A Republic of the People, a Constitution of Air

No one drew the intellectual world of the founders more sharply than Gordon S. Wood. In The Creation of the American Republic (1969), which won the Bancroft Prize, he showed how republicanism — the belief that free government depended on civic virtue, and leaders willing to subordinate private interest to the public good — shaped the founders’ worldview and the Constitution. For a generation, the book made it impossible to write about the founding without reckoning with Wood’s analysis. But the founders were never his real subject. Ordinary people were, and so was the country they built once the gentry lost control of it. Still, since Wood died on June 7, weeks short of the country’s 250th birthday, the obituaries have tended to focus on his scholarship about the founding elite, rather than on the democracy that he spent 50 years describing.

The Creation of the American Republic made Wood the finest archaeologist of republicanism and the natural heir to his Harvard supervisor, the historian Bernard Bailyn, whose Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) had recovered the founders’ mental world from their pamphlets and made ideas, not economic interests, the cause of the Revolution. Teacher and pupil stood close enough to be filed as a single school, and their readers rarely saw how far Wood had strayed from that inheritance. For Bailyn, the colonists’ fear of a plot against liberty was itself the engine of revolt. Wood treated the same fear as a symptom. For him, the feverish rhetoric did not cause the American Revolution; it only registered the immense social change that did. Yet this Wood is easy to miss, because his argument about society was not written as social history. He deduced the democratic transformation from the rhetoric of the gentry who dreaded it. His deepest sociological claim therefore hides inside books that seem to be about the elite’s ideology.

That method is on clearest display in a 1966 essay, “Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution,” which reads almost as a user’s guide to The Creation of the American Republic. In it, Wood refutes both the Progressive school of history, which read the founders’ rhetoric as propaganda masking economic interests, and the neo-Whigs, who took it as sincere principle. Ideas were neither mask nor mirror, he argued, but the tools people used to make sense of a reality they did not fully grasp. Wood found the clue in the rhetoric’s excess: language so feverish, he argued, betrayed strains in a society more mobile and restless than its leaders’ categories allowed, and a gentry whose authority rested on a deference that was already eroding beneath them. The gentry saw that erosion clearly and filled their letters and pamphlets with alarm. Where they diagnosed moral decay, Wood recognized the first buds of democracy. He turned their complaints about social mobility into his best evidence for it. For Wood, the gentry’s insistence on the common good was a reaction against ordinary people who pursued their own interests openly.

In The Creation of the American Republic, Wood carried that method into the 1780s. In 1787, as he prepared for the Philadelphia convention, James Madison listed the vices of the political system, which he traced above all to the state governments, and charged that their legislators pursued private interest and served the narrow demands of their constituents at the expense of the public good. The legislators he had in mind — farmers, artisans, and petty traders of middling fortune — had filled assemblies the gentry once commanded, printed paper money, and passed laws that shielded debtors from their creditors.

Wood then cast the Constitution as a remedy, and its makers as desperate heroes rescuing the Revolution from the excesses of democracy. The Federalists’ coup was rhetorical: they appropriated the language of popular sovereignty and turned it to their own ends, building institutional barriers to keep ordinary people at arm’s length from the federal government. Thus, the Constitution carried a contradiction at its root: it names the people as the source of all authority while building barriers to keep them at bay. That contradiction, popular sovereignty invoked to legitimate a government designed to restrain the popular will, was the mark of the social and ideological change that, in Wood’s view, would define the radical nature of the American Revolution.

In a famous essay for the Constitution’s bicentennial in 1987, called “Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the Constitution,” Wood let slip where his sympathies truly lay. They lay not with the Federalists, who rallied in favor of the Constitution, but with the Anti-Federalists, who criticized it. For Wood, the Anti-Federalists were the real forerunners of a modern, pluralistic democracy, because they saw American politics as a healthy interplay of interest groups. James Madison, the drafter of the Constitution long seen as a prophet of interest-group politics, appeared in a different light. Madison did not, according to Wood, welcome a world of competing interests; he sought to multiply interests so that they would cancel each other out and leave disinterested men free to govern above the fray. He was trying to build a constitutional device that would neutralize the scrum. In the end, Madison’s failure became the triumph of American democracy. After all, in Wood’s narrative, ordinary people would continue to reshape politics and society, whatever the Constitution prescribed.

