Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution, by Gordon S. Wood

‘The Revolutionary era was the most creative period of constitutionalism in American history’, writes Gordon Wood on the second page of Power and Liberty. ‘Rarely’, he says, ‘has any nation is such a short period of time … created and secured so many political institutions’ (p. 2). As anyone who has read anything on the subject will know, this is not Wood’s first venture into American constitutional history. His landmark first book, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-–1787 (1969), was about the origins of the federal constitution, and he has returned to the topic many times since. It will come as no surprise that some of what he has to say sounds familiar, especially his insistence that the Revolution was a democratic transformation unlike any the world had previously seen. What is surprising are his apparent doubts about whether that transformation has been an unmitigated good thing. Although he still sees much to admire, the story that emerges is a good deal darker and, in places, less congratulatory than Wood’s other writings might lead readers to expect.

Initially written for a lecture series at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, the book opens with a discussion of Britain’s imperial constitution, moves briskly through the history of ‘constitution-making’ in the states (p. 32), the so-called ‘crisis of the 1780s’ (p. 54), and the Philadelphia convention of 1787, then takes a deeper dive into the Constitution’s three most important legacies: the perpetuation of slavery, the development of judicial review, and the invention of the legal ‘demarcation between public and private’ (p. 149). In a brief epilogue, Wood concludes with a perceptive essay on Rhode Island, the most democratic and ‘commercially advanced of [Britain’s] North American colonies’ on the eve of the Revolution (p. 179). Alone among the union’s thirteen members, the Ocean State refused to send delegates to the constitutional convention, and its leaders waited until 1790, more than a year after Washington had taken the oath of office as President, to ratify the new federal charter. Yet no state better exemplified what Wood regards as the republic’s political future: democratic, prosperous and corrupt. ‘As strange and peculiar as Rhode Island seemed’, he writes, it turned out to be utterly typical (p. 176).

As he did in Creation, Wood places democracy at the centre of the book’s analysis, attributing the crisis of the 1780s to growing disillusionment with the populism of the states’ legislatures. Checking the ‘excesses of democracy’, he says, was one of the main goals of the US Constitution, as well as a driving force behind the development of judicial review and the legal distinction between public and private (p. 71). Democracy also helps explain the post-independence growth, and subsequent decline, of antislavery from New England to the Chesapeake. In a pointed response to the New York Times 1619 Project, Wood insists that ‘the Revolution and antislavery were entwined and developed together’ (p. 100). In many states, property-owning blacks enjoyed the right to vote. But as poor whites also gained the franchise, legislatures everywhere, including in the free states of the North, began to retreat. ‘No state admitted to the Union after 1819 allowed blacks to vote’, he writes. ‘By 1840, 93 percent of northern free blacks lived in states that completely or practically excluded them from the suffrage and hence from participation in politics’ (p. 124).

Despite this bleak view of democracy, a recurring theme is the positive character of what Americans did achieve. Because the American Revolution was the first of the great Atlantic revolutions, the United States obviously played a leading role. At times, however, Wood’s account of that role betrays a celebratory, triumphalist tone often associated with the idea of American exceptionalism. Speaking of Virginia’s Statute for Religious Freedom, which ended public support for churches and other religious institutions, he has this to say: ‘Nothing like that had ever before occurred in Western history’ (p. 90). That, certainly, is what Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the law’s respective author and sponsor, thought, and it is how like-minded thinkers elsewhere viewed the law’s significance, especially in Europe. But perception is not always the same thing as reality. Some readers, for example, might wonder about the wall between church and state that Roger Williams erected in colonial Rhode Island. A less sweeping statement might have carried more weight.

If there are places where Wood risks claiming more than the evidence will bear, there are many more where his insights are spot on, perceptive, and shrewd. This book is clearly the work of a historian who has spent a long and illustrious career grappling with the American Revolution’s conflicted legacies of democracy and constitutional government. Whether one agrees with his conclusions or not, the result is a book from which both general readers and specialists will benefit.