Gordon Wood Research Articles

The Pennsylvania Council of Censors and the Debate on the Guardian of the Constitution in the Early United States

Abstract In 1776, Pennsylvania established an institution called the Council of Censors, which would be elected every seven years and was tasked with ensuring that the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government had remained faithful to the constitution. None of the other thirteen colonies would create a similar institution, although Vermont would in 1777. Nor has the Council of Censors enjoyed a positive reputation among historians or constitutional scholars: Gordon Wood, for example, has attacked the institution as ‘a monster [pulled] out of Roman history’. Contemporaries agreed, and the body was abolished in Pennsylvania in 1790 after years of vociferous opposition and was criticized extensively at the Federal Convention in 1787. But the Council of Censors was a remarkably innovative institution, the first designed to enforce a written constitution, created decades before the Supreme Court’s assumption of the power of constitutional judicial review in 1803. This article presents a new history of the origins of the Council of Censors and its reception both in Pennsylvania and across the United States. It challenges prevailing accounts of the origins and purpose of the Council of Censors and argues that it was a product of a new theory of constitutionalism as the codification of popular sovereignty which emerged in the United States in the 1770s in response to the colonists’ fears about legislative overreach. Prior to the nineteenth century, it was only in Pennsylvania that this resulted in the creation of institutions to secure the supremacy of constitutional law over ordinary legislative power. As the final section of this article demonstrates, the idea that the constitution could be enforced against the legislative branch by an independent constitutional guardian—including the Supreme Court—was rejected at the Federal Convention precisely because of its framers’ antipathy to Pennsylvania’s radically democratic constitution.

A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200: Western Slavery, National Impasse ed. by Jeffrey L. Pasley and John Craig Hammond

Reviewed by: A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200: Western Slavery, National Impasse ed. by Jeffrey L. Pasley and John Craig Hammond Van Gosse (bio) Keywords Missour Crisis, Slavery, Antislavery, Sectionalism A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200: Western Slavery, National Impasse. Edited by Jeffrey L. Pasley and John Craig Hammond. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2021. Pp. 426. Cloth, $45.00.) This volume is that rare thing: an edited collection in which the whole is considerably greater than the sum of the parts. Pasley, Hammond, and their authors offer a profound reconsideration of the early republic, challenging the edifice built by historians like Gordon Wood, in which race and slavery register as distractions from the main thrust of post-Revolutionary consolidation. The editors' Introduction proposes revisions on multiple fronts, since "the first two decades of the nineteenth century remain one of the least studied and most poorly understood periods in American history" (11). This gap reflects the periodization of the First Republic (1790–1860) as a series of discrete chunks (the Era of Federalism, the Age of Jackson, and so on), avoiding the larger continuity of sectional contestation over the problem of slavery. Positing the struggle in 1819–1821 as a fulcrum in this [End Page 642] larger dynamic indicts the blinkered historiography of the early republic, which has never "dealt easily or accurately with anything connected to the Missouri Crisis: slavery, the trans-Appalachian West, or even the nineteenth century" (11). This volume not only challenges scholarship that elides the centrality of slavery; it also poses a powerful corrective to historians of race and slavery who elide formal politics. In the editors' sum-up, "By the 1990s, historians working on the social and cultural history of race and slavery often felt free to eschew political events altogether" (15). That silence made it easier for political historians to pose grand narratives skating over the "peculiar institution." With great brio, this volume rides into the terrain left open by these mutually reinforcing exclusions. Putting the Missouri Crisis at the center of post-Revolutionary history, its authors explore both the "crisis" itself and what it represents, the long struggle over the explosion of racial capitalism inside a putatively republican order. What was hidden is revealed; the partisan fissuring of the Era of Good Feelings is no longer a meaningless churn; Jackson's southwestern wars no longer predestined "expansions"; James Tallmadge's amendment to bar slavery from Missouri not premature sectionalism but the eruption of rising antislavery outrage. The biggest shift proposed here is not temporal but spatial. In decisive ways, its authors turn the focus back to the West and away from Congress. Most previous studies (Glover Moore's pro-southern The Missouri Controversy, 1819–1821 in 1953; Sean Wilentz's influential 2004 article in the Journal of the Historical Society; Robert Pierce Forbes's groundbreaking The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath in 2007) focused on maneuvers in and around Washington.1 Missouri and the frontier into which it fit scarcely figured, a testament to enduring regional prejudices. No longer! Collectively, these essays clarify that the extraordinary influx of slaveholders into Missouri after 1810, and the possibility that such men would control the entire frontier, was the issue—not sectional power plays. Obviously, the latter precipitated the crisis: Tallmadge represented a strongly [End Page 643] antislavery constituency, as Sarah Gronningsater explicates with great subtlety, and, as John Van Atta outlines, the South felt threatened by "an aggression not just on slavery and slave-state sovereignty but also on them personally and their cultural identity … a comprehensive northern attack on the entire structure of their society, on their concept of manhood and the roots of their self-respect" (189). A re-centering on the trans-Mississippi West linked to both the juridically slaveless Northwest Territory and the new Cotton Kingdom is explored in three key articles (John Craig Hammond, "The Centrality of Slavery: Enslavement and Settler Sovereignty in Missouri, 1770–1820"; Robert Lee, "The Boon's Lick Land Rush and the Coming of the Missouri Crisis"; Christa Dierksheide, "Border Control: Slavery, Diffusion, and State Formation in the Era of the Missouri Crisis"). Dierksheide, in...