But how far-reaching could a revolution be that left the economic structure intact, retained slavery, and barely addressed the subordination of women? Wood answered in his next book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992): the ordinary pursuits of ordinary white men had dissolved a monarchical world of patronage, deference, and dependency, clearing the ground for a commercial and egalitarian society. Wood celebrated this change and stated clearly that “no constitution, no institutional arrangements, no judicial prohibitions could have restrained the popular social forces unleashed by the Revolution.”

Only Wood could have written the Constitution out of the American democratic story and won a Pulitzer for it. But in its place, he offered something more mesmerizing: a democratic revolution larger than any election, a spirit of equality loosening the old bonds of rank, reordering how men worked, prayed, communicated, traded, and took up politics, each pursuing his own interest without dressing it as the public good. Above all, in Wood’s eyes, the Revolution handed ordinary people both a new politics and culture, and their tastes obliterated the enlightened world the revolutionary elite had imagined.

Seventeen years later, he would continue to trace how ordinary people changed American politics and culture in Empire of Liberty (2009), Wood’s volume in the Oxford History of the United States, which outlines a country advancing against the founders’ hopes, ideals and institutions. From the Constitution’s adoption to 1815, Wood shows the founders’ expectations inverted at every turn: ordinary people crowded into the evangelical churches instead of growing more rational, the agrarian republic gave way to commerce and manufacturing, and the gentlemen who had once stood for election were pushed aside by professional politicians who ran for office under modern political parties. From electoral competition to logrolling to pork-barrelling, practices despised by the gentry are the ones Wood counted as democracy. Not one of them appears in the Constitution.

For all his celebration of ordinary people, Wood hardly ever let them speak in his books. Instead, he focused on elites: what they believed, how they argued, what frightened them, whom they befriended, how the outcome disappointed them. His critics often denounced him for ignoring slaves and women. Wood answered that the equality he celebrated, even if it reached only white men, ended a contempt for manual labor as old as Aristotle, and that this achievement opened cracks in the political culture that women and African Americans could use later. He rejected, in review after review, the scholarly turn toward class, gender, and other forms of repressive structures in the founding era, which he read as putting the past on trial by current-day values.

In Wood’s analysis, the appropriate historical categorization was between gentry and ordinary people. Scholars such as Alan Taylor and Robert Parkinson have located members of both groups on the same side of most social conflicts. Gentleman and smallholder joined as white men who coveted the same Western land. That solidarity turned outward into a war of dispossession against Indian peoples, and inward against enslaved people and women. Freedom for ordinary white men did grow, but it grew at the expense of the people they held down. The conflict Wood placed between gentry and ordinary people ran instead across a line both sides policed together.

Until the end, Wood fought to maintain a usable origin story, with democracy at its heart, and violence and racism at the margins. He dismissed the notion that a revolution “conceived mainly as sordid, racist and divisive” could inspire a nation. Slavery could be pervasive, cruel, and inhumane. But for Wood, it could not be foundational. In December 2019, that conviction put his name on a letter to the New York Times, signed by five historians, demanding corrections to the 1619 Project. The dispute was never really about the facts, as Adam Serwer argued in The Atlantic. It was about whether Americans had ever meant what they said in 1776, and Wood answered it as though a footnote were at stake. Colleagues who shared his reading of the history saw the brawl coming and stayed out. Wood walked in. In Power and Liberty (2021), his last book, in which he recounts his major contributions to constitutionalism, Wood finally gave slavery a chapter, arguing that the American Revolution was “the first antislavery movement in the history of the world.” Wood walks through every bargain the Framers struck with slavery at Philadelphia yet absolves them of any responsibility. For Wood, the Constitution neither enforces nor endorses a position, but rather stands back and records a social quarrel between the men who created it.

