Disputed 1619 project was CORRECT, Slavery WAS key to US Revolution; Gerald Horne proved in 2014
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The Hidden Stakes of the 1619 Controversy - Boston Review
Critics of the New York Times’s 1619 Project insist the facts don’t support its proslavery reading of the American Revolution. But they obscure a longstanding debate within the field of U.S. history over that very issue.
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Opinion | 1619, Revisited (Published 2020)
The loudest criticism of the Times project has been neither productive nor scholarly.
The loudest criticism of the Times project has been neither productive nor scholarly.
Oct. 19, 2020
David La Spina/The New York Times
By Nicholas Guyatt
Nicholas Guyatt is the author of “Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation.”
More than a year after its appearance in The New York Times Magazine, the 1619 Project continues to drive its critics to distraction. Last month, President Trump convened a “White House Conference on American History” to defend the “magnificent truth about our country” from the “toxic propaganda” of the project.
Earlier this month, 21 scholars published an open letter to the Pulitzer Prize Board demanding that the Prize for Commentary awarded to Nikole Hannah-Jones’s lead essay be rescinded. And on Oct. 9, the Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote that the project’s “categorical and totalizing assertions” had squandered a precious opportunity to reorient the national debate on race in American history. Mr. Stephens’s conclusion was sober: “The 1619 Project has failed.”
The five distinguished historians who wrote to The Times last December to ask for “corrections” were more specific: They rejected the claims that Abraham Lincoln had failed to accept Black equality, that Black people had largely fought for their rights without the help of white allies, and that “one of the primary reasons” the colonists had waged the American Revolution was to protect slavery.
This final assertion, which appeared fleetingly in Ms. Hannah-Jones’s lead essay, became the weakest spot against which the project’s critics were determined to press. In the spring of this year, The Times reworded one line in her essay to note that “some of the colonists” saw the Revolution as a way to preserve slavery. Some critics of the project declared victory, and wondered if the entire endeavor might now be undone.
Instead, 1619 continued to resonate, not least in the extraordinary uprisings that followed the killing of George Floyd in May. With the project now seeming prophetic rather than heretical — or perhaps prophetic and heretical — a new line of argument emerged. Just after Mr. Trump’s impromptu conference on American history last month, the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz criticized both the conference and the project, writing that historians may one day conclude that they were “closely matched symptoms of the same era, feeding off each other.”
Although Professor Wilentz had previously expressed support for 1619’s ambitions, he now presented Mr. Trump’s version of American history and the Times project as equidistant from evidence and historical truth. Americans should set aside “ideological distortion” on both sides and choose “legitimate historical writing” instead. Mr. Stephens does something similar in his recent column. Despite the noble goals of the project, its “overreach” has allowed Mr. Trump and his supporters to argue that what the president calls “fake news” is now promoting fake history: “As unbidden gifts to Donald Trump go, it could hardly have been sweeter than that.”
Writing as a professional historian with no involvement in the 1619 Project, I believe that criticism of the project is not only legitimate but necessary. Argument isn’t an obstacle to the work of historians; it is the work of historians. In recent years historians have written a great deal about how slavery and racism influenced the American Revolution (and vice versa) without reaching a consensus view; they’ve also conducted a lively debate over slavery’s role in the shaping of American capitalism.
Historians of good faith and excellent method can and should explore these questions without fear or rancor, or at least without any more rancor than academics usually generate when they quarrel with one another. But in the loudest criticism of 1619 has been a level of vitriol that is neither productive nor scholarly. Professor Wilentz told The Washington Post that, when he first read Ms. Hannah-Jones’s lead essay, “I threw the thing across the room.” His Princeton colleague Allen C. Guelzo has dismissed the project as a “conspiracy theory.” Prominent critics have looked to shut down the project’s assertions rather than engage with them, and have even suggested that the project’s authors bear some responsibility for the president’s endless culture wars.
What’s going on here? In part, I think, the answer is gate-keeping. The project’s critics were clearly upset by its arguments, but does anyone think that the same essays published in another venue would have created anything like this reaction?
There is also something generational about this sense of horror at the storming of the citadel: among liberals of a certain age, The Times has a sacred status in American life. Some of the project’s liberal critics are also accustomed to shaping the national conversation on the American past. That The Times would have published the project without the benefit of their expertise clearly came as a shock. “I had no warning about this,” the distinguished historian Gordon S. Wood told the World Socialist website about 1619. “No one ever approached me.”
But the visceral reaction is also an acknowledgment that the 1619 Project radically challenges a core narrative of American history. Liberals and conservatives alike have imagined the story of the United States as a gradual unfolding of freedom. The Declaration of Independence is the seed of equality which eventually flowers for every American; white people — from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Abraham Lincoln to Lyndon B. Johnson — are indispensable allies in the work of racial progress.
The 1619 Project finds this narrative wanting. Its authors describe a nation in which racism is persistent and protean. White supremacy shapeshifts through the nation’s history, finding new forms to continue the work of subjugation and exclusion.
This is bracing to Americans who’ve been taught that the extension of freedom is the nation’s perpetual purpose. Nonetheless, the criticism directed at the project — and especially at Ms. Hannah-Jones’s essay — has been wildly disproportionate. The project’s authors can’t have imagined that their work would tear the Fourth of July from the national calendar, and yet so many of their critics have insisted that the counternarrative of 1619 might unravel even the most cherished assumptions about the nation’s values and purpose.
On the face of it, this fragility seems misplaced. The traditional narratives of American history die very hard indeed. But the 1619 Project has complicated long-held certainties about that history, forcing Americans (especially white Americans) to look at both the past and the present with fresh eyes.
While the old arguments about the moral unity of the American past will continue to generate fierce headwinds for future scholars who follow in the project’s footsteps, the extraordinary public interest in 1619 has suggested something truly profound: that Americans have the capacity to think differently about their history. In this sense, the 1619 Project has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its creators.
Nicholas Guyatt is reader in North American history at Cambridge University and the author of “Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation.”
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Fact check: Quotes from prominent American statesmen on race are accurate
An old image that is recirculating on social media purportedly shows quotes on race by the Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and member of the Virginia House of Delegates Henry Berry. The quotes, contextualized below, are accurate.
www.reuters.com
Fact check: Quotes from prominent American statesmen on race are accurate
An old image that is recirculating on social media purportedly shows quotes on race by the Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and member of the Virginia House of Delegates Henry Berry. The quotes, contextualized below, are accurate.Reuters Fact Check. REUTERS/Axel Schmidt
One example of the post, shared over 12,000 times as of July 3, 2020, is visible here .
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
The posts attribute the following remarks to Franklin: “Why increase the sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding all blacks and tawnys, of increasing the lovely white and red?”This quote comes from a 1751 essay entitled, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind” ( here ). This passage is visible at the end of the essay.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
The posts attribute the following comments to Jefferson: “I advanced it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time or circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind.”Jefferson made these remarks in Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1785 ( here ). The full text is available here .
Annette Gordon-Reed, a Pulitzer Prize winning lawyer and historian who has written extensively on Jefferson’s relationship with the enslaved woman Sally Hemings, told PBS that despite Jefferson later walking back some of his statements from Notes, there is little evidence to support the idea that he ever held non-racist views of Black people ( here ).
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
The posts attribute the following quote to Lincoln: “There is a physical difference between the white and the black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together... while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any man am in favor having the superior position assigned to the white race.”Lincoln made these remarks during one of a series of debates in 1858 with Stephen Douglas, when the men were vying for control in the Illinois General Assembly ( bit.ly/2Z4WkCV ).
In the same speech Lincoln said: “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”
Lincoln is perhaps best known for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, a key moment in the process for legally abolishing slavery in the U.S. as of January 1, 1863 ( here ).
Henry Louis Gates Jr., American literary critic and historian, is one of a number of Black scholars who has written on the apparent complexity that defined Lincoln’s views on the institution of slavery and its relation to race ( here ).