Letters to the Editor

To the Editor: The September 2021 issue of the JAH features the presidential address by George J. Sánchez. Within a scathing assessment of the presidency of Donald Trump and “assaults on contemporary democracy,” Sánchez offers this statement: “The 1619 Project by the New York Times made clear the impact of slavery on the founding policies, culture, and documents of the nation, but backlash against that factual interpretation [italics added] could also be brutal” (p. 255). To only characterize the 1619 Project as a “factual interpretation” is very troubling. Criticism of the 1619 Project's factual accuracy has come from highly regarded historians. Sánchez only alludes to criticism he characterizes as brutal backlash. The distinguished list of critics includes Gordon Wood. While not acknowledging Wood's critique of the factual interpretations of the 1619 Project, Sánchez approvingly cites the views of “The historian of the American Revolution” who “claimed that the revolutionary generation,...

Thomas Jefferson’s Lives: Biographers and the Battle for History. Edited by Robert M. S. McDonald (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2019) 311 pp. $35.00 cloth and e-book

Thomas Jefferson’s Lives is the best single volume available today for historians to get a handle on how Jefferson studies has evolved. Starting with Jefferson himself, the volume moves forward in time, offering astute, original analyses of Jefferson’s major biographers.In her introduction to the volume, Barbara Oberg, the past General Editor of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, acknowledges that Jefferson scholarship cannot evade Americans’ expectations of the man: “Each age creates its own Thomas Jefferson and adopts its own mythology about the ‘founding of the nation’” (3). Oberg’s introduction outlines how changing historical contexts inspired biographers from Jefferson’s time to ours to rethink his place in the American pantheon.The volume’s spirit is generous yet critical. The book’s first section, “Memory,” focuses on Jefferson’s nineteenth-century biographers. J. Jefferson Looney opens the volume with an examination of how Jefferson curated his papers to shape his legacy. In the second section, “Rivalry,” we learn from Nancy Isenberg and Joanne Freeman how biographers of Jefferson’s rivals Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton used Jefferson as their foil, much in the way that both are used by Jefferson’s biographers. The final section, “History,” traces the development of an academic understanding of Jefferson’s life, including insightful chapters about Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson, Jefferson’s two most prominent twentieth-century biographers.1One of the valuable tensions in this volume is how to approach Jefferson. It is hard not to read this volume without admiring past biographers’ close readings of Jefferson’s words. In turn, the volume’s contributors demonstrate the rewards of reading Jefferson’s biographers closely. Yet textuality is always in tension with Jefferson as spirit, a person who, in Brian Steele’s words, “transcends time and place” (193).A related tension is between Jefferson’s image and the historical Jefferson. Peterson began his career with a dissertation written under Perry Miller, published as The Jeffersonian Image in the American Mind (New York, 1960), before undertaking his biography. Because Peterson denied Jefferson’s relationship with his enslaved mistress Sally Hemings, Francis Cogliano argues, Peterson’s own image has suffered. As a result, we overlook Peterson’s critique of Jefferson’s racism. An advocate of equality, Peterson offered a Jefferson that could speak for the civil-rights era.Another tension is balancing Jefferson’s public and private life. Since James Callender’s first published accusations about Jefferson and Hemings in the Richmond Recorder in 1802, Jefferson’s defenders have sought to downplay them. One approach was to ignore Jefferson’s private life, but Jefferson’s descendants sought to counter what they considered stains on his character by portraying a loving father and grandfather. Yet all families are complicated, Jan Lewis reminds us, in her discussion of Jefferson’s great-granddaughter Sarah N. Randolph’s romanticized biography.2 Reading Jefferson’s family’s words seriously, Lewis finds a father who was tough and demanding, and whose daughters craved attention and praise.We often imagine Jefferson’s domestic life from his retirement at Monticello as one in which he doted on his grandchildren, as Annette Gordon-Reed reminds us in her chapter about Fawn Brodie. Yet Jefferson the grandfather ignores Jefferson the father of a black and white family. That’s what made Brodie’s 1974 biography of Jefferson so important.3 Brodie ensured that Jefferson’s private life was not the property of his white heirs. Brodie, Gordon-Reed writes, was the first to take seriously evidence from Jefferson’s black descendants. Gordon-Reed laments that Brodie, dismissed by Malone and Peterson, did not live to see her conclusions vindicated.The volume concludes with Gordon Wood’s appraisal of Peter Onuf’s work. Having recently retired as the third Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor at the University of Virginia (Malone and Peterson preceded him), Onuf, Wood writes, did not seek to build up nor to tear down Jefferson but instead used him as a lens into American political history. This approach is what made Onuf’s intellectual biography of Jefferson, Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (New York, 2017), co-authored with Gordon-Reed, so important. If Gordon-Reed’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hemingses of Monticello (New York, 2008) illuminated Jefferson’s domestic world, Onuf understood Jefferson’s political world. Together, they demonstrated that the relationship between public and private, so long a tension in Jefferson studies, was essential to understanding Jefferson’s political theory.Because the contributors to Jefferson’s Lives are among today’s most influential Jefferson scholars, their chapters shed light not just on Jefferson studies past but also, when read attentively, on how today’s scholars situate themselves in a long conversation.

