Grantham University Equality and Social Conflict in American Revolution Essay For this assignment you have to read each article and summarize into 4-6 page

Grantham University Equality and Social Conflict in American Revolution Essay For this assignment you have to read each article and summarize into 4-6 pages describing what you learned from the text. Along with this format below.YOU MUST INCORPORATE ALL 4 OF THE ATTACHED READINGS INTO THE ESSAYThe goal of these assignments is to produce a thorough written review of several assigned scholarly articles on U. S. History to 1865. This article analyses essay must be typed in a Times New Roman 12 pt. font, double spaced with 1” margins. It must be between a minimum of four and a maximum of six pages with a separate title page. The Title Pages for the essays will have the title of the paper, the student’s name, the instructor’s last name, the name of the course, and the date the paper is turned into the Blazeview Dropbox. Each essay must include a discussion of the articles’ theses, methodologies, organization, place in the historiography of the subject matter, types of source used in the articles, and important terminology. It should also include your assessment of the works in question. There should be a thesis found in an introduction and restated in a conclusion that ties the assessment of these essays together. Each essay must be cited using endnotes in the Chicago Manual of Style. All the Article Reviews assignments must be turned into the appropriate Blazeview Dropbox labeled by name (i. e. Article Analyses Essay #2) in the “Assignments” section. The Article Analyses Essays will not be accepted after the posted deadlines. Failure to submit any Article Analyses Essay will result in the student failing the course. Each Article Analyses Essay will be 10% of the final grade for the course. Review: Equality and Social Conflict in the American Revolution
Reviewed Work(s): The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood
Source: The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Oct., 1994), pp. 703-716
Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
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Equality and Social Conflict in the
American Revolution
Gordon S. Wood
A T least no one said that the book was too long. Indeed, one of the
chief criticisms of my book is that it is not long enough. I am not
used to people saying that about my work, so I am at a loss about
how to respond. Perhaps I should add an addendum?
But which book should I add it to? Because the three critics have characterized my book so differently, it is difficult to know. To Michael
Zuckerman the book is “almost barren of conscious and compelling irony,”
and to Barbara Clark Smith it expresses “a determined optimism.” To Joyce
Appleby, however, it is not optimistic at all but instead “an ironic tale”
about a Revolution that failed, a “fall from civic grace” that gives the book a
“bittersweet undercurrent.” It seems evident that readers can make of any
book what they will.
One issue raised by these critiques is the relationship among the three cultural paradigms or ideal types-monarchy, republicanism, and democracythat I used to describe the changes that took place between the middle of the
eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth. I was not saying
that these cultural forms were blocks that simply sequentially displaced one
another, republicanism knocking out monarchy, and democracy knocking
out republicanism. Instead, they resembled templates overlying one another,
so that two or more cultural forms could exist simultaneously. Zuckerman
especially seems unable to imagine a society possessing at the same time different, even incompatible and contradictory, cultural traits. For him it is
either one or the other, either totally monarchical, totally republican, or
totally democratic. If the democratic society threw up a kingly Andrew
Jackson as a Washington manque and hundreds of copies of Greek temples,
then it could not be really democratic. If the monarchical society was shot
through with republican sentiments, then it had to be “a monarchical society
that never was.” I would have thought that no complex culture was ever as
monolithic as that. But Zuckerman’s criticism of these cultural forms only
begins to reveal his deep dislike of the book.
Actually, his dislike of the book is very curious. At one point Zuckerman
says that “it is hard to think of major interpretations of colonial, early
national, or Jacksonian society with which [Wood] concurs or with which
his account could be readily reconciled.” In fact, I can think of several. Joyce
Appleby’s for one. Gary J. Kornblith and John M. Murrin’s recent interpreGordon Wood is professor of history at Brown University.
The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, Vol. LI, No. 4, October 1994
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704 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
tation in Alfred F. Young’s edition of Beyond the Revolution for another.