HENRY BERRY
The posts attribute the following to Berry: “We have, as far as possible, closed every avenue by which the light may enter the slave’s mind. If we could extinguish the capacity to see the light, our work will be complete. They would then be on the level of the beast of the fields and we then should be safe.”Berry made these remarks during an 1832 speech before the Virginia House of Delegates on the abolition of slavery ( bit.ly/3dUnjW4 ).
Berry, a slave-holder himself at the time of his 1832 speech, advocated for gradually diminishing the prevalence of slavery, and ostensibly toward its eventual abolition. “That slavery is a grinding curse upon this state, I had supposed would have been admitted by all,” Berry said at the start of his address (page 2). “Yet I am for maintaining the bonds by which we hold this property now,” he remarked later on (page 4). “The evil [of slavery] was gradually entailed upon us, and can only be gradually removed.” (page 4)
For additional reading on the Founding Fathers' views towards slavery, see here . To read more about the debate over Lincoln's attitudes on race relations and abolition see here and here .
VERDICT
True. Quotes from Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Henry Berry are true.This article was produced by the Reuters Fact Check team. Read more about our work to fact-check social media posts here .
Opinion Founding Fathers, trashing immigrants
Catherine Rampell
John Adams, Gouverneur Morris, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson around table. (Augustus Tholey)
My column Friday noted that despite our heritage as a “nation of immigrants,” the United States has a long and ugly history of hostility toward immigrants that dates all the way back to pre-revolutionary times. Here are some of my favorite examples.
First here’s Benjamin Franklin, in 1751, referring to the Swedes, French and other Europeans as insufficiently white, and expressing his growing annoyance at the German immigration boom:
[W]hy should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements and, by herding together, establish their Language and Manners, to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs any more than they can acquire our Complexion?
Which leads me to add one Remark, that the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny; Asia chiefly tawny; America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who, with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we, in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? Why increase the Sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.
The much younger Alexander Hamilton, perhaps the nation’s most famous and politically influential immigrant (he was born in the Danish West Indies and came to New York as a teen), also went on to express anti-immigrant tendencies. He supported the Alien and Sedition Acts, which helped consolidate power for his own political party. And in a series of pseudonymously-written essays, he warned of the dangers of absorbing and especially naturalizing too many foreigners.
In one essay, he explained the risks of giving political rights to foreign elements who might be insufficiently committed to American ideals:
The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias, and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family.
…[F]oreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived; or, if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism? There may, as to particular individuals, and at particular times, be occasional exceptions to these remarks, yet such is the general rule. The influx of foreigners must, therefore, tend to produce a heterogeneous compound; to change and corrupt the national spirit; to complicate and confound public opinion; to introduce foreign propensities. In the composition of society, the harmony of the ingredients is all-important, and whatever tends to a discord ant intermixture must have an injurious tendency.
Now, you might think nativism is a bit hypocritical not only for Hamilton, since he himself was an immigrant, but also really for anyone aware that there were actual native Americans who used to live in what had recently very become the United States.
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In fact, in this vein, Hamilton’s rival Thomas Jefferson argued that the country should not “refuse to the unhappy fugitives from distress, that hospitality which the savages of the wilderness extended to our fathers arriving in this land.” (It was no coincidence of course that the foreigners in question at the time were generally more sympathetic to Jefferson’s political philosophy than Hamilton’s; before this turn of events, Jefferson had expressed far more skepticism about immigration.)
Hamilton responded that he remembered the European settlers’ welcome to the New World a bit differently, and that even if it had been as friendly as Jefferson described, the natives’ hospitality didn’t serve them so well in the end:
Had it all been true, prudence requires us to trace the history further and ask what has become of the nations of savages who exercised this policy, and who now occupies the territory which they then inhabited? Perhaps a lesson is here taught which ought not to be despised.
Catherine Rampell is an opinion columnist at The Washington Post. She frequently covers economics, public policy, immigration and politics, with a special emphasis on data-driven journalism. Before joining The Post, she wrote about economics and theater for the New York Times. Twitter
now they're claiming Jane Austen's father owning slavery investments means she wasn't or couldn't' have been an abolitionist 
Jane Austen family link to abolition movement comes to light https://news.asu.edu/20210614-regents-professor-devoney-looser-uncovers-new-information-jane-austen’s-family-ties-slavery
Jane Austen family link to abolition movement comes to light https://news.asu.edu/20210614-regents-professor-devoney-looser-uncovers-new-information-jane-austen’s-family-ties-slavery
Yes, Virginia, the Constitution Was Pro-Slavery
Unlike Sean Wilentz suggests in "The New York Times," the Constitution was not originally anti-slavery.
www.theatlantic.com
Yes, Virginia, the Constitution Was Pro-Slavery
Unlike Sean Wilentz suggests in "The New York Times," the Constitution was not originally anti-slavery.
www.theatlantic.com
Why the Constitution Was Indeed Pro-Slavery - The Atlantic
Sep 19, 2015How the Constitution Was Indeed Pro-Slavery
Unlike Sean Wilentz suggests in The New York Times, the Constitution was not originally anti-slavery.Charles Dharapak / AP
On Monday, Senator Bernie Sanders told his audience at Liberty University that the United States “in many ways was created” as a nation “from way back on racist principles.” Not everyone agreed. The historian Sean Wilentz took to The New York Times to write that Bernie Sanders—and a lot of his colleagues—have it all wrong about the founding of the United States. The Constitution that protected slavery for three generations, until a devastating war and a constitutional amendment changed the game, was actually antislavery because it didn’t explicitly recognize “property in humans.”
Lincoln certainly said so, and cited the same passage from Madison’s notes that Wilentz used. But does that make it so? And does it gainsay Sanders’s inelegant but apparently necessary voicing of what ought to be obvious, what David Brion Davis, Wilentz’s scholarly mentor and my own, wrote back in 1966—that the nation was “in many ways” founded on racial slavery?
If the absence of an ironclad guarantee of a right to property in men really “quashed” the slaveholders, it should be apparent in the rest of the document, by which the nation was actually governed. But of the 11 clauses in the Constitution that deal with or have policy implications for slavery, 10 protect slave property and the powers of masters. Only one, the international slave-trade clause, points to a possible future power by which, after 20 years, slavery might be curtailed—and it didn’t work out that way at all.
The three-fifths clause, which states that three-fifths of “all other persons” (i.e. slaves) will be counted for both taxation and representation, was a major boon to the slave states. This is well known; it’s astounding to see Wilentz try to pooh-pooh it. No, it wasn’t counting five-fifths, but counting 60 percent of slaves added enormously to slave-state power in the formative years of the republic. By 1800, northern critics called this phenomenon “the slave power” and called for its repeal. With the aid of the second article of the Constitution, which numbered presidential electors by adding the number of representatives in the House to the number of senators, the three-fifths clause enabled the elections of plantation masters Jefferson in 1800 and Polk in 1844.
Just as importantly, the tax liability for three-fifths of the slaves turned out to mean nothing. Sure the federal government could pass a head tax, but it almost never did. It hardly could when the taxes had to emerge from the House, where the South was 60 percent overrepresented. So the South gained political power, without having to surrender much of anything in exchange.
The refusal to mention slavery as property or anything else in the Constitution means something. But what it meant was embarrassment—and damage control.
Indeed, all the powers delegated to the House—that is, the most democratic aspects of the Constitution—were disproportionately affected by what critics quickly came to call “slave representation.” These included the commerce clause—a compromise measure that gave the federal government power to regulate commerce, but only at the price of giving disproportionate power to slave states. And as if that wasn’t enough, Congress was forbidden from passing export duties—at a time when most of the value of what the U.S. exported lay in slave-grown commodities. This was one of the few things (in addition to regulating the slave trade for 20 years) that Congress was forbidden to do. Slavery and democracy in the U.S. were joined at the 60-percent-replaced hip.