Reflections on Gordon Wood and The Creation of the American Republic at Fifty: Editor's Note

Reflections on Gordon Wood and The Creation of the American Republic at Fifty: Editor's Note

Beyond Republicanism, Back to Constitutionalism: The Creation of the American Republic at Fifty

Jonathan Gienapp, Stanford University, and Brendan McConville, Boston University reflect on the historiographic and scholarly contributions of Gordon Wood's The Creation of the American Republic.

The Creation of the American Republic at Fifty

Jonathan Gienapp, Stanford University, and Brendan McConville, Boston University reflect on the historiographic and scholarly contributions of Gordon Wood's The Creation of the American Republic.

American Intellectual History and the Cultural Turn

American Intellectual History and the Cultural Turn Ryan C. McIlhenny (bio) Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, The Ideas that Made America: A Brief History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. x + 222 pp. Notes and index. $18.95. It seems that no other branch of historical study is as buoyant as intellectual history. There have been dips in terms of its popularity, especially in relation to what may be the sexier developments within cultural studies, but intellectual history consistently reappears to provide critical assessment not only of historical changes but also changes in the methods of historical research. In the generation after Merle Curti, Perry Miller, or Henry Commager, intellectual history went through a revival in the late 1970s, due in no insignificant way to the Wingspread Conference of 1977, a gathering of historians including Paul Conkin, John Higham, Gordon Wood, David Hollinger, Dorothy Ross, Henry May, and Thomas Bender. Wingspread played an important role in joining older approaches to intellectual history with new creative discoveries within the humanities, breathing new life into this mode of historical writing. Distinct from the history of ideas and the history of philosophy, intellectual historians, according to Peter Gordon, see ideas as “historically conditioned” and thereby “best understood within some larger context, whether it be the context of social struggle and institutional change, intellectual biography (individual or collective), or some larger context of cultural or linguistic dispositions (now often called ‘discourses’).”1 Aware of the historical conditions from which ideas emerge—not to mention, as Daniel Wickberg does in American Labyrinth (2018), the contingency of contexts—intellectual historians are also cognizant of how such contingencies shape the way that they understand the methods of their own craft. Disciplines across the intellectual spectrum have been influenced by developments in cultural studies. Scholars—not just those in the humanities or social sciences, but also in the hard sciences—have demonstrated greater historical awareness, becoming increasingly wary of presenting ideas as normative or static. Social history steeped in the turbid currents of the 1960s, emphasizing long-ignored marginalized groups, was followed almost immediately by cultural history, which considered at a deeper philosophical level the social identities created through textual discourse. The [End Page 165] attendees at Wingspread, as well as those who helped author the collection of essays in New Directions in Intellectual History (1979), engaged the messiness of ideas, especially those articulated by iconoclastic intellectuals like Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, and Clifford Geertz. The cultural presupposes the social and thus edges ever closer to the philosophical. Cultural historians are often reluctant to attribute causation to ideas, but Ratner-Rosenhagen and others would argue that causation can be the result of ideas, including cultural ones related to identity. Consequently, the cultural, especially in regard to ideas, has provided fodder for intellectual historians, since both are “invested in decoding meaning,” write Raymond Haberski and Andrew Hartman in American Labyrinth (2018), and thus “interested in language as a historical source.”2 For James Livingston, cultural change “is the groundwork of intellectual innovation.”3 Benjamin Alpers likewise suggests that cultural history has had an important impact on “intellectual historical practice” and that cultural and intellectual history should be viewed “as a single subfield.”4 Since the 1980s, cultural history has emphasized the pluralistic and unintended happenings from below and from the periphery, challenging first-principles foundationalism, eschewing any form of unidirectional history—whether top-down, bottom-up, or side-to-side (core-periphery)—and welcoming the ongoing creations of and negotiations within these spaces. The revolt of cultural scholars against simplistic bifurcations has led to an acceptance of ideas as contingent, inherently unstable, yet rich with possibilities, revitalizing in turn a dialectical method without a rigid teleology. Since Wingspread, contemporary intellectual historians have come to appreciate such dynamism, expanding interpretive boundaries and injecting the field with new and relevant insights. Following the success of American Nietzsche (2011), Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas that Made America embraces the creative possibilities of intellectual history, making the multiple worlds of ideas more palatable for readers. Daniel Rodgers, a leading figure among contemporary intellectual historians, identifies movement “as a central motif in intellectual history,” comparing it to a kind of “borderlands history.”5 Ratner-Rosenhagen agrees...

