For Independence Day, I thought I would re-present my review of Gordon Wood’s Revolutionary Characters,a book I highly recommend. The piece originally appeared in the June 19, 2006 issue of TAC; this version, edited from my original draft, is a bit different from the one that appeared in print.

It’s not one of my favorite reviews — there was so much material I wanted to cover that condensing it into 2200 words or so proved impossible. Despite that, it’s wordy in places. But it gets across something of the book’s appeal, I hope.

[Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different,Gordon S. Wood, Penguin, 319 pages]

After 230 years the American Revolution and our Founding Fathers have become shopworn things, leached of much of their character, reduced to mannequins to be dressed up in the intellectual fashions of the day. Idealized portrayals of Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and the rest still find a mass audience, resisting revisionist pressure. But as objects of reverence, the Founders cease to be what they were-revolutionaries, men who took up arms against their government and spilled blood for their rights.

If alabaster Founders survive at the popular level, clichés of a different sort prevail in academia, where perpetual debunking is the fate suffered by these men-and that they were men is part of the problem. But only part: Washington was rich as well as white and male. And he owned slaves. So did Jefferson, who slept with one of them, too. Because of the gulf between his life and his ideals-that “all men are created equal” stuff-Jefferson has become a particular target of censure. But the others get their share as well.

Not that all scholarly treatments of the Founders fall into that mode. Just as pervasive, and just as off base, are those scholars who find in the Federalist and other papers of the founding generation far-sighted statesmen who anticipated the modern world of competing interest groups and lobbyists scrambling over one another like beetles after the main chance. Political parties and pork-barrel politics are what America has always been about, in this view, right back to the Constitutional Convention.

Gordon S. Wood, the Alva O. Way University Professor at Brown, navigated past all of these shoals in The Radicalism of the American Revolution, the work that won him a Pulitzer Prize a little over a decade ago. He does so again in Revolutionary Characters, in which he restores something of their 18th-century significance to the eight revolutionary figures treated within these pages. Cleaning away the layers of whitewash and graffiti that have accumulated on these men is only part of Wood’s project. He also has a more specific objective in mind: to show why a nation aborning that produced a half-dozen statesmen of world-historical caliber-and perhaps a score more of nearly that rank-before the turn of the 19th century seemingly cannot produce a single one today.

“What made subsequent duplication of the remarkable intellectual and political leadership of the revolutionaries impossible in America,” Wood contends, “was the growth of what we have come to value most, our egalitarian culture and our democratic society.” The Enlightenment’s gentlemanly ideal demanded statesmen like Washington, Adams, and Jefferson. But the mercantilist and increasingly egalitarian and democratic Republic they created had little use for-and considerable suspicion toward-men of such character. Those Founders who lived long enough to taste the fruits of their labor, Jefferson especially, found them unexpectedly bitter.

Disinterestedness was the hallmark of a gentleman’s character. He was not the creature of his financial interests-if he was not independently wealthy, he at least affected the attitude of one who was, spending generously and borrowing as needed to show that money had no hold over him. He was impartial, concerned only for the public good, not the advancement of friends or, still less, of party. Cultivating this kind of character was of overriding importance to the men Wood profiles (except, notably, Aaron Burr), so much so that even personal shame was preferable to a tarnished political reputation. When Alexander Hamilton was accused of corruption for making payments to a man named James Reynolds, rather than let it be thought that he was engaged in any political intrigue, Hamilton revealed that he had, in fact, been conducting an affair with Reynolds’s wife, and the money was for blackmail. The personal humiliation involved here, for Hamilton’s wife as well as Hamilton, was secondary to the risk to his public character.

Money, not sex, was the root of all republican evils. There was much more to this belief than just aristocratic contempt for work and commerce. Bribery was a mainstay of political power in 18th-century Britain; it was the means by which the king subverted the independence of Parliament and thereby the liberties of Englishmen. Not for nothing did Samuel Johnson define “pension” in his great dictionary as, in part, “pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country.” The young Republic had as much to fear from foreign wealth as well as foreign armies, and the possibility of one branch of government corrupting another was very real.

The Founders also feared the mixture of industrial interests with state power, a combination likely to create constituencies for monopoly at home and wars abroad. Monopoly, in the 18th century, was not understood as any kind of result of free competition but as a government grant of exclusive privilege to favored manufacturers. Indeed, “Social honors, social distinctions, perquisites of office, business contracts, privileges and monopolies, even excessive property and wealth of various sorts,” Wood noted in The Radicalism of the American Revolution, “…seemed to flow from connections to government, in the end from connections to monarchical authority.”