Another clause in Article I allowed Congress to mobilize “the Militia” to “suppress insurrections”—again, the House with its disproportionate votes would decide whether a slave rebellion counted as an insurrection. Wilentz repeats the old saw that with the rise of the northwest, the slave power’s real bastion was the Senate. Hence the battles over the admission of slave and free states that punctuated the path to Civil War. But this reads history backwards from the 1850s, not forward from 1787. The shaping policies of the early republic were proslavery because the federal government was controlled by southern expansionists like Jefferson and Jackson, who saw Africans as a captive nation, a fifth column just waiting to be liberated (again) by the British.
The refusal to mention slavery as property or anything else in the Constitution means something. But what it meant was embarrassment—and damage control. Domestic and foreign critics had lambasted Americans for their hypocrisy in calling themselves a beacon to human freedom while only a few states moved on the slavery question. The planters didn’t need or even want an explicit statement that slaves were property; it would have stated the obvious while opening up the United States to international ridicule in an era when slavery was coming into question.
On balance, the Constitution was deliberately ambiguous—but operationally proslavery. Perhaps more so than Madison wanted, as Wilentz maintains. But Madison’s putative intentions are all that matters to Wilentz. He’s outdone original-intent jurisprudence in reducing history to a morality play of good founders, bad critics. He loses sight of what actually happened when the ambiguously worded but slavery-suffused Constitution was finally released to an anxious public.
What happened was that antifederalists in the North understood that that the federal government had been strengthened, but that slavery in particular had been shielded from an otherwise-powerful Congress. Ratification ran into trouble in the states where the antislavery criticisms of the Constitution were most articulate and widely publicized: Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York. Some southern antifederalists like Patrick Henry, most concerned about local control, tried to argue that any stronger government would eventually threaten slavery, but the more persuasive voices in the South were those like Charles Pinckney, who testified upon returning to South Carolina that he couldn’t imagine a better bargain could have been made for the planters.
Was Madison outraged? Hardly. He went down to the Virginia ratifying convention to assure delegates that Henry was dead wrong: The original intent was indeed to protect slave property. Much of what we know of the Constitutional Convention comes from his notes—which, recent scholarship suggests, he carefully edited for a posthumous audience. He made sure, for example, that posterity would know that he objected to the slave trade being guaranteed for another 20 years—but this was a common Virginia position at the time, since Virginians were already net sellers of slavers rather than importers by 1787.
Madison put the defense of the proslavery clauses in the voice of a Virginian and then called them “a little strained,” but just.
But there’s more. When it came time to deal with the matter of slave representation in Federalist 54, Madison obliquely distanced himself from the three-fifths clause by saying that one had to admit that slaves were, irrefutably, both people and property. He actually argued that the three-fifths clause was a good example of how the Constitution would lead to good government—by protecting property. He looked forward to the honest census that would result from slaves and other people being both taxed and represented. He put the defense of the proslavery clauses in the voice of a Virginian and then called them “a little strained,” but just.
When we see things like this in today’s politics, we call it damage control. I give Madison credit for a kind of honesty about his ambivalence, at least for those who could read between the lines—but this is far from the bold antislavery stand Wilentz would have us see in Madison’s words. Wilentz is an astute student of politics, and has often praised pragmatism in the figures he admires. Why his Madison has to be an antislavery truth teller when there are other candidates for that historical role—even in 1787—is beyond puzzling.
Americans and their leading historians still find it hard to account for how their Revolution, considered as a quarter-century of resistance, war, and state-making, both strengthened slavery and provided enough countercurrents to keep the struggle against it going. Tougher still is understanding how the work of 1787 constitutionalized slavery—hardwired it into the branches, the very workings, of the federal government. Given the subsequent history of disfranchisement and policing in this country, it’s not a stretch to say that it is hard-wired there still.
If Sean Wilentz prefers to celebrate what the Founders did not do—that is, write something like the Confederate Constitution—that’s the beginning of a potentially interesting conversation, even if it takes a counterfactual as its starting point. But the fact that it took a civil war to settle the debate about the Founders’ intentions for slavery’s future shows that, as John Quincy Adams came to understand and assert during the 1830s, there was no constitutional way except the exercise of war powers to end slavery in the United States. You can call that the founders’ design, but it seems more a design flaw than something to celebrate. When it takes a war to resolve something, humane persons call it a failure or a tragedy. They don’t blame the people who point out the roots of the problem. Unless their agenda is less historical than political. When Wilentz raps the knuckles of Bernie Sanders for saying what his teachers said fifty years ago, he isn’t doing his favorite any favors.
The Changing Same of U.S. History - Boston Review
Like the 1619 Project, two new books on the Constitution reflect a vigorous debate about what has changed in the American past—and what hasn’t.
bostonreview.net
The Changing Same of U.S. History
Like the 1619 Project, two new books on the Constitution reflect a vigorous debate about what has changed in the American past—and what hasn’t.
Image: Zhixiao Jiang
Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution
Gordon S. Wood
Oxford University Press, $24.95 (cloth)
The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America
Carol Anderson
Bloomsbury, $28.00 (cloth)
“Our Constitution is so old,” says Heidi Schreck in her 2019 Pulitzer– and Tony–nominated play What the Constitution Means to Me. The line is a deliberate double-entendre, its meaning turning subtly on intonation. On the one hand, it captures the complaints of those who want to change the system—so oldcarrying the sense of obviously obsolete. On the other hand, it gestures at the reverence of those who think it’s our rock—so old, in this case, meant as a badge of honor. By binding these two visions together, the line also gives expression to the ambivalence of liberals like Heidi and me, who were taught to believe that the Constitution can and does change but have learned to wonder about who has benefitted from its protections, much less its ambiguities.
There is a widening gulf between those who see the Constitution’s age as a sign of its wisdom and those who see it as the dead hand of the past.
Lately, the debate about whether the Constitution is the problem or the solution has reached a new level of intensity. An older standoff between originalist jurisprudence and living constitutionalism has come to seem quaint, especially in the face of design flaws, from the Electoral College to the Senate, that critics allege have never been addressed, much less fixed. The controversy is as weighted and as polemical as the famous debates between the Ancients and the Moderns over the value of Greek and Roman classics, a debate that in many ways set the stage for the Enlightenment, the Age of Revolutions, and the Constitution itself. Historians find themselves working overtime, called in as consultants, their work on the distant past suddenly rendered relevant. Two new books reveal the widening gulf between those who see the Constitution’s age as a sign of its wisdom and those who see it as the dead hand of the past. At stake is also a longer conflict about whether U.S. history is a matter of great changes or a changing sameness.
The terms of the revived debate today began to take shape in the early twentieth century, when a chorus of self-styled Progressives called for major policy changes to redress structural inequalities and rampant corruption. Though accused of being radical, and often moralistic, they were also professionals in their various fields, well-meaning, and not least burdened by a sense of guilt at their personal good fortune after a series of national economic downturns. They sought to use the tools of modern social analysis and science to create better government. In the young disciplines of history and political science, one of their controversial avatars was a Midwesterner and Columbia professor named Charles Beard, who in 1913 more seriously pursued the suggestion of an earlier scholar, Orin G. Libby, that perhaps the framers of the Constitution had been an alliance of commercial classes more than a virtuous convocation of statesmen. Beard pushed the class analysis even further, depicting the framers as a self-interested clique of bondholders. The implications were obvious. If the Constitution fashioned in 1787 primarily served the class alliances of its time and its authors, then its institutional apparatus could be tinkered with or even thrown aside as decrepit in its very mode of operation as well as its unfortunate results. (It was not a coincidence that the years between 1913 and 1920 saw constitutional amendments permitting the income tax, establishing the direct popular election of U.S. senators, and female suffrage.)
