Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution

by Gordon S. Wood

Overview

New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gordon S. Wood elucidates the debates over the founding documents of the United States.

The half century extending from the imperial crisis between Britain and its colonies in the 1760s to the early decades of the new republic of the United States was the greatest and most creative era of constitutionalism in American history, and perhaps in the world. During these decades, Americans explored and debated all aspects of politics and constitutionalism—the nature of power, liberty, representation, rights, the division of authority between different spheres of government, sovereignty, judicial authority, and written constitutions. The results of these issues produced institutions that have lasted for over two centuries.

In this new book, eminent historian Gordon S. Wood distills a lifetime of work on constitutional innovations during the Revolutionary era. In concise form, he illuminates critical events in the nation's founding, ranging from the imperial debate that led to the Declaration of Independence to the revolutionary state constitution making in 1776 and the creation of the Federal Constitution in 1787. Among other topics, he discusses slavery and constitutionalism, the emergence of the judiciary as one of the major tripartite institutions of government, the demarcation between public and private, and the formation of states' rights.

Here is an immensely readable synthesis of the key era in the making of the history of the United States, presenting timely insights on the Constitution and the nation's foundational legal and political documents.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780197546918
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	09/01/2021
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	524,014
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Gordon S. Wood is the Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University. He is the author of many books, including The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, which won the Bancroft Prize and the John H. Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association; The Radicalism of the American Revolution, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize; The American Revolution: A History; The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin; Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different, which was a New York Times bestseller; Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (OUP, 2009), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the American History Book Prize from the New-York Historical Society; and Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. He is a regular reviewer for the New York Review of Books.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Ch 1. The Imperial Debate
Ch. 2 State Constitution-Making
Ch. 3 The Crisis of the 1780s
Ch. 4 The Federal Constitution
Ch. 5 Slavery and Constitutionalism
Ch. 6 The Emergence of the Judiciary
Ch. 7 The Great Demarcation Between Public and Private
Epilogue
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

07/05/2021

Pulitzer winner Wood (Friends Divided) surveys the “politics and constitution-making” of the Revolutionary era in this astute if somewhat familiar history based on a series of lectures he gave at Northwestern University in 2019. Discussing the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and other foundational documents, Wood finds that the revolution was much more “radical” than many of the Founders anticipated, because it released the “aspirations and interests” of thousands of “middling, commercially minded people.” He also claims that revolutionary rhetoric, which cast dependence on England as a form of enslavement, contributed to a rapid decline in indentured white servitude, which in turn made Black slavery “more conspicuous than it had been before,” and put American slave owners on the defensive for the first time. Though 19th-century abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison labeled the Constitution “a covenant with death,” he had little understanding of the circumstances in which it was written, according to Wood, who credits the emancipation of slaves in Northern states after the revolution with setting the stage for the abolition of slavery in “the whole of the New World.” Wood has made these arguments before, but they’re restated lucidly and concisely here. The result is a welcome distillation of an influential career. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"This book distills the core insights of a long career into a single small volume that grabs the reader's interest from the first page and never lets go." — Jessica T. Mathews, Foreign Affairs

"With characteristic insight, sobriety, and wisdom, Gordon Wood had given us much to consider in this thoughtful study of how the framers of the American Republic imperfectly but determinedly set us on a journey toward a more perfect Union. Wood's scholarship always repays our careful attention, and this incisive new book joins the large company of his invaluable contributions to understanding America's complexities and contradictions." — Jon Meacham, author of The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels

"No one has done more to teach us about the origins of American constitutionalism than Gordon S. Wood. Now, at a moment when we are trembling over the strength of our constitutional system, Wood gives us a deft shorthand account of how it all began. For anyone who wants to understand what made American constitutionalism such a vital political experiment, this is the place to start." — Jack Rakove, author of Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience: The Radical Significance of the Free Exercise of Religion

"Gordon Wood's Power and Liberty conveniently encapsulates more than a half-century of scholarship by the leading historian of American constitutionalism during the founding era and the early republic." — William E. Nelson, author of E Pluribus Unum: How the Common Law Helped Unify and Liberate Colonial America, 1607-1776

"Gordon Wood has packed a lifetime of learning into this splendid little volume. In his capable hands, our founding charters, grown stale from familiarity, regain their freshness and allure as revolutionary documents that redefined our politics. Wood has an uncanny ability to project himself into the past and to report on his findings as if he had been a personal witness to those distant events." — Ron Chernow, author of Alexander Hamilton

"Masterful... No historian knows more about the founding years of the U.S. than Wood. In his latest, he once again demonstrates his characteristic clarity... A fresh, lucid distillation of Wood's vast learning about the origins of American government."
—Kirkus, Starred Review

"The book has an elegiac quality along with his customary clarity." —The New York Times

"No living historian has done more to illuminate the origins of our constitutional heritage in the Revolutionary era."—National Review

"Many historians view Wood as the greatest living scholar of the American Revolution. This book distills the core insights of a long career into a single smallvolume that grabs the reader's interest from the first page and never lets go."—Foreign Affairs

"This wonderful collection of essays offers many delights for the specialist and non-specialist alike...to borrow an admiring line from one of Wood's own reviews, 'There is no other historian in the country who could have written this book.'" —The New Criterion

From the Publisher

★ 2021-05-28
The Pulitzer and Bancroft winner delivers another masterful book of Revolutionary War–era history.

No historian knows more about the founding years of the U.S. than Wood. In his latest, he once again demonstrates his characteristic clarity in an examination of the origins and growth of American constitutional principles from the Stamp Act crisis of 1765 into the 19th century, “the most creative period of consti­tutionalism in American history and one of the most creative in modern Western history.” This introduction to the formative half-century of American history maintains a taut focus on the nation’s early constitutional development. While that emphasis comes at the cost of attention to social realities, the author sharply clarifies the stages that the founding generation went through to create their governments and the struggles to understand what they were doing. To Wood, American’s growing realization during and after the Revolution that they had to discard the Articles of Confederation for a new frame of government constituted “a momen­tous change, and one not at all anticipated in 1776.” As the author notes, it created “a radically new government altogether—one that utterly transformed the structure of central authority.” In what’s likely to be the most controversial aspect of the book, Wood finds the origins of this transformation not in an economic and social crisis prior to 1787 but rather in the maturation of American constitutional thought. The author shows that the Constitution didn’t arise out of social and economic turmoil; instead, it emerged from constitutional, legal, and structural realities as well as innovative thought. Wood’s argument is the most potent in the brilliant two chapters on the judiciary and the distinction between public and private spheres of life. While he may receive criticism for overlooking much of the social and cultural history produced by other historians, no one will be able to ignore the power of his arguments.

A fresh, lucid distillation of Wood’s vast learning about the origins of American government.

Kirkus Reviews