Poetry Wars: Verse and Politics in the American Revolution and Early Republic

Poetry Wars: Verse and Politics in the American Revolution and Early Republic

Method and Dialogue in History and Originalism

There is a sharp separation between the scholarly literature of originalists and professional historians. Originalists cite one another, but regularly ignore recent work by historians. Historians are generally happy to return the favor. Engagement between the two communities is too often limited to methodological disputes and amicus briefs. As a result, historical inquiry offers less to constitutional law than it might, and constitutional lawyers offer less to history than they could. Some of this separation is due to unavoidable methodological tension, but those tensions have not always frustrated productive dialogue. Originalism, in fact, emerged as an important theory of constitutional interpretation because of developments in professional historiography. Post-Revisionist approaches to the historiography of Reconstruction inspired and legitimated the book that set originalism on its current trajectory: Raoul Berger's Government by Judiciary. The revolution in the historiography of the founding embodied in Gordon Wood's Creation of the American Republic offered originalists other opportunities. It was not methodological disagreements but technological, institutional, and disciplinary developments since the 1980s that separated history and originalism. Those trends have mostly accelerated in the twenty-first century, but the role historians played in creating originalism suggests opportunities for productive dialogue still exist and should be pursued.

The Burr Conspiracy: Uncovering the Story of an Early American Crisis by James E. Lewis

Reviewed by: The Burr Conspiracy: Uncovering the Story of an Early American Crisis by James E. Lewis Matthew G. Schoenbachler (bio) The Burr Conspiracy: Uncovering the Story of an Early American Crisis. By James E. Lewis Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Pp. 715. $35.00 cloth; $21.95 paper) One of the great mysteries of early American history is the nature of Aaron Burr's machinations in the trans-Appalachian west between 1805 and 1807. Did he plan a filibustering attempt to wrest Florida [End Page 383] and Texas from Spain? Did he conspire to affect the secession of the trans-Appalachian west from the United States? Burr's "ultimate aim," Gordon Wood wrote in Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815, "has never been entirely clear." The Burr Conspiracy does not answer these questions, nor does it intend to. As James E. Lewis explains, "rather than retelling the story of the Burr Conspiracy this book focuses upon the stories about the Burr Conspiracy that were told at the time and over the next few decades" (p. 6). Early Americans, much like later historians, were unable decipher the former vice-president's motives and intentions. Awash in a sea of rumor and innuendo, they struggled to make sense of contradictory reports, and in the process fashioned stories that inevitably bore the fingerprints of their day. These stories shed light on early nineteenth-century America—the means by which information (and misinformation) circulated through the postal system as well as by means of informal networks of kinship, class, and politics; the manner in which contemporaries borrowed categories, concepts, and examples from history and literature to shape their understanding of Burr's contretemps; how President Thomas Jefferson's widely circulated message to Congress in January 1807 selectively chose facts as a means of bolstering the sort of minimalist republican government he advocated; how Americans came to believe the homespun clothes Burr was wearing when he was captured proved his guilt, for no true gentleman would deign to disguise himself. More broadly, Lewis contends that Burr's actions so alarmed Americans because of chronic, simmering apprehensions of western disloyalty. In the stories, contemporaries told about Burr's actions, Lewis contends, "we see the continuing fears about the fragility of the federal union, the instability of republican governments, and the uncertainty of American nationalism" (p. 12). Readers of the Register will find especially interesting Lewis's lucid account of John Wood and Joseph M. Street's 1806 charges that a good many of early Kentucky's founding elites had similarly conspired with the Spanish in the 1780s. Twenty years in the making, Lewis's study is heroically researched [End Page 384] and tells of America's reaction to the Burr Conspiracy story in exhaustive—and occasionally exhausting—detail. The book's penchant for digression and redundancy occasionally strains the patience of the reader, while Lewis's unwillingness to hazard any judgment as to the nature of the conspiracy itself can be frustrating. After two decades' worth of study, the author, one surmises, surely developed an informed opinion as to what really happened. Such insight would have been dearly appreciated, especially in the aftermath of studies such as Nancy Isenberg's attempted whitewash of Burr's reputation in Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (2007). Although contemporary stories constructed matter a great deal, history is not and can never be solely a matter of "sense-making." The realities of the time—though dimly perceived and subject to distortion—matter. In fact, such a dialectic between events and perception is the only means of preserving the integrity of history itself. That said, Lewis's study is major contribution to early American history—well-written, nuanced, and thoughtful. By examining what people made of the events and how those stories illuminate the early nineteenth century, Lewis ably charts a borderland between the known and the unknowable, between story and history—and thereby illustrates the limits of the historian's endeavor: despite our fondest wishes, there are some things we will never know. Matthew G. Schoenbachler MATTHEW G. SCHOENBACHLER teaches history at the University of North Alabama. He is the author of...