The backlash to Beard helped send an Ohio newspaper editor and former lieutenant governor named Warren G. Harding to a Senate seat and eventually the White House in 1920. Harding’s headlines screamed about Ivy League professors tearing down the “Founding Fathers,” a term he tried out in a subsequent speech that stuck long after its politicized origins were forgotten. The fact that Harding’s own administration reached heights of corruption not exceeded until Donald Trump has never given those who still refer to Founding Fathers any pause.
Despite the backlash in the political realm, Progressive approaches to history, including critical approaches to most of the American past, dominated younger and intellectual circles for a generation, surviving in the work of historians like Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. (and his son, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.). It helped, as Staughton Lynd later pointed out, that Beard and his followers did little to question what Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois famously called “the color line.” Their great battle was between partisans of “the people”—usually farmers but sometimes including their urban working-class allies—and vested interests: businessmen, bankers, capitalists. In this scheme, slaveholding Southern planters and their descendants might be relied upon to lead yeomen (small property holders) against the capitalists.
According to the first wave of Progressive historians, the Constitution primarily served the class alliances of its time and its authors.
But the intellectual prominence of the Progressives finally faded, too, beginning in the 1940s. In the middle of a burgeoning Cold War, it proved useful to see the American past as a story of well-meaning colonists taking up arms against the dominant empire of their day, especially as the United States seemed to be on the rise, not falling into corruption or decline. From this perspective, it was the Americans, including the framers of the Constitution, who were provincials, the colonized rather than colonizers, the underdogs who got out from under British dominance. Their financial interests and elite status didn’t matter so much, or even at all. Maybe they even saved the West and its traditions from corruption and imperial overreach.
Anti- or post-progressives thus found that they could have their Americanism and their critique of their colleagues’ Euro-snobbery (whether from the left or the right) at the same time. Ever Oedipal, young historians began to make their name by attacking the pieties of their Progressive forebears. (Not coincidentally, the U.S. academy at this time was growing by leaps and bounds: the generational critique proved fertile soil for career advancement.) The Progressives had been like the Populists, the argument went—their lame, homegrown quasi-socialism exposing them to be provincial rubes and fellow-traveling ideologues at once. The American Revolution and the Constitution were, in fact, worthy of celebration. Criticizing them as antiquated or bourgeois now seemed counterintuitive; they were valuable precisely because the nation hadn’t fallen into one –ism or another. The truths were held self-evident again.
The strength of this kind of history of the American Revolution, as its foremost practitioners Bernard Bailyn and his student Gordon Wood never tired of telling us, is that it has understood its prime movers, who they began calling “the founders,” on their own terms, which means examining their particular worldview sub specie aeternitatis rather than judging it as primitive and lacking or as propaganda, containing seeds of bias or oppression—the cardinal sin of Beard, in their judgment. This worldview could be called ideology—Bailyn’s most famous book traced The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)—but even as such it was the key to understanding their motives and the reasonable, not regrettable, outcomes. By the late 1980s Bailyn and his students had stopped using the word “ideology,” as by then it smacked too much of critique.
In his new book, Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution, Wood insists that Beard still “casts a long shadow.” The same could be said of Wood, who has been an authority on this subject for almost as long as the fifty-six years that elapsed between Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitutionof the United States (1913) and the publication of Wood’s first book, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, in 1969. That study won acclaim for highlighting the intellectual and practical dilemmas of republicanism and for seeming to split the difference between celebration and criticism of the founders. Wood argued that, ironically, the course of the 1780s led toward a Madisonian “science of politics” that sought to bury economic conflict in schemes of federalism and representation, and did it so successfully that it created an American political tradition that couldn’t deal honestly with class or money.
In this, the young Wood performed a scholarly triple axel. At great length and sophistication, he had offered something to those inclined to celebrate the Constitution, those who criticized it, and those looking for some way between. The republic, simply put, was moderate yet innovative, advanced yet caught up in self-deception. Expecting the founders to have dealt with something as modern as race relations, however—as Lynd, New Left–affiliated historian and activist, was doing in the late 1960s in essays that laid out precisely where the Progressive historians had failed—was “anachronistic.” Thanks to his outspoken antiwar activism, Lynd lost his job at Yale. For his part, Wood got tenure at Brown, and after winning a Pulitzer for his second book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991), he became known for complaining publicly about his left-leaning and multiculturalist colleagues and for the plaudits he received from Newt Gingrich, who distributed the book to rookie House members. That wouldn’t have been so notable or memorable had it not been part of what New York Times Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein, in a lengthy new response to the controversy over the 1619 Project, rightly describes as an earlier iteration of today’s outrage—one that targeted the first set of national guidelines for teaching U.S. history and was cooked up just in time for 1994’s midterm elections.
Part 2:
In his distinctive kind of “founders” history, Wood uncritically reproduces the views of his subjects, who to him are always the best witnesses.
Wood laid a foundation for a distinctive—we might say strategically sophisticated—kind of “founders” history, one that keeps a quiet distance from uncritical flag-waving by emphasizing at every turn how different the eighteenth century was yet also embraces patriotism by insisting that everything good about the United States still somehow emanates from the founding, even if sometimes ironically and unintentionally. Criticisms from the left—by neo-progressives or multiculturalists who would add other groups to the pantheon of founders, or would emphasize or even dwell at all on the antiquated, racist, inegalitarian aspects of what the founders created—have been mocked by Wood, in prefaces and footnotes and occasional book reviews, as misguided, “presentist” Beardian holdovers. That’s the language he uses when he is being polite. On other occasions, Wood descends into explicit red-baiting, as in his reviews of The Unknown American Revolution (2005), the career-summing work of the late Gary B. Nash that Wood tars as “locked into . . . Marxian categories,” and Robin Einhorn’s American Taxation, American Slavery (2006), a brilliant and meticulous excavation of tax policy’s links to the peculiar institution. By losing focus on “revolutionary characters” and their leadership, Wood has charged, these historians are doing politics, not history. How he has chosen to summarize his life’s work in his latest book tells us a lot about the current debate over the Constitution and where the current threat to his would-be vital center—his conviction that in the United States “power and liberty” have flown evenly and together—comes from: the claim that racial oppression has been a primary and continuous force in U.S. history, one reinforced, rather than mitigated, by the founders’ Constitution.
Wood begins with Tom Paine, who used to be exiled from the elite pack of founders for being too radical and plebian (not to mention his shilling for the French Revolution). Wood writes that Paine left Britain in 1774 “full of rage at the decadent monarchical society that had kept him down” and fully “ready to articulate America’s destiny.” What he means is Paine’s suggestion, in Common Sense (1776), that a new United States should throw over not just the monarchy but all the old laws. For Wood, the essence of the American experiment lay in a constitutional process that leads to fundamental laws that have popular sanction. The Founding—the real American Revolution—wasn’t a war for independence or even the Constitutional Convention: it was the process. Because the United States lacked an “ethnic basis for its nationhood,” Americans came to look to founding documents and principles as the “source of our identity.” Several complicating facts—that the English thought of themselves as uniquely bound by laws, that many colonists came to identify strongly as British before the Revolution, and that for a decade they asked for better representation in Parliament or for the King to simply listen to their petitions—no longer much interest Wood, at least when they get in the way of emphasizing that “never in history had there been such a remarkable burst of constitution-making.”
Paine is now Wood’s prophet precisely because it is Paine who first emphasizedthe American Revolution as an opportunity “to begin the world over again.” Again and again, Wood elevates the United States to unparalleled significance in world history. The exceptionalism here is not even thinly veiled; what to Paine had been propaganda and exhortation in Wood becomes a statement of fact. Paine, at least, felt constrained to make some actual comparisons. Not Wood: he simply and uncritically presents Paine’s resentful image of a decadent empire. It is the ultimate straw man, mirroring the selective memory of the American revolutionaries themselves, who stressed how faithful they were to English traditions and laws—until they weren’t.