James L. Huston’s article in the October 1993 American Historical Review for
still another. Richard L. Bushman’s interpretations in King and People and
Refinement of America for others. And, for still one more, mirabile dictu, a
i99i article written by none other than … Michael Zuckerman.1
Zuckerman’s brief overview of the Revolution, “A Different Thermidor:
The Revolution Beyond the American Revolution,” was written to combat
the so-called republican synthesis, which, he says, is unable to explain “the
nation that came out of the Revolution.” In his i99i essay Zuckerman confronted the question raised by Appleby fifteen years ago of where and when
scholars were to find in the frenzy of corruption and the fear of tyranny so
prominent in the republican interpretation of the Revolution the sources to
account, in Appleby’s words, “for the aggressive individualism, the optimistic materialism, and the pragmatic interest-group politics that became so
salient so early in the life of the new nation.”2
This is certainly a question I have tried to answer over the past few
decades. Zuckerman in fact, in a note to his i99i essay, singled me out as
one of the few historians over the years who had recognized the salience of
Appleby’s question “in a sustained fashion.”3 In i99i at least, Zuckerman
seems to have been in agreement with my emerging interpretation of the
Revolution. He actually borrowed several phrases and images of mine on the
economic effects of the Revolution from an article I had published in I987.4
Certainly, in i99i he was as fascinated as I have been by the sudden transformation from republicanism to liberalism, “a transformation so swift and
sweeping,” he wrote, as to be “baffling,” a “transition from one configuration to the other…. which we must study if we would understand our origins as a nation,” for it was in this “transition that the ideological lineaments
of modern America emerged.”5 I could not have said it better myself.
Zuckerman goes on to explain this transition in terms of a consumer revolution, sustained by “seas of self-interest” that broke through the ideological
restraints of republicanism “more quickly than anyone could have imag1 Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the I790s (New York,
i984) and Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1992);
Kornblith and Murrin, “The Making and Unmaking of an American Ruling Class,” in Alfred F.
Young, ed., Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism
(DeKalb, Ill., 1993), 27-79; Huston, “The American Revolutionaries, the Political Economy of
Aristocracy, and the American Concept of Distribution of Wealth, 1765-1900,” American
Historical Review, XCVIII (I993), 1079-1105; Bushman, King and People in Provincial
Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, N. C., I985); Zuckerman, “A Different Thermidor: The Revolution
Beyond the American Revolution,” in James A. Henretta et al., eds., The Transformation of Early
American History: Society, Authority, and Ideology (New York, 1991), 170-193.
2 Zuckerman, “A Different Thermidor,” 173; Appleby quotation ibid., 174.
3 Ibid., 302 n. I0.
4 Compare the second paragraph of Zuckerman’s I99I essay, ibid., I83, with the bottom
paragraph on p. 77 of my I987 piece, “Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the
Constitution,” in Richard Beeman et al., eds., Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution
and American National Identity (Chapel Hill, N. C., I987).
5 Zuckerman, “A Different Thermidor,” 174.
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EQUALITY AND CONFLICT IN THE REVOLUTION 705
ined.” “A people which appeared, in the righteousness of its resistance to
tyranny, ‘incapable’ of corruption was suddenly seized by ‘a spirit of avarice
and peculation.”‘ By i8oo, the transition was “essentially complete.”
Liberalism had destroyed the corporate republican conceptions of society
and made competition and pluralism acceptable.
It unleashed struggles for status throughout the community, and it intimated egalitarianism in principle even if it achieved no such leveling in
practice. Liberalism promoted democratization because it released the
energies of ordinary people and, more, because it accorded such commoners the capacity for virtuous conduct. Unlike republicanism, it did
not reserve its accolades and entitlements to men of sufficient means to
stand above the pell-mell of passion and the entrapments of dependence. Emphasizing opportunity as it did, liberalism offered masses of
Americans “an escape from the self-denying virtue of their superiors”
and the social control that attended it.6
This argument of Zuckerman’s is extraordinary in light of his heated criticism of my very similar interpretation. The main difference is that his transition is all brought about by some reified entity called “liberalism.” His
ordinary people are not agents in his story; they are the victims, presumably
of those whom he labels “the commercial classes” or “mercantile operators.”
