From Deference to Democracy: The Transformation of American Society, 1789-1815

Gordon S. Wood's Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic: 1789-1815 is an impressive and magisterial survey of one of the most complex and written-about eras in American history by one of the leading historians of the early republic. This extraordinary new book, the eighth and latest volume in the Oxford History of the United States, complements and amplifies the author's arguments in two of his earlier books, the Bancroft Prize-winning The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992). In Empire of Liberty, Wood has skillfully navigated the twenty-six-year critical period when the future of republicanism and the union were in doubt.

The periodization of Wood's new work, however, is unlike that in two earlier series: The American Nation: A History, published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its successor, The New American History Series. While both earlier series had separate volumes dealing with the Federalist and Jeffersonian eras, Wood's covers both periods. This more comprehensive approach has put a burden on Wood to analyze, explain, and conceptualize the multifaceted forces that were at work in the United States from 1789 to 1815. Henry Adams, for example, took nine volumes to deal only with the period from 1800 to 1816. This also puts a burden on the reviewer, even one who has been allotted extra space, to attempt to do justice to such a large, sweeping, and detailed account.

Wood has chosen to meet this imposing challenge by organizing his book in two different ways. For the most part, the first eight chapters deal chronologically with the period up through the election of 1800. In contrast, the remaining eleven chapters are primarily arranged topically. Topical arrangement, however, sometimes means that events with a specific and timely significance are separated from their chronological position in the narrative and therefore lose some of their significance and impact.

Wood begins his book where he left off in The Radicalism of the American Revolution, stating that, by 1815, the "central impulses of the Revolution had run their course" and "Democracy and equality were no longer problematic issues to be debated; they had become articles of faith to be fulfilled" (p. 4).

In the 1780s, however, that was far from the case. The elites of the country were becoming increasingly troubled by the radicalism of various state legislatures, with the "middling sort," especially in the Northern states, gaining considerable political power and challenging the classical ideas of an elitist deferential authority. Consequently, it was this concern that led to the writing and ratification of the Constitution, with James Madison hoping that the new structure of government "would be a kind of impartial super-judge over all the competing interests in the society." It would, anticipated Madison, create a "disinterested & dispassionate umpire in disputes between different passions & interests" in the different states (p. 32).

Many Federalists who had enthusiastically supported the ratification of the Constitution and the new government were losing faith in the Revolutionary dream that the American republic could survive with a government of limited powers. These Federalists, the author claims, were pessimistic about the future of republicanism but had no desire to return to a monarchical form of government, which they believed was impossible even if they had desired it. Thus, President George Washington and Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Wood maintains, were determined to transform the country into an integrated nation with a national government that had the power "to act energetically in the public sphere" (p. 53).

Although eventually adopted, Hamilton's financial plan faced great difficulty in overcoming state and local loyalties. It would not be easy, as Wood styles it, to build this "monarchical republic" that Hamilton had in mind—for this Walpolean vision of government ultimately failed to gain traction in...