Every generation in American history endures a “renewed” interest in the Framers, usually for the sake of political ends. Joseph Ellis and David McCullough are only the two most popular writers of hagiography on Adams, Jefferson, Washington, et al. No offense intended, necessarily: Ellis’ brief Passionate Sage, published in the early nineties, remains the best short biography of Adams extant, never shirking from the peculiarities of our most irascible Founder (the most memorable bit: a xeroxed reproduction of Adams’ expansive, vituperative marginalia preserved in his copy of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women; the man could not stop reminding non-enemies that he was smarter than them and got there first, whatever “it” was). For a more trenchant analysis of Adams’ political views — which, to its credit, the HBO miniseries didn’t elide — consult John Patrick Diggins’ equally brief entry in the American Presidents Series.
For more than thirty years, Gordon S. Wood has deepened Revolution and Framer scholarship by applying largely discredited (or absorbed into other theoretical disciplines) New Historical methodology. His Empire of Liberty, a splendid sequel to The Radicalism of the American Revolution, eschews biographical sketches for a view of the period as a discrete epoch — itself no doubt an anachronistic way of studying it — in which the rise of populism allows the flowering of or, in some cases, conflicts with the origins of judicial review, the extra-constitutional acquisition of land (e.g. Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana), corporations, a free press, and, yes, slavery. Speaking of anachronisms, the premise of Empire of Liberty is quaint in its devotion to what I’ll call Zinnism: the years between 1789 and 1815 saw a triumph of democracy. For this to be so, Wood spends almost a third of his seven-hundred-plus page opus chronicling the heresies of Federalism: its pretensions to monarchism, its contempt for men without property or antecedents. Federalists, Wood argues, were out of step with the times and doomed to failure.
I find it odd that, other than acknowledging Alexander Hamilton’s farsightedness in establishing a national bank and requesting that the federal government absorb the debts incurred by the states during the war, Wood does little to assure readers that without Washington’s confidence in admitted loons like Hamilton we would still have remained a loose aggregate of states. So quick is he to wrinkle his nose at Adams’ theories about popular sovereignty that he fails to apportion him the proper credit for risking his presidency in a successful attempt to wrangle the States out of a potentially ruinous war with France (and risk he did: Adams became our first one-term president. The second? His son John Quincy). A believer in what those of us who were still taught American history in high school learned as “the Revolution of 1800,” Wood’s narrative impatiently taps its foot in anticipation of the triumph of Jeffersonian thought.
The best model for my kind of approach remains Henry Adams’ History of the United States of America, an exhaustive account of the Jefferson and Madison administrations which will take you a lifetime to read but approaches In Search of Lost Time and surpasses Dance to the Music of Time in its dialectic suppleness; Adams might be the only significant ironist to emerge in American literature. So enraptured is Adams with the contradictive possibilities of a figure like Thomas Jefferson that he has the patience and skill to draw out his multifoliate personality in protracted accounts of his negotiations to get Louisiana and the Floridas from the Spanish and French. I haven’t finished the book and neither will you, but don’t fret: the New York Review of Books, in another example of its devotion to preserving the best of American letters, published an extremely abridged version consisting of the first and last chapters in 2006. It coincided with the publication of Garry Wills’ terrific booklength Cliffs Notes-esque reading of Adams’ text and the history (weird, yes).
But Empire of Liberty is magisterial in the best sense: it can survey what even a skeptic will call an era while marshaling a wealth of primary text research to illuminate the commonplace (I didn’t know, for example, that slave society in the eighteenth century boasted a modicum of social mobility that the nineteenth would largely reject). Wood is very good on rascals like Aaron Burr and secondary but fascinating characters like Dr. Benjamin Rush, friend to both Jefferson and Adams and a genuine liberal in both the nineteenth and twentieth century senses of the word. If you need one book that touches on every trend and personage of the period, Empire of Liberty will do until you find the fortitude to dip into History of the United States of America.
Humanizing The Vacuum 