The notion of an absolute difference between Britain and America—the essential premise of all revolutionary wartime propaganda—undergirds Wood’s description of the imperial controversy. In his telling, while the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) left the British empire suddenly sovereign and dominant over half of North America (something numerous native nations effectively disputed, but that’s irrelevant to Wood), colonial life had led Americans to understand representation as direct, local, and real rather than as an abstract mediation through the king or members of parliament elected by a small number of constituents. Faced with new taxes they didn’t vote for, colonial spokesmen tried to finesse the issue by distinguishing internal and external taxes, or taxes versus other kinds of laws. Key imperialists, however, discerned that the real issue was sovereignty, and not just what parts of it resided with the king or parliament. After a decade of activism and reaction, colonial arguments drifted, by 1774, toward invocations of natural rights, which had the radical potential Paine recognized as a world-shattering event, even “the cause of all mankind.”
Again and again, Wood invents a radicalism that is about anything but nationalism and everything but material interests—all in the name of doing history rather than politics.
Thus we come to one of the climaxes of the book. Wood can’t emphasize enough how radical the Declaration of Independence was in 1776. In another of his many superlatives (of the kind one imagines most professors excising in red on an undergraduate paper), the Declaration becomes the “most important document in American history.” This is a fine tautology, perhaps, if your goal is to stir up swoons of national pride, but analytically, of course, the statement means next to nothing. This kind of language says more about Wood’s aspirations for U.S. history—the story he wants to tell about the one true meaning of America, the American identity he himself wants to embrace, the inspiring transition from Old to New World—than the history itself. Again and again, Wood invents a radicalism that is about anything but nationalism and everything but material interests—all in the name of doing history rather than politics.
That radicalism plays directly into Wood’s concise summation of his earlier arguments about the new state constitutions following 1776. In this account, the Americans practically invent the notion of written constitutions as fundamental law, to the extent of establishing, as Paine had forecasted, intermediate elected bodies (conventions) to write them and special elections to ratify them. These constitutions dismantled executive power, isolated and lessened judiciary powers, and empowered legislatures as the most representative and democratic part of government, while tentatively moving toward bicameralism as a check against democratic excess.
Nevertheless, the federal structure that barely got the new nation through the war was not up to coordinating these thirteen newly empowered states in a hostile world. Wood pivots from emphasizing the weakness of the Articles of Confederation in the realm of taxation and foreign affairs to the old Madisonian saw that the very legislatures he had praised as revolutionary had indulged in “excessive democracy.” Wood isn’t simply saying that Madison saw it this way, and that that is why he developed a science of government around fears of majority tyranny and mechanisms for balance—an account that is true enough, and indeed represents the scholarly consensus. Wood is saying there really was too much democracy in the American Revolution.
On this point, Wood predictably fails to engage the work of Woody Holton, Barbara Clark Smith, and Terry Bouton, who argued convincingly, in three important books published a dozen years ago, that the political crisis over taxation in the 1780s reflected less demagoguery than profit-seeking by a threatened gentry class of mushroom patriots who no longer worried much about the inflation-driven travails of their neighbors. Progressive history got a lot more careful and convincing in this third, twenty-first century wave, but Wood has ignored all of it. Instead he doubles down on his argument from his 1991 study, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, that the financial crisis of the 1780s was caused by ordinary people seizing the democratic desire to “get rich” (he sees capitalism and democracy and the middle class as ultimately the same things, none of which had anything to do with the South or with slavery). If the first wave of Progressives made the (white) people perpetual victims of greedy elites, for Wood they are always already “middle class.” In this, Wood uncritically reproduces the views of elites like Madison, who to him are always the best witnesses—sometimes charmingly candid, often amusingly jaded, but rarely self-interested, and never themselves operating as anything resembling a class. Even to suggest such a thing amounts to treason.
After this accounting, it is hardly surprising that Wood objects to the title of Michael Klarman’s comprehensive tome The Framers’ Coup (2016), as he does in a footnote, because it “suggests a degree of skullduggery on the part of the framers.” Yes, Wood admits, the Constitutional Convention was stacked with nationalists and involved striking, if ambiguous, compromises between federal and state authority; yes, the debates over ratification reveal (unnamed and uncharacterized) “social division.” But the important thing is that the results created “an entirely new intellectual world of politics” that grounded representation in the sovereignty of the people, not estates or classes tied to the separate branches. The federal Constitution, in other words, took what was good and stable in the state constitutions and left the dangerous democratic tendencies out.
Wood’s insistence on interpreting everything to the founders’ credit, even against his own evidence and every possible counterargument, comes to a head in his fifth chapter. In Power and Liberty’s introduction, Wood admits, for the first time in his many books, that slavery was “one of the major issues” in the convention and in the ratification debates. Yet he makes this claim only to justify segregating slavery into a separate chapter in which he contextualizes the subject into irrelevance. Slavery is apparently still beside the point because, as his mentor Bailyn stressed, the important thing is that the Revolution made slavery a problem: revolutionary ideology “created” and “galvanized” an antislavery movement. Missing from this account—as well as all of Wood’s earlier accounts—are the pre-Revolutionary Quakers who actually did the first effective organizing, their English allies, and the enslaved people whose travels and resistance created a cohort of emancipated spokespersons like James Somerset (who ran away from his customs officer enslaver and catalyzed Lord Mansfield’s 1772 decision in Britain that posited slavery as inferior colonial law), Phillis Wheatley (who made pointed public criticisms of slaveholder hypocrisy), and the first black abolitionist activist, Olaudah Equiano (who fought in the Seven Years’ War, not the American Revolution).
Wood’s fundamental demand is that the great men of the American Revolution be let off the hook. Slavery can be an issue so long as it makes clear that the Founders were noble.
The Somerset case, Wood concedes, may have caught the attention of the enslaved—Wood’s first-ever concession that they had a politics—but the patriots weren’t the slightest bit worried about it. To Wood, it’s inconceivable that his heroes kept quiet about things they didn’t want their slaves to know about, or that they were trying to spin the slavery question that was already being thrown in their faces. Independence was inevitable already in 1775, so defending property in slaves against military threats in 1775 and 1776 couldn’t have “forced founders” in Virginia and South Carolina to support independence, as Holton argued in an important study two decades ago and reiterates in his new book, Liberty Is Sweet.
Instead, Wood writes, the American Revolution inspires emancipation all over the new world as “the first great antislavery movement in world history.” The founders, on this telling, really were antislavery; the ways the Constitution hard-wired slavery into the new order were a tragic accident of well-meaning statecraft. In Wood’s account, our revered statesmen mostly believed that it would die a natural death anyway. Not coincidentally, this chapter on “Slavery and Constitutionalism” dispenses with the Constitutional Convention and the ratification debates, already covered in slavery-free detail in the previous chapter, in just three and a half pages. The main point is that the three-fifths clause “seemed a necessary compromise”—at least to the ultimate authority, James Madison. Astonishingly, Wood has moved from insisting defensively, for decades, that slavery didn’t matter because the founders didn’t talk about it, to saying that it isn’t very important because they thought they had sufficiently dealt with it. The thread tying together these otherwise inconsistent positions is Wood’s fundamental insistence that the great men of the American Revolution be let off the hook. Slavery can be an issue so long as it makes clear that the Founders were noble.
In his distinctive kind of “founders” history, Wood uncritically reproduces the views of his subjects, who to him are always the best witnesses.