A Politician Thinking: The Creative Mind of James Madison by Jack N. Rakove

Reviewed by: A Politician Thinking: The Creative Mind of James Madison by Jack N. Rakove Jessica Choppin Roney, Whitney Martinko, and Katlyn Marie Carter (bio) A Politician Thinking: The Creative Mind of James Madison. By Jack N. Rakove. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. Pp. 226. Cloth, $29.95.) In Jack N. Rakove's new book on James Madison, readers are promised insight not so much into Madison's thought, but into his way of thinking. The effort to explore how Madison thought, argued, and evolved provides a welcome intervention in the scholarship of a relatively lesser-studied founder. Rakove stresses Madison's unique status as a political thinker who wrote strikingly little "for publication or persuasion." (5) Throughout the book, Rakove draws upon Madison's correspondence and notes to show how his ideas developed over time. For example, a letter to Caleb Wallace in the wake of Madison's battle against the religious assessment bill and in favor of the Bill for Religious Freedom in Virginia was "the first occasion on which [he] wrote systematically about the tenor of republican government in the states" (62). When exploring Madison's shifting thought on the necessity of a Bill of Rights, Rakove cites letters exchanged between Madison and Jefferson between 1787 and 1789. "In the annals of American history—and indeed in the realm of global constitutional history—few if any exchanges have ever attained a comparable level of political importance and analytical sophistication" (120). Rakove focuses primarily on the period from 1776 to 1801, when he says Madison's tenure as a "constitutional thinker" ended (186). During this period, Madison's questions and concerns were derived from immediate events that posed specific problems. The book sets out to show [End Page 555] how "his ideas evolved out of his deep immersion in deliberations and decisions, both at the state and national levels of revolutionary governance" (15). In Rakove's telling, we see Madison as a problem-solver trying to balance "empirical and theorizing components" (15). He argues Madison's purpose when writing was generally to identify "a problem that he felt he first had to solve rather than articulating an argument meant to persuade others" (112). This approach leads Rakove repeatedly to emphasize that "Madison's political thinking … was less about rhetoric than analysis" (15); his questions were "genuine, not merely rhetorical" (72) or "more analytical than rhetorical" (88). His answers were "substantive, not rhetorical" (17). When Rakove does focus on Madison's published writing, it is to dissect the way in which he went about answering questions and constructing arguments. Focusing on his notable Federalist essays, Rakove elucidates Madison's "way of thinking like a constitution," as he puts it (146). Thinking like a constitution entailed establishing clear definitions of key terms, examining "an array of applied or potential meanings" for those terms based on practice, and, finally, identifying "the real forces that animate political action" (146). It was this fusion of pragmatic, experiential evidence with more abstract theoretical reasoning that was the source of Madison's creativity. Through this emphasis on the process of Madison's thinking, rather than the final product of his thought, Rakove provides a new perspective on what Gordon Wood called "the James Madison problem": how to reconcile the Madison of the 1780s with the Madison of the 1790s (153). Rakove's approach suggests that there are perhaps not as many discrepancies as we might think; rather, there was a shifting of emphasis and changing of definitions. First, Rakove shows how Madison in the 1780s was centrally concerned with the legislative branch and particularly the way in which deliberation could best be facilitated. His focus on the legislature went beyond the institution itself to question how it would relate to "the people themselves" (73). This desire to create a generative and sound deliberative process produced some of Madison's most innovative ideas. Rakove suggests that Madison was less interested in the abstract theory of separation of powers than in how to guarantee a balance of powers. In the 1790s after the Bank Bill and the Neutrality Proclamation, Madison's attention shifted to the executive as a central concern. As Madison gained a new appreciation...

Reading These United States: Federal Literacy in the Early Republic, 1776–1830 by Keri Holt

Reviewed by: Reading These United States: Federal Literacy in the Early Republic, 1776–1830 by Keri Holt Joseph Fichtelberg (bio) Reading These United States: Federal Literacy in the Early Republic, 1776–1830 keri holt Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019 336 pp. For the past generation, historians and literary critics have been diligently filling in the "empty place" in American life. Claude Lefort's designation for the locus of democratic power freed by the king's absent body (17) has summoned a range of social adhesives, from the republican ideology of Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood to Michael Warner's public sphere, Eric Slauter's aesthetic state, and Michelle Sizemore's American enchantment. Add to this list Keri Holt's "federal literacy," a term indicating the reading practices that imagined national unity. Reading These United States: Federal Literacy in the Early Republic, 1776–1830 is an acute, [End Page 836] deeply informed, and wide-ranging account of the visual and verbal strategies that promoted political and cultural consensus in the new nation. Holt traces the outpouring of national tropes advanced by almanacs, dinnerware, captivity narratives, novels, and a wealth of periodicals. Her study also marks the gradual collapse of this appeal, as it buckled under the pressures of sectionalism and territorial expansion. Through her meticulous scholarship, Holt's Reading These United States demonstrates both the power and the limitations of the nation's inaugural search for order. Echoing Wood's account of the founders' idealism, Holt's federal literacy promoted the "composite character" (5) of early national experience, a celebration of "a plural union of differences" (7). Representations of diversity took numerous forms. Geographies, maps, and almanacs highlighted the interdependencies of distinct parts. Popular texts like Jedediah Morse's Geography Made Easy helped to forge a national sensibility while detailing regional differences. So, too, did almanacs, which presented a mix of local and regional details interspersed with mileage tables and court sessions in distant cities. Expansive signifiers like the Declaration of Independence and astrological images allowed readers to project a common experience. The visual arrangement of almanacs, their pages often divided into compartments or cells displaying diverse information in the manner of newspapers, encouraged what Holt calls "multimodal" reading, an experience of heterogeneous unity. Other visual displays had the same effect. Parades celebrating ratification of the Constitution marshaled the young nation's many constituencies in emphatic review, and images of harps, constellations, and interlocking chains adorned newspapers, currency, and fine china. Such strategies, Holt observes, also allowed powerful appeals by those excluded from the national imaginary. In the hands of Benjamin Banneker, for example, the multimodal structure of almanacs became an argument for racial, as well as spatial, pluralism. Magazines and satires did the same cultural work. Holt demonstrates the federal design of such early publications as the Columbian Magazine, which presented an array of local and national material, including many works by women. The magazine printed a copy of the Constitution when that document was released to the public, and during the ratification debate ran Jeremy Belknap's satire The Foresters, in which colonial history served as an allegory for the new national structure. Satires like The Anarchiad, which purportedly warned against the dangers of diversity, nevertheless [End Page 837] promoted the value of a sophisticated audience accustomed to multiple perspectives. As with almanacs, the wide range of attitudes encouraged a habit of mind, a crucial ideological adjustment enabling a new national consensus. It was a shift exploited by writers like Judith Sargent Murray, who leveraged federal literacy to urge the inclusion of women in the national imperative. One of Holt's most arresting arguments involves the use of captivity narratives to promote what she calls "concurrent sentimentality." Like the multiple perspectives in almanacs and satires, the experience of captivity and return invited readers to imagine radically different circumstances. Holt's chief exhibit is Mary Rowlandson's Narrative, a best-seller in the Federalist era, which offers a primer in cultural pragmatism. Forced to adapt to her captors, Rowlandson develops a more comprehensive sense of her own community's values. In effect, her faith has been resituated, leavened and deepened by the demands of captivity. Holt offers a striking...