“Few of them”-that is, common ordinary people-he says, “really wished
to live under a liberal regime.” What they really wanted, he writes in his
most sentimental prose, was to cling together in little communities, in their
small peaceable kingdoms. “On city stoops and street corners, on the stump
and in smoke-filled rooms, around the hot stove and in the ladies’ auxiliaries, at camp meetings and in parish halls, in all the settings in which the
great majority of Americans came together, the old aspiration to close, consensual community survived.”7 We are supposed to believe that the entire
explosion of economic and popular energy in early nineteenth-century
America that we label “liberalism” was carried out in opposition to the will
of the bulk of the population.
Because I suggest that the bulk of the population may have welcomed this
liberalism-indeed, may actually have brought it about through their many
pursuits of happiness- Zuckerman now seems to be passionately anxious to
reverse direction and to criticize my book-as if its mere presence endangers
the kind of America he seeks. Indeed, the responses of both Smith and
Zuckerman possess a degree of anger and indignation that goes beyond what
one normally expects in a review of a book. In part at least, this anger and
indignation seem to arise from my use of the term “radicalism.” Edmund S.
Morgan foresaw in a review of my book that New Left historians might be
upset that I had used a term they believe they own.8 At any rate, Zuckerman
6 Ibid., i82, i87, 190.
7 Ibid., i86, 192.
8 Morgan, “The Second American Revolution,” New York Review of Books, June 25, 1992.
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706 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
can scarcely contain his fury: he says that I deny class at every turn and disregard race, gender, and ethnicity almost entirely, none of which is true.
Smith, like other neo-Progressive or New Left historians, believes that radicalism means “substantive change in the lot of those who were most
oppressed, subjugated, or marginal in the society.” In her opinion, these
most oppressed, subjugated, or marginal were African-American slaves,
women, and other “have-nots” on the very bottom of American society.
No one denies that these groups were oppressed in various ways, as most
people were in premodern times, and that black slaves especially endured a
subjugation rarely duplicated in the history of the world. We have learned a
lot about the oppression of these groups in the past thirty years, and I presumed a good deal of that knowledge on the part of my readers. But despite
what Smith and Zuckerman say, I do not ignore issues of slavery and gender
or of ethnicity, for that matter: what, for example, is my discussion of the
Germans in Pennsylvania about? To be sure, I do not repeat in detail what
others have said so fully and eloquently in dozens of monographs on race
and gender over the past few decades, but I believe I have set these issues in
their proper context for fully understanding them. I think I have placed the
proportions of the story in accord with those of the eighteenth-century,
instead of those of our present, and have correctly set forth the essential
challenges the Revolution made to the position of women and to slavery,
including explaining the origins of the first emancipation and the abolition
movement. And contrary to what Zuckerman says, I do indeed include
Jefferson’s anxiety about the effects of slavery on whites.9
No doubt I spent less time than Smith or Zuckerman would have liked or
expected on the lot of slaves and women in the Revolution. They expected
more because these subjects are understandably preoccupying many historic
ans these days. But I never intended merely to synthesize contemporary
scholarship. Of course, my book does rely heavily on the writing of many
historians over the past generation or so, and I am much indebted to those
writings. But it tries to be much more than a simple summing up of existing
scholarship; it also aims to say something new and original about the
Revolution, to see it from an unconventional, if not unfashionable, perspective-which is why, to Smith’s and Zuckerman’s disappointment, “the bulk
of what counts as ‘the Revolution’ in many courses and monographs is
barely here.”
What I hoped to do was press beyond the issues of contemporary scholarship, which often deal with past oppressions of women and blacks in a very
present-minded manner, to retrieve a kind of oppression that has been lost
to us. There existed in the premodern world another, more general sort of
9 Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, I992), 5I. If I had
had the benefit of Linda K. Kerber’s recent article, I could have emphasized even more strongly
than I did the way the Revolution transformed the role of women-with some Americans even
coming to believe in the possibility of women becoming citizens with their own direct responsibilities to the state; Kerber, “The Paradox of Women’s Citizenship in the Early Republic: The
Case of Martin vs. Massachusetts, i8o5,” AHR, XCVII (1992), 349-378.