Wood laid a foundation for a distinctive—we might say strategically sophisticated—kind of “founders” history, one that keeps a quiet distance from uncritical flag-waving by emphasizing at every turn how different the eighteenth century was yet also embraces patriotism by insisting that everything good about the United States still somehow emanates from the founding, even if sometimes ironically and unintentionally. Criticisms from the left—by neo-progressives or multiculturalists who would add other groups to the pantheon of founders, or would emphasize or even dwell at all on the antiquated, racist, inegalitarian aspects of what the founders created—have been mocked by Wood, in prefaces and footnotes and occasional book reviews, as misguided, “presentist” Beardian holdovers. That’s the language he uses when he is being polite. On other occasions, Wood descends into explicit red-baiting, as in his reviews of The Unknown American Revolution (2005), the career-summing work of the late Gary B. Nash that Wood tars as “locked into . . . Marxian categories,” and Robin Einhorn’s American Taxation, American Slavery (2006), a brilliant and meticulous excavation of tax policy’s links to the peculiar institution. By losing focus on “revolutionary characters” and their leadership, Wood has charged, these historians are doing politics, not history. How he has chosen to summarize his life’s work in his latest book tells us a lot about the current debate over the Constitution and where the current threat to his would-be vital center—his conviction that in the United States “power and liberty” have flown evenly and together—comes from: the claim that racial oppression has been a primary and continuous force in U.S. history, one reinforced, rather than mitigated, by the founders’ Constitution.
Wood begins with Tom Paine, who used to be exiled from the elite pack of founders for being too radical and plebian (not to mention his shilling for the French Revolution). Wood writes that Paine left Britain in 1774 “full of rage at the decadent monarchical society that had kept him down” and fully “ready to articulate America’s destiny.” What he means is Paine’s suggestion, in Common Sense (1776), that a new United States should throw over not just the monarchy but all the old laws. For Wood, the essence of the American experiment lay in a constitutional process that leads to fundamental laws that have popular sanction. The Founding—the real American Revolution—wasn’t a war for independence or even the Constitutional Convention: it was the process. Because the United States lacked an “ethnic basis for its nationhood,” Americans came to look to founding documents and principles as the “source of our identity.” Several complicating facts—that the English thought of themselves as uniquely bound by laws, that many colonists came to identify strongly as British before the Revolution, and that for a decade they asked for better representation in Parliament or for the King to simply listen to their petitions—no longer much interest Wood, at least when they get in the way of emphasizing that “never in history had there been such a remarkable burst of constitution-making.”
Paine is now Wood’s prophet precisely because it is Paine who first emphasizedthe American Revolution as an opportunity “to begin the world over again.” Again and again, Wood elevates the United States to unparalleled significance in world history. The exceptionalism here is not even thinly veiled; what to Paine had been propaganda and exhortation in Wood becomes a statement of fact. Paine, at least, felt constrained to make some actual comparisons. Not Wood: he simply and uncritically presents Paine’s resentful image of a decadent empire. It is the ultimate straw man, mirroring the selective memory of the American revolutionaries themselves, who stressed how faithful they were to English traditions and laws—until they weren’t.
The notion of an absolute difference between Britain and America—the essential premise of all revolutionary wartime propaganda—undergirds Wood’s description of the imperial controversy. In his telling, while the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) left the British empire suddenly sovereign and dominant over half of North America (something numerous native nations effectively disputed, but that’s irrelevant to Wood), colonial life had led Americans to understand representation as direct, local, and real rather than as an abstract mediation through the king or members of parliament elected by a small number of constituents. Faced with new taxes they didn’t vote for, colonial spokesmen tried to finesse the issue by distinguishing internal and external taxes, or taxes versus other kinds of laws. Key imperialists, however, discerned that the real issue was sovereignty, and not just what parts of it resided with the king or parliament. After a decade of activism and reaction, colonial arguments drifted, by 1774, toward invocations of natural rights, which had the radical potential Paine recognized as a world-shattering event, even “the cause of all mankind.”
Again and again, Wood invents a radicalism that is about anything but nationalism and everything but material interests—all in the name of doing history rather than politics.
Thus we come to one of the climaxes of the book. Wood can’t emphasize enough how radical the Declaration of Independence was in 1776. In another of his many superlatives (of the kind one imagines most professors excising in red on an undergraduate paper), the Declaration becomes the “most important document in American history.” This is a fine tautology, perhaps, if your goal is to stir up swoons of national pride, but analytically, of course, the statement means next to nothing. This kind of language says more about Wood’s aspirations for U.S. history—the story he wants to tell about the one true meaning of America, the American identity he himself wants to embrace, the inspiring transition from Old to New World—than the history itself. Again and again, Wood invents a radicalism that is about anything but nationalism and everything but material interests—all in the name of doing history rather than politics.
That radicalism plays directly into Wood’s concise summation of his earlier arguments about the new state constitutions following 1776. In this account, the Americans practically invent the notion of written constitutions as fundamental law, to the extent of establishing, as Paine had forecasted, intermediate elected bodies (conventions) to write them and special elections to ratify them. These constitutions dismantled executive power, isolated and lessened judiciary powers, and empowered legislatures as the most representative and democratic part of government, while tentatively moving toward bicameralism as a check against democratic excess.
Nevertheless, the federal structure that barely got the new nation through the war was not up to coordinating these thirteen newly empowered states in a hostile world. Wood pivots from emphasizing the weakness of the Articles of Confederation in the realm of taxation and foreign affairs to the old Madisonian saw that the very legislatures he had praised as revolutionary had indulged in “excessive democracy.” Wood isn’t simply saying that Madison saw it this way, and that that is why he developed a science of government around fears of majority tyranny and mechanisms for balance—an account that is true enough, and indeed represents the scholarly consensus. Wood is saying there really was too much democracy in the American Revolution.
On this point, Wood predictably fails to engage the work of Woody Holton, Barbara Clark Smith, and Terry Bouton, who argued convincingly, in three important books published a dozen years ago, that the political crisis over taxation in the 1780s reflected less demagoguery than profit-seeking by a threatened gentry class of mushroom patriots who no longer worried much about the inflation-driven travails of their neighbors. Progressive history got a lot more careful and convincing in this third, twenty-first century wave, but Wood has ignored all of it. Instead he doubles down on his argument from his 1991 study, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, that the financial crisis of the 1780s was caused by ordinary people seizing the democratic desire to “get rich” (he sees capitalism and democracy and the middle class as ultimately the same things, none of which had anything to do with the South or with slavery). If the first wave of Progressives made the (white) people perpetual victims of greedy elites, for Wood they are always already “middle class.” In this, Wood uncritically reproduces the views of elites like Madison, who to him are always the best witnesses—sometimes charmingly candid, often amusingly jaded, but rarely self-interested, and never themselves operating as anything resembling a class. Even to suggest such a thing amounts to treason.
After this accounting, it is hardly surprising that Wood objects to the title of Michael Klarman’s comprehensive tome The Framers’ Coup (2016), as he does in a footnote, because it “suggests a degree of skullduggery on the part of the framers.” Yes, Wood admits, the Constitutional Convention was stacked with nationalists and involved striking, if ambiguous, compromises between federal and state authority; yes, the debates over ratification reveal (unnamed and uncharacterized) “social division.” But the important thing is that the results created “an entirely new intellectual world of politics” that grounded representation in the sovereignty of the people, not estates or classes tied to the separate branches. The federal Constitution, in other words, took what was good and stable in the state constitutions and left the dangerous democratic tendencies out.
Wood’s insistence on interpreting everything to the founders’ credit, even against his own evidence and every possible counterargument, comes to a head in his fifth chapter. In Power and Liberty’s introduction, Wood admits, for the first time in his many books, that slavery was “one of the major issues” in the convention and in the ratification debates. Yet he makes this claim only to justify segregating slavery into a separate chapter in which he contextualizes the subject into irrelevance. Slavery is apparently still beside the point because, as his mentor Bailyn stressed, the important thing is that the Revolution made slavery a problem: revolutionary ideology “created” and “galvanized” an antislavery movement. Missing from this account—as well as all of Wood’s earlier accounts—are the pre-Revolutionary Quakers who actually did the first effective organizing, their English allies, and the enslaved people whose travels and resistance created a cohort of emancipated spokespersons like James Somerset (who ran away from his customs officer enslaver and catalyzed Lord Mansfield’s 1772 decision in Britain that posited slavery as inferior colonial law), Phillis Wheatley (who made pointed public criticisms of slaveholder hypocrisy), and the first black abolitionist activist, Olaudah Equiano (who fought in the Seven Years’ War, not the American Revolution).