FROM POLITY TO EXCHANGE: THE FATE OF DEMOCRACY IN THE CHANGING FIELDS OF EARLY AMERICAN HISTORIOGRAPHY

Gordon Wood stoked a strong response from his fellow early American historians in 2015 when, in the pages of theWeekly Standard, he accused the Omohundro Institute of Early American History, publishers of the prestigiousWilliam and Mary Quarterly, of abandoning interest in the development of the United States. “A new generation of historians is no longer interested in how the United States came to be,” Wood argued. “That kind of narrative history of the nation, they say, is not only inherently triumphalist but has a teleological bias built into it.” Wood blamed the shift away from the nation on historians’ interest in such issues as race and gender: “The inequalities of race and gender now permeate much of academic history-writing, so much so that the general reading public that wants to learn about the whole of our nation's past has had to turn to the history books written by nonacademics who have no PhDs and are not involved in the incestuous conversations of the academic scholars.” Of theWilliam and Mary Quarterly, Wood concluded, “without some kind of historical GPS, it is in danger of losing its way.”

Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American LiteratureFictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America

Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American LiteratureFictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America

DEMOCRATIC VISTAS

After a generation of grand stories about the rise of modern republican thought (the so-called “republican-synthesis” school epitomized by the works of Gordon Wood and J. G. A. Pocock), James Kloppenberg's new book, Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought, offers a history of democratic thought: what Kloppenberg calls “the idea of self-government.” In the course of nearly a thousand pages of text and notes, Kloppenberg traces democracy's emergence “as a widely shared, albeit still controversial, model of government” over the last four centuries in the North Atlantic world (1). The book is deeply learned and intellectually capacious, covering thinkers from the ancient Greeks, through the sixteenth-century wars of religion, through the American and French Revolutions, ending abruptly at the Civil War. Few intellectual historians writing today could have managed a book of such sweep. The number of authors, texts, and themes discussed is vast—so much so that at times it seems that the book could double as a history of thought in the West.

Carla J. Mulford. Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire.

In Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire, Carla J. Mulford offers an intellectual and literary biography that explains how the man many historians have considered to be a committed imperialist ultimately joined the revolution to end the British Empire in part of North America. Rather than arguing for any one particular moment when Franklin turned his back on Britain’s imperial project, Mulford details how early modern liberalism shaped his evolving response to empire throughout his life. Pulling common threads through Franklin’s voluminous writings over time, Mulford argues that Franklin’s turn against the empire was gradual. Thus, Alexander Wedderburn’s humiliation of Franklin in the Cockpit in 1774 was not the beginning of his disillusionment with empire, but the end. In fact, it was “a turn that had been deliberated for over twenty years” (16). Mulford is concerned with much more than quibbles over chronology. Although focused specifically on Franklin, the book’s important contribution is its explanation of the origins of the American Revolution. If that subject matter seems well-worn, Mulford’s methodology is not. Rather than revive the republican synthesis of Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood, Mulford sides more with Joyce Appleby in arguing that “the phrase early modern liberalism helps to cut a clear path through the staggeringly confusing historiography” (5). Even though the phrase did not exist in Franklin’s lifetime, which she acknowledges, it best describes Franklin’s intellectual world with its dual concerns of liberty of person and liberty of conscience. Franklin had long had doubts that Britain would secure these liberties for the American colonists, doubts ultimately confirmed in 1774. This historiographical and conceptual framework serves Mulford’s method well with its blending of “historical documentary biography with aesthetic concerns about the life of the mind” (x). She has synthesized an impressive amount of Franklin’s writing, revealing an intellectual coherence and seriousness that many previous biographers have found elusive because of the many (often satiric) personas Franklin adopted as a writer.

The Framers' Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution by Michael J. Klarman

Reviewed by: The Framers' Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution by Michael J. Klarman John R. Vile (bio) The Framers' Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution. By Michael J. Klarman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xiii, 865. $39.95 cloth; $14.57 ebook) As his title suggests, Michael J. Klarman, who is a Harvard law professor, believes that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 engineered a nationalistic and anti-democratic "coup" that probably did not represent majority national sentiment, despite [End Page 663] ample flaws in the existing Articles of Confederation. Klarman devotes his opening two chapters to describing these flaws and the economic chaos they bred; two chapters to the deliberations at the convention, the second focusing on issues involving slavery; and single chapters to the anti-federalists, the state ratifying conventions, the adoption of the Bill of Rights, and a conclusion. The central strength of this book is its deep familiarity with primary sources, which Klarman constantly quotes; citations of secondary sources are far more limited. Klarman's narrative of the convention focuses chiefly on the creation of individual institutions, like Congress and the presidency, and on issues—most prominently slavery—rather than on the chronological progression of the proceedings. Despite Mary Bilder's recent claims in Madison's Hand (2015) that Madison doctored his notes, Klarman relies constantly on them. They remain highly credible because they are so detailed and because they so ably show how individual speeches and debates reflected multiple perspectives and led to specific outcomes. Klarman's central theme is close to that developed in Gordon Wood's classic The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (1969). In addition, the sheer length of The Framer's Coup makes it unlikely to capture the market for shorter, more focused narratives of the convention like David Stewart's Plain, Honest Men (2010) or Clinton Rossiter's 1787: The Grand Convention (1966). Klarman focuses far more attention on James Madison than on any of the other delegates, often resorting to long footnotes, which would be particularly disconcerting to general readers, to describe other major characters. Klarman highlights the anti-democratic features of the Constitution, which include the perpetuation of slavery, the Electoral College, and equal state representation in the Senate, but I think it is more accurate to describe the convention as representative, or republican, than as anti-democratic. Under the Articles of Confederation, state legislatures chose delegates to a single house of Congress; no president represented the national will; and independent federal courts [End Page 664] were nonexistent. The Articles more democratically represented state interests, but its government was far more parochial than the government established by the new Constitution and was far more difficult to amend. Convention procedures were secret, but the procedures for ratifying the document were far more democratic than the congressional drafting and state legislative ratification of the Articles. Although he does not cite him, Klarman's argument that the ratification process focused far more on local issues than on matters of constitutional theory differs from Bruce Ackerman's view in We the People, Volume 1: Foundations (1991) that the people were engaging in a grand "constitutional moment." Although Klarman rightly stresses the elements of compromise and contingency that were involved in both the writing and ratification of the Constitution, I believe that he underestimates its overall republican coherence. Klarman's informative chronological discussion of the ratifying process within individual states in chapter six is far easier to read than some of the longer tomes on the subject but might test the patience of those who have read almost four hundred pages before getting there. I found myself drawing parallels between Klarman's description of anti-federalists and modern-day Trump supporters. Klarman's presentation of Madison as the mastermind of the Bill of Rights, who sought to avoid either major structural changes or the possibility of a second convention, is solidly in the mainstream of current scholarship on the subject and further highlights Madison's important role. In short, despite some minor shortcomings, Klarman offers a lot of book for the money. [End Page 665] John R. Vile JOHN R. VILE is...

William Smith’s Catonian Loyalism, Race, and the Politics of Language

William Smith’s Catonian Loyalism, Race, and the Politics of Language Christopher A. Hunter (bio) In early 1776, all Philadelphia knew where Rev. William Smith’s loyalties lay. That February, at the behest of the Continental Congress, the Anglican clergyman and provost of the College of Philadelphia presided over an elaborate memorial service for Richard Montgomery, the American general killed in the failed invasion of Quebec. The city’s notables packed the new German Reformed Church to hear Smith venerate the man he called the “Proto-Martyr to your rights” (Oration 23).1 After comparing Montgomery’s and Cincinnatus’s devotion to “virtue, liberty, truth, and justice,” Smith no doubt surprised many in the audience by praising Montgomery’s “loyalty to his sovereign” (24, 31–). Quoting the Olive Branch Petition, a six-month-old last-ditch effort to avert the Revolution, Smith boldly declared, “the delegated voice of the continent . . . supports me in praying for a restoration ‘of the former harmony between Great Britain and these Colonies’” (33). But the king had refused even to read Congress’s olive branch, and the delegated voice of the continent no longer saw reconciliation as a viable possibility. Privately, John Adams seethed at the “insolent Performance.” New Jersey delegate William Livingston moved that the Congress thank Smith for his service and publish his speech, but the motion was withdrawn after Adams and other radicals objected that Smith had “declared the Sentiments of the Congress to continue in a Dependency on G Britain which Doctrine this Congress cannot now approve” (R. Smith 505). Undeterred, Smith published An Oration in Memory of General Montgomery (1776) himself, ignoring counsel from Livingston and Benjamin Franklin to omit the reference to the Olive Branch Petition and his reflections on Montgomery’s loyalty to the king (Franklin 376). Indeed, Smith did just the opposite, adding a preface declaring, “whatever claim he may have to the appellation of a good Citizen or Friend to Liberty” must rest on his efforts to prevent American independence (Oration 4). William Smith understood liberty and good citizenship to be mutually [End Page 531] constitutive: civic virtue demands freedom from compulsion while true liberty requires voluntarily subordinating individual interest to the commonweal. Between March and April 1776 Smith continued to make the case that reconciliation with Britain was the surest path to liberty, publishing a series of essays that are among the most important of the era’s many attempts to stem the rising tide of independence. More learned than James Chalmers’s Plain Truth (Philadelphia, 1776) and more widely available than Charles Inglis’s The Deceiver Unmasked (New York, 1776), the full series appeared in three separate Philadelphia newspapers and the Annapolis Maryland Gazette (see the appendix). Smith signed these essays “Cato,” invoking a pair of texts more normally associated with his opponents: Joseph Addison’s play Cato (1713) and John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s political essay series Cato’s Letters (1720–23). As Smith’s nom-de-plume and invocations of “public virtue” suggest (Oration 10), republicanism—which Gordon Wood has called the “ideology of the American Revolution” (“Classical Republicanism” 12–13)—was also the ideology of one of the Revolution’s most vocal opponents.2 This essay’s three sections explore the origin and progress of William Smith’s Catonian Loyalism, both for what they reveal about the republican resistance to Independence and for the distinctively literary responses Smith’s particular brand of Loyalism provoked from the more Revolutionary quarters of the print public sphere. The first section traces the roots of Smith’s political views to the 1750s, when he first used Addison’s Cato to help articulate a defense of a white Protestant empire. In the years surrounding the French and Indian War, Cato provided Smith a way to focus his ideas about citizenship and political liberty. In 1776 these ideas about kinship, virtue, and empire met with fierce resistance. The essay’s second section turns to Smith’s Cato essays, which marshaled his theological and philosophical expertise in an attempt to forestall the dissolution of the empire. More than any of his contemporaries, Smith recognized the impossibility of translating his republican ideals into print, and the final section...