Only disinterested men could administer government justly. Any other kind would lead to tyranny, either by betraying the Republic to foreign interests or by using the power of government to enrich themselves and their friends at the expense of others’ wealth and liberty. That, at least, was the theory-though Hamilton, for one, had other ideas.

Wood’s first chapter makes the case for George Washington as the model of disinterestedness. Other scholars have found in Washington’s career hypocrisy and an unseemly preoccupation with what we now call public image. How many times did he retire from public life only to return to military or political command? He did it after the Revolutionary War. He did it again after serving as president of the Constitutional Convention. Even after his two terms as president of the United States, he returned to the fray when called upon by President Adams to take charge of the Army.  His hand-wringing over how the public might see him in each of these episodes, and in the matter of whether he should accept shares in the Potomac Company, makes ready fodder for debunking scholars.

But Wood argues, persuasively, that Washington wasn’t just putting up a pretense of republican humility. He cared about how he was perceived because, in the highly personal politics of the 18th century, appearances mattered. And in surrendering his sword to Congress after the successful conclusion of the Revolutionary War and stepping down as president after eight years, Washington did indeed do something extraordinary. Jefferson, among others, expected him to serve as president for life. He could have reigned as an elected monarch. And earlier he could have overawed the Continental Congress. For a man of his stature to surrender power voluntarily was unheard of in the modern world-the old Roman Cincinnatus offered the only obvious parallel. Washington’s example set the young republic apart from the old rules of European power politics, or so it seemed.

Washington served the needs of both emerging poles of American political consciousness. He embodied the Enlightenment ideal of disinterestedness so dear to Jefferson. And he lent his prestige, which grew with each act of humility, to the national government at every stage, from the Constitutional Convention through the struggle for ratification to his tenure as president. That pleased Hamilton, who as secretary of the Treasury-and a surrogate son of sorts to the childless president-was able to shape Washington’s administration in ways that Jefferson despised.

Poor Jefferson. Wood cites his early biographer James Parton’s remark that “If America is right, Jefferson was right.” But as Wood observes, “[o]ver the past four decades or so many people, including some historians, have concluded that something is seriously wrong with America. And if something is wrong with America, something has to be wrong with Jefferson.” Slavery and Sally Hemings are just the beginning: “The Jefferson that emerges out of much recent scholarship … resembles the America many critics have visualized in the past four decades: self-righteous, guilt-ridden, racist, doctrinaire, and filled with liberal pieties that under stress are easily sacrificed.”

Attempts to reclaim Jefferson in the ’70s and ’80s tried to transform him into things he was not: a communitarian, a classical republican. The Sage of Monticello drew from the wisdom of antiquity, of course, and by the end of his life was a devoted localist. But, as Wood argues, he was always, above all, a democrat, a man of Enlightenment, and a libertarian. He stood for a modern, not classical, kind of virtue, “less the harsh self-sacrifice of antiquity and more the willingness to get along with others for the sake of peace and prosperity. Virtue became identified with politeness, good taste, and one’s instinctive sense of morality.”

Jefferson’s faith in the natural sociability of man and congruence of individual interests was the root of his faith in democracy; he saw little need for minorities to fear majority power. But state power was another matter, says Wood: “He hated all bureaucracy and all coercive instruments of government; he sometimes gave the impression that government was only a device by which the few attempted to rob, cheat, and oppress the many.” The government that governed least was best because fundamentally decent and sociable people did not need anything more.

He held to this vision even in the hardest cases, those of slavery and war. The former he expected to whither away with the progress of the human spirit. And the latter would disappear once republics, loving only peace and commerce, had spread throughout the world. Embargoes, like the disastrous one of Jefferson’s second administration, would substitute for war. Toward the end of his life, however, Jefferson’s faith, though not forsaken, had grown darker: religious fervor meant intolerance to him; the resurgence of Christianity alarmed him. And democracy itself, instead of leading an Enlightened public to elect disinterested statesmen, had produced venal politicians and Andrew Jackson. He blamed all this on the Federalists.

