Gordon S. Wood, the great historian of the American founding, died at ninety-two on June 7, just weeks shy of the 250th anniversary of American independence. This coincidence does not quite possess the providential aura of Thomas Jefferson’s and John Adams’s deaths on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration. But Wood’s death offers an important opportunity to reflect on his brilliant contributions to American history, and to lament the passing of a great generation of historians, including Wood, who came of age during and after World War II. We’re not likely to see a generation of scholars like Wood’s again, nor would the elite academy welcome them if we did.
In the mid-1990s, I was admitted to Brown University to work with Wood for a Ph.D. Alas, Brown had no stipend for an iffy candidate from a southern public school, so I went elsewhere. But Wood’s works, especially The Creation of the American Republic (1969) and The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), seeped into my bones anyway. As I have returned to my yellowed copies of his books in the days since his passing, I find myself regularly reminded of ideas about the Revolution and the Founders that I first learned from him. Now I just teach them as historical givens.
Wood’s professional genealogy helps explain his trajectory as a scholar. His career was connected to three other major figures of American historical scholarship. The first was Bernard Bailyn, Wood’s doctoral adviser and longtime Harvard historian who died in 2020 at age ninety-seven. Then there was Edmund Morgan, Bailyn’s contemporary who taught at Brown for a decade before moving to Yale in the mid-1950s. Bailyn and Morgan both studied at Harvard with the legendary Perry Miller, one of the most influential American historians of the twentieth century.
In this essay there’s no space to summarize the works of these four titans. But if you pick up a book by any of them, you’ll be treated to an intellectual feast. And Gordon Wood was part of a historiographical tradition that began with Miller.
The “Miller school” of history was marked by several key traits. One was taking ideas seriously. Before Perry Miller, the American Puritans were in bad odor in the academy because scholars deemed them insufficiently “progressive.” But Miller saw the Puritans as people of intellectual weight and conviction. For Miller, scholars should begin by understanding what historical figures believed and how they acted on those beliefs, not by judging them according to contemporary political agendas. Thus, historians of the Miller school believed in history’s value in ways that many academic historians do not today. The Miller school historians didn’t always agree, however: Wood at times suggested that Morgan particularly indulged in “idealist” history that neglected the real-world ramifications of ideas.
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Sign up and get our daily essays sent straight to your inbox.The Miller school also mastered the use of irony as an interpretive theme. They borrowed this concept partly from Reinhold Niebuhr, the great realist theologian of the mid-twentieth century and author of the classic book The Irony of American History (1952). They were less interested in Niebuhr’s ideas about God (Miller was an avowed atheist, Wood an agnostic) than in Niebuhr’s convictions about humanity’s flawed nature and its limited vision.
For the Miller school, many of the most familiar features of American history were the result of unintended consequences. People do have sincere ideas and act on them, but their beliefs and actions almost always have unexpected effects. Miller famously argued in his essay “Errand into the Wilderness” (1953) that the colonial Puritans failed in their primary mission to focus England’s attention on the ideal church-state order they erected as a “city on a hill” in New England. Their errand having failed, the consolation prize was putting an indelible imprint on America itself.
A final trait was that the Miller school indeed sought to understand American national identity. They did not take a celebratory or idealized view of the American tradition, but they thought that tradition was real and coherent, and it had beneficial consequences, most obviously in the ideal of American liberty.
For Wood, the American Revolution was unintentionally “radical,” as he suggested in the title of his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1992 book. The Founders believed in ordered liberty and republican government, but they were hardly democrats. Instead, they explained that the best governments balanced aspects of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Too much emphasis on any one of those features would lead to despotism, factionalism, or anarchy, respectively. As John Adams observed, “Liberty depends on an exact Ballance … The best Governments of the World have been mixed.” And yet, as Wood told the story, the ideology of the Founders and the structure of American society generated a populist democracy that most Patriot leaders found distasteful and alarming.
Wood’s essay “A New Kind of Democracy” was the lead chapter in a wonderful 2024 American Enterprise Institute volume, appropriately titled Democracy and the American Revolution. The essay offers a mature summation of themes that he originally developed in his first two books. As Wood shows, the Founders did not desire unfettered democracy, nor did they think such democracy was even possible outside of small entities like town governments.
