One month shy of celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, America lost one of its greatest chroniclers of the revolution that it inspired.
Gordon S. Wood died last week at the age of 92. While many of his contemporaries found it necessary to trash the revolution, pointing out the utter hypocrisy of slave owners proclaiming for liberty, Professor Wood chose to look at the entire revolutionary period as far more important than simply a question of slavery.
His 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, gave a ringing defense of the ideals and personalities that created the United States out of an idea — the first time in history that had happened. He answered those who called out the Founders for their hypocrisy, as England's great man of letters, Samuel Johnson, best summed up when he remarked in 1775, "Why is it we hear the loudest yelps for freedom from the drivers of negroes?"
Wood wrote in Radicalism, "To focus, as we are today apt to do, on what the Revolution did not accomplish—highlighting and lamenting its failure to abolish slavery and change fundamentally the lot of women—is to miss the great significance of what it did accomplish; indeed, the Revolution made possible the anti-slavery movement and women's rights movements of the nineteenth century and in fact all our current egalitarian thinking."
Wood belonged to a generation of historians who came of age in the second half of the 20th century, when the progressive school of historiography held sway over most of academia. Charles A. Beard and his acolytes believed that the American Revolution was a reaction to Great Britain's colonial policies that stifled the American economy. Beard looked at history through the lens of economic interest and class conflict. Critics frequently accused him of being a Marxist, something Beard strongly rejected.
It was of little consequence. Beard posited that the Revolution was an economic reaction, and that the political rhetoric of the Founders — their constant talk of "liberty," "tyranny," and "virtue" — was a mere propaganda smokescreen designed to hide their underlying financial motives.
Woods and a new cohort of American historians of the Revolution, including his mentor Bernard Bailyn, Jack Greene, and Richard Buel, Jr., strongly pushed back on that premise. They argued that a shared, deeply entrenched political ideology rooted in 18th-century English radical Whig thought genuinely motivated the colonists.
The liberal historians at the time referred to this movement as the "Ideological School," or "Republican Revisionism." But Woods' work was solidly based on fact. His sources were always impeccable; his point of view was firmly grounded in previous scholarship. Wood saw himself as carrying on a great tradition, chronicling American exceptionalism and correcting Beard's cold point of view that reduced shattering revolutionary ideas such as equality to dollars and cents.
He was an early and passionate critic of the 2019 New York Times's controversial 1619 Project. Wood wrote that the American Revolution had not been fought to defend American slavery from our abolitionist overlords, but rather to create the conditions where a new kind of freedom could thrive.
Wood was a prolific author. In addition to Radicalism, he authored the Bancroft-winning prize The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 in 1969. This foundational work traces how early Americans shifted away from traditional English political theory to construct a distinct, entirely new framework for constitutional governance and popular sovereignty.
His 2001 concise account of the Revolution, The American Revolution: A History, summarizes the causes, progression, and societal impact of the war and its aftermath.
His 2004 biography, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, was considered one of the best Franklin biographies ever written. The Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815, written in 2009, was a sweepingly detailed narrative of the tumultuous early decades of the United States, tracking the political wars between Federalists and Jeffersonians, the rise of a rowdy democratic culture, and the War of 1812.
The writing of history has changed. Narrative histories are considered beneath the time of a "real" historian. History popularizers such as Wood, Catton, Shelby Foote, and Stephen Ambrose are derided for making history accessible to all of us.
Some of the points that these scholars made are not without foundation. History is far too messy to lend itself to most narratives. Too many things are happening in too many places at the same time for an accurate rendition of history to be reduced to a nice, neat narrative.
Nevertheless, the service these scholars render to the general public is without equal. History tells the story of us. If it is best understood as a narrative, so be it.
“To be an American is not to be someone,” Woods wrote, “but to believe in something.” That's as good an explanation of what America is and who we are as we're likely to get.