Hamilton had in mind an America very different from that of Jefferson’s dreams. He wanted glory for himself and his nation, and he could obtain the former by turning the latter into a world power on par with Britain. He didn’t believe in any natural human sociability that would bring nations together in peaceful trade, and domestically he sought to marshal venality to the national government’s advantage by employing the very practices that Jefferson considered corruption. He was, as Wood says, a “big government man,” an admirer of George III’s “fiscal military state”: “Hamilton saw that the secret of the Hanoverian monarchy’s success was its system of centralized tax collection and its funded national debt together with its banking structure and its market in public securities. For a state to wage war successfully, it had to tax efficiently and borrow cheaply.”

Hamilton would be at home, Wood thinks, with “our government’s vast federal bureaucracy, its sprawling Pentagon, its enormous CIA, its huge public debt, its taxes beyond any he could have hoped for, and especially its large professional military force with over a million men and women under arms spread across two oceans and dozens of countries.” But for all that, he was still an 18th-century gentleman: he understood state finance perhaps better than anyone who had ever lived, but he never enriched himself. And he took the gentleman’s code of honor seriously enough that it finally got him killed after he accepted Aaron Burr’s challenge to a duel.

Burr had none of the scruples of Hamilton or the other Founders about separating public interest from private. Wood contends that it was this, and not Burr’s adventures in the West, that was his real treason: a betrayal not of his nation but of his class. When Burr received the same number of electoral votes as Jefferson in the presidential contest of 1800 and the race went to the House of Representatives, Hamilton worked to ensure his archenemy’s election, so appalled was he at the prospect of Burr becoming president. “Burr may have represented what most American politicians would eventually become-pragmatic, get-along men,” writes Wood, “but to Hamilton and Jefferson he violated everything they had thought the American Revolution had been about.”

Wood is never less than engaging as a writer, never less than illuminating as a thinker. But his chapters on Paine, Franklin, and John Adams all seem relatively slight. In Paine, he discovers America’s first public intellectual, alienated from the founding statesmen by his direct appeal to a mass public and alienated from that very public by his unorthodox religious views. Franklin, subject of Wood’s 2004 book The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin,is a man of many masks, but ultimately one whose frustrated ambitions at the hands of George III’s ministers led him to join the Revolution. And Adams, most brilliant of the Founders, was nonetheless a man out of tune with his times, a figure who in Wood’s view could not grasp the profoundly republican character of the Constitution, which expressed not distinct classes of few and many but the sovereignty of the people as a whole.

None of those chapters breaks new ground. The one devoted to James Madison, however, does. For other scholars there is a James Madison problem-how did the “father of the constitution” and author of the Virginia Plan that would have given Congress a veto over every state law become by 1798 a proponents of states’ rights? Wood provides an elegant answer: Madison was a nationalist of a very different sort than Hamilton and the Federalists. He saw the Constitution not as a stepping stone toward creating the British Empire anew, but as a check on the illiberal tendencies of state legislatures. Madison hoped the Congress would be a kind “superjudge” and that the national government would attract better gentlemen than state legislatures could. Once he saw what Hamilton had in mind, however, he fought to preserve the state prerogatives.

Wood offers a plausible new reading of Federalist No. 10 to buttress his case; he keeps Madison in his 18th-century context and examines that famous document not in light of what America subsequently grew into-with its political parties and interest groups-but in light of 18th-century British government, where the Crown and Privy Council played the kind of super-political role Wood sees Madison advocating for the U.S. federal government. It’s an enlightening approach.

Most boldly of all, Wood reconsiders what most scholars have thought to be Madison’s greatest failure: his seemingly inept leadership in the War of 1812.  In fact, Wood argues, Madison knew exactly what he was doing. He and the Jeffersonians did not prepare for the war before it was upon them because “War, the Republicans realized, would lead to a Hamiltonian monarchical type of government, with increased taxes, an overblown bureaucracy, heavy debts, standing armies, and enhanced executive power.” And once the fighting commenced, “Better to allow the country to be invaded and the capital to be burned than to build up state power in a European monarchical manner.”
Today, as Wood acknowledges, such a thing is unimaginable. But at the time, Madison’s concern for keeping militarism in check, even in wartime, and his respect for civil liberties in extremis, won him great honor among his countrymen. John Adams said he had “acquired more glory, and established more Union, than all his three Predecessors, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, put together.”

“Maybe we ought to spend less time investigating Madison the author of the tenth Federalist and more time investigating Madison the president,” writes Wood. “His conception of war and government, whether we agree with it or not, might help us understand better the world we have lost.”

Filed under: Books, Liberty