Ex Post Facto

Reading: Wood, The American Revolution, pp. 91-135.

In these two sections on “Republicanism” and “Republican Society,” Wood puts forward his argument that the American Revolution was indeed revolutionary, and not simply because the colonies gained independence. The revolution had several unforeseen consequences. Having rejected their king, the Americans began questioning other forms of hierarchy as well. While they by no means overturned all social hierarchies, they nevertheless created the most egalitarian society of European origin in the western world.

Wood comes from (and helped create) a school of thought that places heavy emphasis on the role of a “republican ideology” in both precipitating the revolution and in reshaping post-Revolutionary America. (The republican ideology has also been labeled as “Whig” or “country” ideology, because of its roots in a 17th- and 18th-century political movement in Britain that downplayed the authority of the crown.) Perhaps the dominant element of the republican ideology was the belief that liberty was fragile and had to be jeolously guarded, lest it be wiped out by corrupt, power-hungry leaders. (For more on the republican ideology, follow this link.)

Republicanism was not the only ideology at work, however. As they shrugged off their allegiance to the crown, the revolutionaries also tended to follow Thomas Paine in rejecting monarchy and aristocracy altogether. Instead, they accepted the principle articulated in the “Declaration of Independence” that “all men are created equal” and in possession of certain fundamental rights. The revolution thus encouraged egalitarianism, within certain limits.

The notion that all people have a basic set of rights is part of the ideology of “liberalism,” which Wood also refers to. It’s important to note, here, that today we use liberal to label politicians and voters who tend to support government regulation and intervention. But the classical liberalism of the revolutionary period did no such thing. The liberalism that Wood writes about was an ideology that was suspicious of government power and that valued individual rights and liberty above all else.

Republicanism and liberalism constituted overlapping worldviews that reshaped how many Americans thought and behaved during the revolutionary and early republic periods. People of the time, however, did not use these labels (at least not quite in the same way that historians use them).

Perhaps the most important questions to ask, using these two sections, are: