Empire of Liberty
A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815
by Gordon S. Wood
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Among the founding generation of American statesmen, none seems more elusive than Thomas Jefferson. That his was a life of paradox is notorious. A Virginian nationalist, a slave-holding philosophe, an aristocratic democrat, a provincial cosmopolitan, a pacific imperialist - the paradoxes, it seems clear, are of no ordinary variety, reaching beyond the life of one man. They are as large in meaning and as portentous in significance as America itself, and it is no surprise that his biographers, almost despite themselves, have had no choice but to travel the formidable road of the general interpretation of American history; or that Henry Adams, in his monumental history of early America, should have made Jefferson the central figure in his tale, the key to unlocking the riddles of our national existence. "Almost every other American statesman," Adams held, "might be described in a parenthesis. A few broad strokes of the brush would paint the portraits of all the early Presidents with this exception, and a few more strokes would answer for any member of their many cabinets; but Jefferson could be painted only touch by touch, with a fine pencil, and the perfection of the likeness depended upon the shifting and uncertain flicker of its semi-transparent shadows."
Jefferson's "peculiar felicity of expression," his propensity to make of every particular controversy the raw matter for a general theme transcending the immediate occasion, his genius at reducing a tangled problem of foreign diplomacy or domestic policy to an expression of such simplicity and elegance that it immediately fixed itself on the popular mind and became the "tocsin of party" - all this gave his writings an importance in subsequent political conflicts comparable to no other American statesman. That his writings might be invoked on every side of a given controversy added to the uses of the Jeffersonian past, and all the great conflicts of nineteenth-century American history - over slavery, union, and democracy - found partisans on either side appealing to the "sagacious aphorisms and oracular sayings" of the great Virginian. That the real man was lost in the process became the ritual complaint of his twentieth-century biographers, who have done much to restore the original contours of his life and thought; yet the mystery remains.
In lifting the veil from Jefferson's life, his modern biographers have been attracted to the theme of practical idealism, though it, too, in its marrying of apparent opposites, is suggestive of ambivalence and contradiction. Noting that Jefferson's opponents in his own day were often puzzled to decide whether he was a hopeless visionary or a shallow Machiavellian - a "misguided child of light or a demon of darkness" - Merrill Peterson argues that Jefferson, in truth, was neither.
From the book Empire of Liberty by Gordon S. Wood. Copyright (c) Oxford University Press 2009.
From the book Empire of Liberty, by Gordon S. Wood.
Empire of Liberty
Review by Lucas A. Powe, Jr.
Forty years ago the publication of The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 announced the arrival of Gordon S. Wood as a major historian of the early republic. Now he has capped an outstanding career with the publication of Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815, the latest entry in the Oxford History of the United States series. Like the other volumes in this terrific series, it is big, comprehensive and well written.
The years of the first quarter-century of the republic under the freshly ratified Constitution were monumental. A government described on paper had to be translated into reality. In the process, Americans discovered that they had two political parties in a country where everyone agreed there should be none. Yet just over a decade into the republican experiment there was a peaceful transfer of power from the Federalists to Thomas Jefferson and his Republicans.
A major problem for the young republic was foreign relations. Beginning in 1793 and ending only when the covered period ends, the two great powers in the world—France and Great Britain—were at war. George Washington wisely stated a policy of neutrality, but neither great power was much concerned about American neutrality. Thus the republic was disrespected and in danger of being sucked into a war that it did not want nor could expect to win. At the end of the 1790s with John Adams and the Federalists in power, it appeared that the likely foe would be France. When Jefferson’s Republicans had control, the likely foe was Great Britain. Before the War of 1812, in the last year of Jefferson’s presidency, he tried to bring Britain to its knees by imposing an embargo—“peaceful coercion” forbidding Americans from shipping any goods or ships abroad. Instead of coercing Britain, it destroyed New England’s economy. Abandoning everything he believed about limited government, Jefferson used federal troops and treason prosecutions to coerce New England (not Britain) to abide by his ideological experiment. Jefferson, like Washington before him (and all subsequent two-term presidents), found that his second term failed to match the promise of his first.
Eventually, with younger men, the “War Hawks,” arriving in Congress, America declared war with the former mother country. And thanks to Andrew Jackson’s victory in New Orleans (after the peace treaty had been signed), Americans could believe they had won a second War for Independence.
Empire of Liberty—the title comes from Jefferson’s description of the United States—is, like Gordon Wood’s other books, a story of the decline of aristocracy, the growth of equality and the rise of the middling sort. Together with the Hartford Convention they spelled the death of the Federalist Party. It is a story well told by a master historian. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year 2009.
Hardcover: 800 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press ( October 26, 2009 )
Item #: 85-9779
ISBN: 9780195039146
Product Dimensions: 6.125 x 9.25 x 0.0 inches
Product Weight: 44.0 ounces
Scholarly but readable
January 19, 2010
I bought this for my history teacher son at Christmas as I thought it would be useful as a source book. I spent the Christmas break reading all of it myself. It is a long book but very readable and offers fascinating insights into the early history of the republic. The early sources of opposition to 'big government' are all here. Wood is perhaps a little hard on the Federalists, who after all were right in their vision of a unified state in the long run, but the most important legacy of these years was the transfer of power peacefully, which has endured for over two hundred years.
Reviewer: Alan C
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