Still, conditions in American society made the path to democracy more feasible than in England, where only one in six adult males could vote (never mind women or children). At the time of the Founding, two-thirds of America’s adult white males held the franchise. Today’s scornful historians wag their fingers at the incipient American democracy of 1776, since it excluded women, poor men, and ethnic minorities. Wood viewed such deficiencies in context, and he rejected politicized, reductionist versions of American history of the sort on display in the ballyhooed 1619 Project. The overall trend after the Revolution was toward vibrant democracy, though the major Founders didn’t mean for it to turn out that way.
Wood’s revolution, then, was designed to be traditionalist and conservative, but became dizzyingly democratic. As Wood explained in typically gripping prose, the Revolution “released the aspirations and interests of tens of thousands of middling people—commercial farmers, petty merchants, small-time traders, and artisans of various sorts—all eager to buy and sell and get rich, creating a wild, scrambling, bustling, individualistic democratic world unlike anything that had ever existed.”
The Founders mainly fought against Britain for their liberty, but the ways they defended liberty exalted the ideal of human equality. And equality, for Wood, was “the most radical and most powerful ideological force let loose by the Revolution.” Wood’s mentor Bailyn likewise saw liberty as a “contagion” spreading in the American system that gave women, African Americans, and poor-to-middling people new ideas about their rights too.
As the American population swelled after the Revolutionary War, so too did voting rights expand. The size of the states’ lower houses of legislature grew to two or three times the size of their colonial predecessors, making more room for non-aristocrats to vote and serve in office. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 desired to check the “excess of democracy” in the states, and to restore a proper balance of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Antifederalists warned that the Federalists were trying to reassert the power of American aristocrats, and to create an American king, disingenuously called “the president.”
But whatever the anti-democratic intentions of 1787, the contagion of democratic liberty proved difficult to contain, especially when Thomas Jefferson took the reins of government in what he styled the “Revolution of 1800.” Federalists such as Alexander Hamilton called democracy the nation’s “real Disease,” but common people such as the eccentric pastor and Jeffersonian ideologue Elias Smith insisted that America’s governments were destined to be democratic. “Let us never be ashamed of DEMOCRACY!” Smith thundered. Benjamin Latrobe, the architect of the U.S. Capitol and friend of Jefferson, similarly explained that granting the franchise to most adult white men had “spread actual and practical democracy and political equality over the whole union,” producing “the greatest sum of happiness that perhaps any nation ever enjoyed.”
Wood does not deny that the spread of white male suffrage depended on the exclusion of blacks from voting (and the continued exclusion of women). Slaves had never voted, of course, but free black men were increasingly deprived of the franchise before the Civil War. Still, when Americans appealed for equal rights, they conventionally turned to the language of equality by God’s common creation from the Declaration. The Seneca Falls Convention (1848), the first formal women’s rights meeting in American history, presented its Declaration of Sentiments as a logical fulfillment of the Declaration. “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal,” the delegates insisted. A plain reading of Genesis 1:27 (“male and female he created them”) buttressed their claim.
Wood’s work did sometimes underestimate Christianity’s formative role in American liberty and equality. Of course, Wood knew that Americans were by-and-large a “Bible-toting people,” as he puts it in his AEI essay. Yet he tended to see democratic religion as a product rather than a cause of America’s egalitarian ethos. But one need only consult the Declaration (authored, ironically, by the skeptic and slaveowner Jefferson) to see the theological grounding of the American argument for equality. Americans believed all people were equal because God created them in His image and endowed them with rights. No king or aristocrat (or, perhaps, any slave master) could justly deny those rights, because all people stood equal before their Creator.
Despite America’s manifest inequalities, “within decades following the Declaration of Independence, the United States laid claim to being the most democratic and egalitarian nation in history,” Wood wrote. It was “the only great democracy in a world of monarchies and one that awed and frightened some of its own citizens and many Europeans. It seemed to represent the future for all of humanity.” Though America’s ideals were riddled with ironies and inconsistencies, the nation still emerged as a global beacon of ordered liberty and republican democracy. No one better explained the history and significance of that American nation than Gordon Wood.