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EQUALITY AND CONFLICT IN THE REVOLUTION 707
oppress-ion that I believe the Revolution eliminated, a comprehensive
oppression that subsumed the oppression of both slaves and women and in
which all ordinary people had a stake.
This oppression involved -all common ordinary Americans, including not
only blacks and women but white males as well. This oppression was, of
course, scarcely comparable to the particular degradation suffered by
African-American slaves; nevertheless, its elimination had to precede the
elimination of the oppression of blacks and women. The age-old humiliation
felt by all commoners in the premodern world is by no means as well known
today as that experienced by black slaves and women, and for that reason I
thought it was worth emphasizing and spending some time on. In order to
understand better the changes brought about by the Revolution, I sought to
demonstrate the degree to which elites for centuries had held common ordinary people in contempt. Because this oppression of all ordinary people is
not an issue of our own time in the way race, gender, and ethnicity are, it is
not easy to get present-minded historians like Smith and Zuckerman to
understand it. In fact, so absorbed in the present cultural wars are they that
it is inconceivable to them that any white males in the past, unless they were
sailors or homeless or very poor, could ever have been oppressed or have felt
oppressed. They imply that only those who are oppressed or marginalized in
our own time were capable of being oppressed two centuries ago. If the
Revolution did not totally abolish slavery and fundamentally change the lot
of women, then it could not possibly have been radical. In other words,
there is something profoundly anachronistic about their conception of the
Revolution, as far as it is expressed in their critiques: they indict the
Americans of the past for not thinking as we think and for not behaving as
we would behave today. Consequently, they are unable to understand a document as fundamental to the Revolution as the Declaration of
Independence.
We cannot appreciate the radical significance in 1776 of the Declaration’s
ringing affirmation that all men were created equal and had certain inalienable rights unless we understand the earlier presumptions of inequality and
the contempt in which ordinary people, white as well as black, were held
throughout previous history. What was radical about the Declaration in
1776? We know it did not mean that blacks and women were created equal
to white men (although it would in time be used to justify those equalities
too). It was radical in 1776 because it meant that all white men were equal.
Hard as it may be for Smith and Zuckerman to understand, saying that all
white males were equal in 1776 was something revolutionary and new under
the sun. In my book I wanted to get that point clear; for once the claim of
equality by all white males was established in the eighteenth century (no
mean feat since it took a few thousand years of Western history to accomplish), then the other claims to equality could follow and, relative to the
total span of Western history, although not to our brief American past, follow rather rapidly.
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708 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
So when Smith says that developments concerning social leveling are not
central to my story, or when Zuckerman says that I exclude from my
account the ideals and passions of ordinary Americans, they could not be
more mistaken. Central to my story is the struggle of ordinary people to
emerge into consciousness and prominence; indeed, their emergence ultimately is what the radicalism of the Revolution is all about.
Contrary to what these critics say, my account is not written out of elite
archives and is not merely a reflection of northeastern aristocrats. They
assume that I am taking the point of view only of the Revolutionary leaders
and the better sort and ignoring that of common ordinary people because I
do not talk about Jack Tars or women in food riots or the homeless.10 The
only ordinary people they can really conceive of are those on the very bottom of the society, usually the society’s victims, whom they sentimentalize
and wrap in a nostalgic mantle of romantic communalism. Common farmers, artisans, shopkeepers, petty merchants, protobusinessmen-those whom
today we might label “lower-middle class” or “middle class”-these ordinary
people have no real place in their consciousness.
Yet these sorts of ordinary people are the major actors in the Revolution
and the major actors in my story. Contrary to what Appleby says, I did not
describe democracy coming into being without will, motive, or agency.
There were many wills, many motives, and many agents-all those common
people who transformed the Revolution from a colonial war of independence into a momentous democratic upheaval. The demographic and economic forces that I talked about are not some superhuman entities. They are
merely shorthand terms for the actions of hundreds of thousands of these
ordinary workaday people. 11
These common people did have spokesmen among the Revolutionary
elite. I agree with Appleby that Jefferson was the most important of these
spokesmen. Better than anyone else ever has, Jefferson articulated our basic
American ideology-our belief in liberty and equality, our c…
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