Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different. By Gordon S. Wood. (New York: Penguin, 2006. xiv, 321 pp. Paper, $16.00, ISBN 978-0-14-311208-2.)

Abstract

It has taken Gordon S. Wood nearly forty years to assemble his cast of “revolutionary characters” and place them all onto the stage of the republican synthesis he helped create. These essays have been published independently elsewhere and revised for this volume. There is little new aside from the introduction, which asserts that the founders “unleashed … egalitarian forces” that prevented the “character” they embodied from being reproduced in the nation they created (p. 26). In that sense, they became truly “revolutionary characters,” with goals and ideals informed by the Enlightenment, empowered by republicanism, but ultimately impeded by egalitarianism. These players are also “characters” in the theatrical sense of the word. George Washington is Wood's hero—the ultimate republican citizen and the most perfect example of the “gentleman” described in the introduction, deemed worthy of governing the fledgling republic. Benjamin Franklin is second only to Washington, Wood argues in a greatly condensed version of his 2004 assessment (The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin), and is more difficult to grasp because his true character has been obscured by eighteenth-century misconceptions and the resultant myths, placing him within the “bumptious capitalism of the early Republic” (p. 90). Thomas Jefferson is the epitome of the naïve, enlightened intellect and represents the duality, nay, hypocrisy of America.