Empire of Liberty

Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815
Author: Gordon S. Wood 2009 738 pp
My rating: 4*
Started November 13 2009, Finished February 15 2010.

Better than the preceding volume of the Oxford History of the United States, but not quite as edifying or engrossing as those that follow, this volume follows the new nation from “what do we do now?” period of its first constitutional governments to the “we’re a real nation now” solidification that resulted from the war of 1812. One of the most interesting topics covered is the bootstrapping of the government, where despite, or maybe because of, the vague guidance provided by the constitution, the President -- the essential and magisterial Washington whose common sense and commanding presence were often all that kept the loosely cohering assemblage of states from flying apart -- and the Congress, were more or less making it up as they went along. Other major themes include:The emergence of political parties, starting with the Anglophile Federalists and the Jefferson lead Republicans who opposed the strong centralization that the Federalists’ beliefs implied.The singular set of genius included among the Founding Fathers, a very lucky historical fluke, where in particular Washington, Hamilton, Madison and Jefferson each contributed different and critical talents towards setting the foundling nation on its course.Themes that echo down through the ages, including fear of a developing “licentiousness” in the population and the rise of the “middling” man , that person between nobility and peasantry who came to define the essence of being American.The book is not without flaws, including a surprising number of typos e.g. “dociety … of artists” (p 574), and an overly long and repetitious chapter on the arts (15). The book’s organization along thematic rather than chronological lines could be confusing for a reader not firmly grounded in the basics of the era; e.g. one encounters in depth discussions of aspects of various presidencies before rereading about the elections that put those presidents in office.

---

French immigrant and author Hector St. John Crevecoeur … in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782) … described the American as “this new man,” a product of “that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country.” (39)Compared to Great Britain, America had a truncated society; it lacked both the great noble families … and the great masses of poor (44)White Americans enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world, and goods of all sorts were widely diffused throughout the society (46)In 1789 the majority of Frenchmen did not speak French but were divided by a variety of provincial patois. (48)The secretary of the treasury began in 1789 with thirty-nine members in the central office … By comparison, the other departments were tiny: at the outset the secretary of state had four clerks and a messenger, the secretary of war had only three clerks, and the attorney general had none … A French visitor to the treasury office in 1794 was startled to find the secretary attended by only a single crudely dressed servant, seated at a plain pine table covered with a green cloth, his records laid on makeshift plank shelves in a ‘ministerial office’ whose furnishings could not have cost more than ten dollars … (92)… all the states’ expenditures in the early 1790s totaled only a little more than $1 million a year, the federal government’s expenditures in 1795 were $7.5 million (103)… it became increasingly difficult to find gentlemen willing to sacrifice their private interests in order to hold public office. After Henry Knox retired, President Washington had to go to his four choice for secretary of war … and to replace Randolph as secretary of state he had to go to his seventh choice. (234)Believing that most of the evils afflicting human beings in the past had flowed from the abuses of inflated political establishments, Jefferson and the Republicans in 1800 deliberately set about what they rightly believed was the original aim of the Revolution: to reduce the overweening and dangerous power of government. (287)The Jeffersonian revolution was an extraordinary and unprecedented experiment in governing with the traditional instruments of power. Governments in the early nineteenth century were not supposed to cut taxes, shrink their bureaucracies, pay off their debts, reduce their armed forces , and diminish their coercive power. No government in history had ever voluntarily cut back its authority. (301)For centuries it was assumed that most people would not work unless they had to. “Everybody but an idiot,” declared the enlightened English agricultural writer Arthur Young, … “knows that the lower class must be kept poor or they will never be industrious.” (324)… to the astonishment of foreigners, nearly all Americans -- men, women, children, and sometimes even babies -- drank whiskey all day long. (339)[During he first decades of the Republic] Premarital pregnancies dramatically increased, at rates not reached again until the 1960s. (342)… on the eve of the Revolution … Harvard and Yale abandoned the ranking of entering students on the basis of their families’ social position and estate. (342)At the heart of the Revolution lay the assumption that people wer not born to be what they might become. (470)… on the eve of the Revolution … the nine [American] colleges together awarded fewer than two hundred B.A. degrees a year … [472]In 1790 it had taken more than a month for news to travel from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia; by 1794 that had been cut to ten days. [479][As part of the trend of treating criminals more humanely] In Massachusetts in 1785 a counterfeiter was not longer executed. Instead, he was set in the pillory, taken to the gallows, where he stood with a rope around his neck for a time, whipped twenty stripes, had his left arm cut off, and finally was sentenced to three years’ hard labor. [493]In 1804 and 1807 Ohio required blacks entering the state to post a five-hundred-dollar bond guaranteeing their good behavior and to produce court certificates proving they were free. (541)Many of the states outlawed blasphemy, which they defines as attempts to defame Christianity, and they sought to retain some general religious qualifications for public office. Five states -- New Hampshire, Connecticut, New Jersey, North Carolina and Georgia -- required officeholders to be Protestant. Maryland and Delaware said Christians. Pennsylvania and South Carolina officials had to believe in one God and in heaven and hell; Delaware required a belief in the Trinity. (583)In 1795 the United States agreed to a humiliating treaty with Algiers that cost a million dollars in tributes and ransoms -- an amount equal to 16 percent of federal revenue for the year. (636)Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina was only one of many Republicans who in the early months of 1812 voted against all attempts to arm and prepare the navy, who opposed all efforts to beef up the War Department, who rejected all tax increases, and yet who in June 1812 voted for the war. After much hand-wringing over the problem of paying for the war, the Congress finally agreed to some tax increases … Taxes would only cover a portion of the cost of the war; the rest would have to be borrowed. Of course, in 1811, even as war seemed increasingly likely, the Republicans had killed the Bank of the United States, which some knew was the best instrument for borrowing money and financing a war. This failure to re-charter the BUS proved to be disastrous for the war effort. (672-3)By 1816 [clergyman William Bentley’s] dreams of newspapers becoming agents of education for the public had dissipated. The press, he now realized, has become simply a source of “public entertainment,” filled with inconsequential and parochial pieces of information. (732)[Post presidency Jefferson] loathed the new democratic world that America had become -- a world of speculation, banks, paper money and evangelical Christianity; (736)