Remembrance: Andrew R. L. Cayton: Midwesterner, 1954–2015

RemembranceAndrew R. L. Cayton: Midwesterner, 1954–2015 Jon K. Lauck Last spring, at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the historian Andrew R. L. Cayton participated in a panel discussion at the first annual history conference of the newly organized Midwestern History Association. Cayton held forth on the future of the field of midwestern studies, which he had done so much to lead for over two decades. He offered smart advice, gentle reminders, historical perspective, important warnings, and some grand plans. Little did the assembled participants know that Drew, as he was widely known, would soon be diagnosed with colon cancer and that his Michigan remarks would be one of the final times he would offer his thoughts on the Midwest and its history. Drew was about as midwestern as it was possible to be. Born in Cincinnati, he mostly grew up in Marietta, Ohio, where the Muskingum River drains into the Ohio River, which forms the southern boundary of the Midwest. Marietta was the first town established in the Northwest Territory by the Americans after the revolution forced the British to cede the future Midwest to its rebellious colony. Drew’s father was head of the library at Marietta College and his mother taught art at the local high school. Although he took an expansive view of midwestern history and the various histories contained therein, including the darker stories, Drew recalled his youth in Marietta with great fondness and said he believed “strongly in the basic values associated with that world: family, respectability, mutual respect, and integrity, what my mother used to call character.” After graduating from high school in Marietta in 1972, Drew went to the University of Virginia, where he earned his ba in 1976. At Virginia, he decided to pursue academic history instead of becoming a high school teacher because he read Ray Allen Billington’s biography of Frederick Jackson Turner. He also met Mary Kupiec during his second year of college at Virginia [End Page 201] and they were married in August 1975. Later followed his daughter Elizabeth Renanne, who was born in November 1984, and his daughter Hannah Kupiec, who was born in July 1988. After graduating from Virginia, Drew and Mary moved north to Brown University, where he studied for his Ph.D. under the famous historian of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood, and Mary earned her Ph.D. in American Civilization. Not surprisingly, Drew’s doctoral research focused on the era of the revolution and its implications for frontier Ohio. His dissertation-turned-book was published under the title Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780–1825 (Kent State University Press, 1986) and reflected the influence of Wood’s research on the political culture and thought of the revolutionary era. Drew followed with a collection about early Ohio politics, coedited with Jeffrey Brown, entitled The Pursuit of Public Power: Political Culture in Ohio, 1788–1861 (Kent State University Press, 1994). During this time period, Drew was also thinking about the development of the Midwest in conjunction with the bicentennial of the Northwest Ordinance, the foundational statute which shaped the history of the Midwest. This led to Drew’s book with Peter Onuf entitled The Midwest and the Nation: Rethinking the History of an American Region (Indiana University Press, 1990), which offered an exhaustive review of the relevant literature on the Midwest and several conceptualizations of how the Midwest had been viewed in other eras. About the time of the publication of The Midwest and the Nation and after teaching at Harvard (1980–82), Wellesley (1981–82), and Ball State (1982–90), Drew settled down in his home state of Ohio and took a post in the history department at Miami University, where Mary was already teaching. Miami University, appropriately enough, was founded in 1809 during the earliest stages of the Ohio history that Drew had mastered and would share with the world through his books. Drew’s work on the Midwest continued apace at Miami, where he would teach for twenty-five years. He served as coeditor of Miami’s regionally focused journal The Old Northwest: A Journal of Regional Life and Letters for a half...