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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood Max M. Edling Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution. By Gordon S. Wood. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 228. $24.95, ISBN 978-0-19-754691-8.) A new book by Gordon S. Wood is always a major event. Based on a lecture series, this volume on constitutionalism draws on the interpretation of the American founding that Wood presented in his magisterial Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969) and further elaborated in The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1991). The overarching theme is the growth of liberty. Despite the title, power is a secondary concern. Wood argues that the American Revolution was a sharp break with the colonial past that marked the transition to political modernity. It entirely recast the social order; Wood remarks more than once that “[t]he Revolution changed everything” (pp. 105, 159). In contrast to the monarchical social order of the colonial period, the new society was democratic because, at least in the North, it was a “middle-class” revolution (p. 9). Constitutionalism was crucial to the realization of individual liberty and equality: the creation of written constitutions expressing the fundamental law of the community, including an enumeration of individual rights; the elevation of constitutional law above statute law; and the delegation of the exclusive authority to interpret constitutional law to an independent judiciary. Slavery has always been the main challenge to attempts to cast the Revolution as a milestone on the road to modern democracy. Wood has sometimes been criticized for downplaying the importance of the institution but treats it here in a separate chapter. He explains that although New World plantation slavery was historically unique, plantation slavery in North America differed from slavery as practiced in the rest of the Americas. In the thirteen colonies, enslaved Africans formed but one of several classes of unfree labor, which blurred the sense of slavery’s distinctiveness. The Revolution emancipated unfree laborers who were not enslaved because “unfreedom could no longer be taken for granted as a normal part of hierarchical society” (p. 105). Slavery itself was also attacked. “The Revolution and antislavery were entwined,” and abolition was “integral to the republican revolutions taking place in the new states,” Wood claims (pp. 100, 112). At least in the northern states, Wood argues, abolition was “remarkably successful” (p. 112). In the upper South, a strong impulse toward abolition came to naught because the plantation economy was so entrenched, and after 1791 the Haitian Revolution killed off the wish to set the enslaved free. After American independence, the North saw setbacks as racial discrimination followed emancipation. Wood thus deftly separates Revolutionary principles from post–Revolutionary practice. Ideals sometimes shape social and economic reality. At other times ideals and reality remain separate and unconnected. To Wood, the Revolution was not defined by the slavery and racism that American constitutionalism upheld after independence. Rather, the Revolution represented “the first antislavery movement in the history of the world” (p. 100). Some will see in this argument a missed opportunity to place slavery and other forms of unfreedom incompatible with the concept of political modernity [End Page 133] at center stage in the founding drama. These paired ideas—liberty and slavery, participation and exclusion, opportunity and oppression—were not unfortunate aberrations external to the Revolution but central elements of the founders’ worldview and, consequently, of the world they made. Only by analyzing how, in the early American republics, the freedom of the citizen required the unfreedom of the noncitizen can historians productively engage with the troubling legacy that the founding bestowed on the modern United States. As Wood himself is the first to recognize, such a critique is part of an ongoing interpretation and reinterpretation of the constitutional history of the founding that will never end in “final truth” (p. 9). Even those who do not agree with every facet of Wood’s interpretation cannot fail to be impressed by the clarity and power of his argument. Beautifully written by a master historian, Power and Liberty succinctly and elegantly summarizes an interpretation of the American founding that, for...