively creating a very different country from the one the founders had envisaged. By the close of the War of 1812, which Wood labels the “strangest” but “one of the most important” conflicts in American history, anyone 40 or older had been a subject of King George III, whereas anyone younger — a staggering 85 percent of the population — had been born a republican citizen.
Except, of course, for the slaves. Despite America’s stirringly expansive message of liberty, the country remained marred by a brutal paradox, which Wood chronicles with considerable thoughtfulness and balance. Though progressive anti­slavery sentiments mounted across the nation, so, too, did racial distinctions, not only in the South but also in the North. For instance, in New York state, the legislature revoked the franchise for free blacks in part because of their race and in part because they tended to vote for Federalists. Meanwhile, black codes arose in the upper South mandating that free blacks had to carry papers or wear arm patches. Even in this formative period, the coming crisis could be perceived in the varied details of American life.
On every page of this book, Wood’s subtlety and erudition show. Grand in scope and a landmark achievement of scholarship, Empire of Liberty is a tour de force, the culmination of a lifetime of brilliant thinking and writing. —NYT