Gordon S. Wood, the "Republican Synthesis," and the Path Not Taken

Abstract

A WEEK or two into my first graduate seminar, Professor Bernard Bailyn sent me to the university archives in Widener Library to take a look at Gordon Wood's dissertation. Fortunately (at least for me), I was too untutored at the time to grasp just how prodigious a work lay before me. It was clearly an impressive production, but since it did not appear immediately relevant to my topic, it was not until the following year that I first read through the book that had since been published. As both teacher and scholar I have returned to The Creation of the American Republic countless times since. Familiarity with its general argument does not lessen the admiration one still feels for the nuance and subtlety that inform so many of its chapters and sections or (on the other hand) for the ease with which Wood reduces complex developments to remarkably concise formulations. Take, for example, this single sentence from his section on the Articles of Confederation: In the contest between the states and the Congress the ideological momentum of the Revolution lay with the states; but in the contest between the and the state governments it decidedly lay with the people (p. 362). Or consider how Wood captures the increasing nostalgia with which the Revolutionaries looked back on the heroic period of the mid-I77os: In the eyes of the Whigs the two or three years before the Declaration of Independence always appeared to be the great period of the Revolution, the time of greatest denial and cohesion, when men ceased to extort and abuse one another, when families and communities seemed peculiarly united, when the courts (many of which were closed) were wonderfully free of that constant bickering over land and credit that had dominated their colonial life (p. I02). Or look again at the paragraph where Wood, in his neo-Hartzian mode, explains how the disingenuous rhetoric of the Federalists of I787 destroyed whatever chance there was in America for the growth of an avowedly aristocratic conception of and thereby contributed to the creation of that encompassing liberal tradition which has mitigated and often obscured the real social antagonisms of American politics (p. 562).