Wood’s fundamental demand is that the great men of the American Revolution be let off the hook. Slavery can be an issue so long as it makes clear that the Founders were noble.
The Somerset case, Wood concedes, may have caught the attention of the enslaved—Wood’s first-ever concession that they had a politics—but the patriots weren’t the slightest bit worried about it. To Wood, it’s inconceivable that his heroes kept quiet about things they didn’t want their slaves to know about, or that they were trying to spin the slavery question that was already being thrown in their faces. Independence was inevitable already in 1775, so defending property in slaves against military threats in 1775 and 1776 couldn’t have “forced founders” in Virginia and South Carolina to support independence, as Holton argued in an important study two decades ago and reiterates in his new book, Liberty Is Sweet.
Instead, Wood writes, the American Revolution inspires emancipation all over the new world as “the first great antislavery movement in world history.” The founders, on this telling, really were antislavery; the ways the Constitution hard-wired slavery into the new order were a tragic accident of well-meaning statecraft. In Wood’s account, our revered statesmen mostly believed that it would die a natural death anyway. Not coincidentally, this chapter on “Slavery and Constitutionalism” dispenses with the Constitutional Convention and the ratification debates, already covered in slavery-free detail in the previous chapter, in just three and a half pages. The main point is that the three-fifths clause “seemed a necessary compromise”—at least to the ultimate authority, James Madison. Astonishingly, Wood has moved from insisting defensively, for decades, that slavery didn’t matter because the founders didn’t talk about it, to saying that it isn’t very important because they thought they had sufficiently dealt with it. The thread tying together these otherwise inconsistent positions is Wood’s fundamental insistence that the great men of the American Revolution be let off the hook. Slavery can be an issue so long as it makes clear that the Founders were noble.
Part 3:
Having dispensed with slavery and racism as holdovers of the ancien régime, Wood devotes two more chapters to the healthy effects of the constitutional settlement. Out of the separation of judicial powers, Americans groped toward a role for judges as the new disinterested aristocracy that would preside not simply over justice, but over “constitutional law,” considered as foundational yet also as written statutes. At the same time, judge-interpreted laws placed legal boundaries around property and contracts. Wood is startlingly certain that the results have been essentially positive and distinctively American (even though Britain’s Mansfield and his protégé William Blackstone actually pioneered the sanctity of contracts, including financial instruments like maritime insurance). There has been “nothing quite like it anywhere else in the world,” Wood writes, again forsaking careful scholarly comparison for transparent nation-bragging. Where capitalist modernity can’t be reduced to American constitutionalism, Wood resolves to stress its ultimate compatibility. His final chapter relates the emergence of distinct public and private realms, or the separation of politics and social authority, which he construes, contra reams of twenty-first century scholarship, as having nothing to do with patriarchy, Western tradition, capitalism, or the desires of slaveholders to protect what they would come to call their “peculiar domestic institution.”
Despite the intellectual favor it won more than thirty years ago, today Wood’s anti-Beardian celebration of founders backing their way into modernity seems absurdly tone deaf as well as factually dubious. His confident celebration of the judiciary at a moment when public confidence in the Supreme Court (not to mention law enforcement) may be the lowest it has been since none other than the Progressive Era seems at best a tinny echo from the past, at worst the unfortunate result of the praise he has received over the years from law school professors who can agree only on that one thing: constitutionalism as the American Way. That slavery and the enslaved hang in the middle of this book, separated but hardly equal, unconnected to anything else in history or constitutionalism, is a potent reminder of just how snow-blinded mainstream American scholarship can be even when it thinks it is recognizing the presence of Black people. In the end, for all the veneer of sophistication, Wood merely ratifies the perspective of the Founders, whose words he privileges. They were embarrassed by slavery; they wanted to portray it as not really American, as an exception, fated to end, a separate Southern subject given a mere last lease on life by a necessary compromise. Wood does too. It’s the ultimate in winners’ history, and all the more so when Wood defends it as just the facts, told “as impartially and as truthfully as possible,” rather than—God forbid—a “usable past.”
Carol Anderson’s take on the legacy of the Constitution is as good a measure as any of the rise of a different view, aspects of which have been present all along but which turn both Wood and Beard on their heads. In this telling, American history is characterized by a different set of continuities than middle-class democracy or class conflict. Constitutionalism still structures our history and politics, but in ways that are more revealing and disturbing than ever, because in the Constitution we can see not just compromises over the entrenched institution of slavery but an uncompromising core of anti-Blackness. There is little progress, less irony, mostly tragedy. Where Wood casts the Founders as inhabitants of a distant world, for Anderson they are modern, all too modern.
Anderson finds plenty of evidence that makes gradual emancipation in the North look like surface, feel-good reform, not the world-historical event presaging equality that Wood sees.
Anderson’s new book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, is the third of a trilogy, coming after pithy long views of White Rage (2016) and of disfranchisement in One Person, No Vote (2018). With each volume, events that followed have seemed to prove her prescience, leading her to elaborate in this latest volume a view of the Second Amendment that had been broached before by Robert J. Cottrol, Raymond T. Diamond, and Carl Bogus but nevertheless is not very widely known. Anderson starts from evidence pulled from news articles about the violent deaths of armed but peaceful Black men and women like Philando Castile as opposed to the fate of gun-toting rebels like Cliven Bundy. Again and again, a double standard emerges. When Black people have guns, possession is not a right to protect: it’s a threat that gets them shot. Anderson insists that we face a paradox in the history of the Bill of Rights and its enforcement. Whatever their original intentions, protections offered by amendments to the Constitution, such as those for equal protection under the law and voting rights or those against “cruel and unusual punishment,” have often been weakened in order to undermine Black rights, even when the original intent was otherwise. The “fatal” Second Amendment, by contrast, has been strengthened for everyone but Black people.
This is why Anderson argues that the well-worn debate about whether the Founders meant to enshrine the right of individuals or collectives (i.e., state-sponsored militias) to bear arms is a red herring, “distracting” us from the way the amendment was and still is wielded as an instrument of racial hierarchy. She’s very clear: the Second was “designed,” “constructed,” and “consistently” applied against people of African descent, before and after emancipations that might seem to have changed their status, before and after the later amendments that supposedly guaranteed their civil rights. She allows the possibility that other amendments could again be a pathway to “civil and human rights,” but not the Second. Here, original intentions and hundreds of years of history create an ever-renewable tool of oppression. When Black people have guns, while it might be better than not having them, it gets them in trouble. When white people have guns, it doesn’t. When both have them, as in confrontations with police—even Black police—the results are predictable. Anderson doesn’t mention that most gun homicides are intraracial, or that the Second Amendment couldn’t itself militarize today’s police with leftover ordnance, because to her guns aren’t “the key variable here. It’s Black people.” The Second Amendment has been “quicksand for African Americans.” She suggests that anti-Blackness feeds an obsession with the Second in white culture that has made it an infinitely renewable resource, regardless of the aggregate effects of lax gun laws. This may not be Afro-pessimism, but it certainly is a thread of Black originalism.
Anderson spends more time on the colonial period than Wood, thanks to her stress on continuity over revolutionary change. Slave resistance and revolts led to laws that restricted gun ownership for Black people, whether free or enslaved. If she exaggerates the organization and arms of the early Virginia militia, she is on well-established ground when she describes the emergence of slave patrols as versions of militia and as arms control measures for “suspect groups” like Natives and Africans. She’s devastating on the consequences of the American Revolution, where she follows both classic and recent historians such as Benjamin Quarles and Robert Parkinson in seeing a process by which Black American support for the patriots in some quarters was overwhelmed by the British recruitment of the enslaved in the South. As Blacks became known as a fifth column, disarming them became a patriotic duty.