Behind this account lies Wood’s sociological view of law, which strips the state of agency and frames it instead as a crowd of interest groups. He grants that the framers built a government to stand above the will of the people, but sees that project, ultimately, as a failure. Not because any crisis or contest defeats the machinery of government. It simply gives way, and modern democracy grows up through the breach. Governmental authority, in Wood’s view, is not shaped by formal institutions from the top down, but rather takes form as “a pooling together of power from below.”

The bottom-up model of power also applies to Wood’s reading of the Constitution. For all its republican machinery, the document he unpacks barely governs, and a pluralist society pushes past it. For Wood, pluralism was not simply an idea, but rather a fact of American life, the natural and almost timeless way politics operated in the United States. This conviction kept him from seeing the state as anything more than the sum of society’s interests. It also provided him with a theory about why private interests were legitimate. Men pursuing their own advantage were not corrupting politics, but rather conducting it. Whereas the founders feared political parties, Wood saw them as simply another element of a pluralistic democracy. In the end, Wood’s conceptual vision kept him from recognizing the Constitution’s role in creating an American government strong enough to wage the wars that drove the new republic’s expansion.

Wood made the Constitution thin in its words and thinner still in its power. In doing so, he was tapping into a long intellectual tradition. In the 1820s, Hegel doubted the United States was a real state at all. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville thought the federal government was growing weaker by the year and giving up even the appearance of strength. In 1827, Goethe envied America for having no ruined castles and no burden of the past; Wood gave his readers a founding almost as unburdened. But as historian William J. Novak has written, no account built on state weakness can explain how the country became a global superpower. In A Revolution in Favor of Government (2003), Max M. Edling showed how central the Constitution was to this consolidation of state power. Where other historians have understood the document as a reaction to domestic social conflict, Edling interprets it as a reaction to an international arena dominated by powerful empires. The framers needed to build the capacity to wage wars against European states and Indigenous peoples in a way that was palatable to a political culture defined by contempt for standing armies, excisemen and public debt. “By making the right choices about resource mobilization,” Edling explains, “it was possible to create a national government that was both light and inconspicuous. It would be light in the sense that its demands would not press too heavily on the people and it would be inconspicuous in the sense that its actual physical presence would be limited.”

The early American state is easier to see from outside. Edling wrote from Sweden. I write from Mexico, which met the fiscal-military machine he describes at its western edge and ended up losing half of its territory. Neither of us has ever had trouble believing that the American state was and remains strong. Wood did, though that did not stop him helping Edling publish his dissertation as a book. Wood was advancing a young scholar whose account of the founding cut against his own, and two decades later that scholar holds the ground Wood held. The field moved in the same direction. In a 2020 article, historian Gautham Rao described two decades of work by historians of law, labor, and policy bringing the state back into the early republic, and the shift it required: abandoning the Weberian assumption that a state is strong only when it looks like a European bureaucracy.

Wood gave ordinary Americans credit for the whole weight of their founding. He did it by making the Constitution itself weightless. That was the cost of the gift. Half a century of scholarship has made the Revolution heavier than it looked in 1976, and Americans have gone on researching it with an honesty that at times runs against national pride. Every generation writes the founding it can bear, and every generation finds the last one’s version too light. The author of Radicalism knew that better than anyone, as someone who had pushed against earlier historians’ depiction of the Revolution as a conservative revolt. What he doubted was whether his country could carry the heavier version, the one Taylor offered, and still believe in itself. His answer was to return to 1776. He spent his last days and months, in the lead-up to the Declaration of Independence’s 250th birthday, insisting that it was the ideals in that foundational document that still held the country together.