Anderson also sees the Deep South coming to the Constitutional Convention with the single-minded desire to protect slavery. This overstates the case, and makes it a bit harder to understand the actual dynamics that, as Anderson argues, strengthened the government for some of the slaveholders’ purposes while weakening it in telling other ways. While South Carolinians bargained successfully to protect slavery, during the debates in the states over ratification some antifederalists like Patrick Henry in Virginia depicted the new federal government as a threat to local militias that kept slaves in check. The Second Amendment, she contends, amounted to a “bribe” designed to buy off southern and antifederalist critics of central state power, a bribe “steeped in anti-Blackness.” What Anderson can’t prove using the kind of evidence Wood elevates above all—direct statements of intentions by Founders—she shores up by brilliantly suggestive readings showing how the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment at its core, elevated the overall importance of militias, whose main (and mainly effective) role between wars was to keep down Blacks and create a bulwark against federal interference in the states.
Having dispensed with slavery and racism as holdovers of the ancien régime, Wood devotes two more chapters to the healthy effects of the constitutional settlement. Out of the separation of judicial powers, Americans groped toward a role for judges as the new disinterested aristocracy that would preside not simply over justice, but over “constitutional law,” considered as foundational yet also as written statutes. At the same time, judge-interpreted laws placed legal boundaries around property and contracts. Wood is startlingly certain that the results have been essentially positive and distinctively American (even though Britain’s Mansfield and his protégé William Blackstone actually pioneered the sanctity of contracts, including financial instruments like maritime insurance). There has been “nothing quite like it anywhere else in the world,” Wood writes, again forsaking careful scholarly comparison for transparent nation-bragging. Where capitalist modernity can’t be reduced to American constitutionalism, Wood resolves to stress its ultimate compatibility. His final chapter relates the emergence of distinct public and private realms, or the separation of politics and social authority, which he construes, contra reams of twenty-first century scholarship, as having nothing to do with patriarchy, Western tradition, capitalism, or the desires of slaveholders to protect what they would come to call their “peculiar domestic institution.”
Despite the intellectual favor it won more than thirty years ago, today Wood’s anti-Beardian celebration of founders backing their way into modernity seems absurdly tone deaf as well as factually dubious. His confident celebration of the judiciary at a moment when public confidence in the Supreme Court (not to mention law enforcement) may be the lowest it has been since none other than the Progressive Era seems at best a tinny echo from the past, at worst the unfortunate result of the praise he has received over the years from law school professors who can agree only on that one thing: constitutionalism as the American Way. That slavery and the enslaved hang in the middle of this book, separated but hardly equal, unconnected to anything else in history or constitutionalism, is a potent reminder of just how snow-blinded mainstream American scholarship can be even when it thinks it is recognizing the presence of Black people. In the end, for all the veneer of sophistication, Wood merely ratifies the perspective of the Founders, whose words he privileges. They were embarrassed by slavery; they wanted to portray it as not really American, as an exception, fated to end, a separate Southern subject given a mere last lease on life by a necessary compromise. Wood does too. It’s the ultimate in winners’ history, and all the more so when Wood defends it as just the facts, told “as impartially and as truthfully as possible,” rather than—God forbid—a “usable past.”
Carol Anderson’s take on the legacy of the Constitution is as good a measure as any of the rise of a different view, aspects of which have been present all along but which turn both Wood and Beard on their heads. In this telling, American history is characterized by a different set of continuities than middle-class democracy or class conflict. Constitutionalism still structures our history and politics, but in ways that are more revealing and disturbing than ever, because in the Constitution we can see not just compromises over the entrenched institution of slavery but an uncompromising core of anti-Blackness. There is little progress, less irony, mostly tragedy. Where Wood casts the Founders as inhabitants of a distant world, for Anderson they are modern, all too modern.
Anderson finds plenty of evidence that makes gradual emancipation in the North look like surface, feel-good reform, not the world-historical event presaging equality that Wood sees.
Anderson’s new book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, is the third of a trilogy, coming after pithy long views of White Rage (2016) and of disfranchisement in One Person, No Vote (2018). With each volume, events that followed have seemed to prove her prescience, leading her to elaborate in this latest volume a view of the Second Amendment that had been broached before by Robert J. Cottrol, Raymond T. Diamond, and Carl Bogus but nevertheless is not very widely known. Anderson starts from evidence pulled from news articles about the violent deaths of armed but peaceful Black men and women like Philando Castile as opposed to the fate of gun-toting rebels like Cliven Bundy. Again and again, a double standard emerges. When Black people have guns, possession is not a right to protect: it’s a threat that gets them shot. Anderson insists that we face a paradox in the history of the Bill of Rights and its enforcement. Whatever their original intentions, protections offered by amendments to the Constitution, such as those for equal protection under the law and voting rights or those against “cruel and unusual punishment,” have often been weakened in order to undermine Black rights, even when the original intent was otherwise. The “fatal” Second Amendment, by contrast, has been strengthened for everyone but Black people.
This is why Anderson argues that the well-worn debate about whether the Founders meant to enshrine the right of individuals or collectives (i.e., state-sponsored militias) to bear arms is a red herring, “distracting” us from the way the amendment was and still is wielded as an instrument of racial hierarchy. She’s very clear: the Second was “designed,” “constructed,” and “consistently” applied against people of African descent, before and after emancipations that might seem to have changed their status, before and after the later amendments that supposedly guaranteed their civil rights. She allows the possibility that other amendments could again be a pathway to “civil and human rights,” but not the Second. Here, original intentions and hundreds of years of history create an ever-renewable tool of oppression. When Black people have guns, while it might be better than not having them, it gets them in trouble. When white people have guns, it doesn’t. When both have them, as in confrontations with police—even Black police—the results are predictable. Anderson doesn’t mention that most gun homicides are intraracial, or that the Second Amendment couldn’t itself militarize today’s police with leftover ordnance, because to her guns aren’t “the key variable here. It’s Black people.” The Second Amendment has been “quicksand for African Americans.” She suggests that anti-Blackness feeds an obsession with the Second in white culture that has made it an infinitely renewable resource, regardless of the aggregate effects of lax gun laws. This may not be Afro-pessimism, but it certainly is a thread of Black originalism.
Anderson spends more time on the colonial period than Wood, thanks to her stress on continuity over revolutionary change. Slave resistance and revolts led to laws that restricted gun ownership for Black people, whether free or enslaved. If she exaggerates the organization and arms of the early Virginia militia, she is on well-established ground when she describes the emergence of slave patrols as versions of militia and as arms control measures for “suspect groups” like Natives and Africans. She’s devastating on the consequences of the American Revolution, where she follows both classic and recent historians such as Benjamin Quarles and Robert Parkinson in seeing a process by which Black American support for the patriots in some quarters was overwhelmed by the British recruitment of the enslaved in the South. As Blacks became known as a fifth column, disarming them became a patriotic duty.
Anderson also sees the Deep South coming to the Constitutional Convention with the single-minded desire to protect slavery. This overstates the case, and makes it a bit harder to understand the actual dynamics that, as Anderson argues, strengthened the government for some of the slaveholders’ purposes while weakening it in telling other ways. While South Carolinians bargained successfully to protect slavery, during the debates in the states over ratification some antifederalists like Patrick Henry in Virginia depicted the new federal government as a threat to local militias that kept slaves in check. The Second Amendment, she contends, amounted to a “bribe” designed to buy off southern and antifederalist critics of central state power, a bribe “steeped in anti-Blackness.” What Anderson can’t prove using the kind of evidence Wood elevates above all—direct statements of intentions by Founders—she shores up by brilliantly suggestive readings showing how the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment at its core, elevated the overall importance of militias, whose main (and mainly effective) role between wars was to keep down Blacks and create a bulwark against federal interference in the states.