Gordon S. Wood > Quotes

“History is the queen of the humanities. It teaches wisdom and humility, and it tells us how things change through time.”
― Gordon S. Wood

“The idea of labor, of hard work, leading to increased productivity was so novel, so radical, in the overall span of Western history that most ordinary people, most of those who labored, could scarcely believe what was happening to them. Labor had been so long thought to be the natural and inevitable consequence of necessity and poverty that most people still associated it with slavery and servitude. Therefore any possibility of oppression, any threat to the colonists' hard earned prosperity, any hint of reducing them to the povery of other nations, was especially frightening; for it seemed likely to slide them back into the traditional status of servants or slaves, into the older world where labor was merely a painful necessity and not a source of prosperity.”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“Virtue became less the harsh and martial self-sacrifice of antiquity and more the modern willingness to get along with others for the sake of peace and prosperity.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“Life was theater, and impressions one made on spectators were what counted. Public leaders had to become actors or characters, masters of masquerade.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different

“Intellectual activity in a culture is not a one-way flow between the great minds and passive recipients; it is a discourse, a complex marketplace-like conglomeration of intellectual exchanges involving many participants all trying to manipulate the ideas available to them in order to explain, justify, lay blame for, or otherwise make sense of what is happening around them. Everyone, not just the great minds, participates in this complicated process.”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History

“In monarchies, each man's desire to do what was right in his own eyes could be restrained by beer, or force, by patronage, or by honor, and by professional standing armies. By contrast, republics had to hold themselves together from the bottom up, ultimately.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“The Civil War was the climax of a tragedy that was preordained from the time of the Revolution. Only with the elimination of slavery could this nation that Jefferson had called “the world’s best hope” for democracy even begin to fulfill its great promise.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god; it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg”—”
― Gordon S. Wood, Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson

“By contrast, said Jefferson, the Southerners were “fiery, voluptuary, indolent, unsteady, independent, zealous for their own liberties but trampling on those of others, generous, candid, without attachment or pretensions to any religion but that of the heart.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“Only “those few, who being attached to no particular occupation themselves,” said Smith, “have leisure and inclination to examine the occupations of other people.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different

“[John Adams] is vain, irritable, and a bad calculator of the force and probable effect of the motives which govern men. This is all the ill which can possibly be said of him.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson

“Although he trusted the good sense of the people in the long run, he believed that they could easily be misled by demagogues. He was a realist who had no illusions about human nature. “The motives which predominate most human affairs,” he said, “are self-love and self-interest.” The common people, like the common soldiers in his army, could not be expected to be “influenced by any other principles than those of interest.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different

“As Oliver Ellsworth, the third chief justice of the United States, declared, “As population increases, poor labourers will be so plenty as to render slaves useless. Slavery in time will not be a speck in our country.”42 The leaders simply did not count on the remarkable demographic capacity of the slave states themselves, especially Virginia, to produce slaves for the expanding areas of the Deep South and the Southwest.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different

“Americans became so thoroughly democratic that much of the period's political activity, beginning with the Constitution, was diverted to finding means and devices to tame that democracy.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“The very first Maxim of Tyranny, is and always was, to puzzle the Understandings and excite the Admiration of the People.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson

“These multiplying societies treated the sick, aided the industrious poor, housed orphans, fed imprisoned debtors, built huts for shipwrecked sailors, and, in the case of the Massachusetts Humane Society, even attempted to resuscitate those suffering from “suspended animation,” that is, those such as drowning victims who appeared to be dead but actually were not. The fear of being buried alive was a serious concern at this time. Many, like Washington on his deathbed, asked that their bodies not be immediately interred in case they might be suffering from suspended animation.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“Nevertheless, some Southerners like James Monroe still had serious reservations about the compromise, believing that assumption would reduce “the necessity for State taxation” and thus would “undoubtedly leave the national government more at liberty to exercise its powers and increase the subjects on which it will act.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“Foreigners thought the Americans’ eating habits were atrocious, their food execrable, and their coffee detestable. Americans tended to eat fast, often sharing a common bowl or cup, to bolt their food in silence, and to use only their knives in eating. Everywhere travelers complained about “the violation of decorum, the want of etiquette, the rusticity of manners in this generation.”36”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“Equality became so potent for Americans because it came to mean that everyone was really the same as everyone else, not just at birth, not in talent or property or wealth, and not just in some transcendental religious sense of the equality of all souls. Ordinary Americans came to believe that no one in a basic down-to-earth and day-in-and-day-out manner was really better than anyone else. That was equality as no other nation has ever quite had it. Such a view of equality was perhaps latent in republican thought. The revolutionaries’ stress on the circulation of talent and on the ability of common people to elect those who had integrity and merit presumed a certain moral capacity in the populace as a whole. In”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“Nothing contributed more to this explosion of energy than did the idea of equality. Equality was in fact the most radical and most powerful ideological force let loose in the Revolution. Its appeal was far more potent than any of the revolutionaries realized. Once invoked, the idea of equality could not be stopped, and it tore through American society and culture with awesome power. It became what Herman Melville called “the great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy!” The “Spirit of Equality” did not merely cull the “selectest champions from the kingly commons,” but it spread “one royal mantle of humanity” over all Americans and brought “democratic dignity” to even “the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike.”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“Once it was finally realized that the desire of ordinary people to buy such consumer goods, and not their poverty or frugality as used to be thought, was the principal source of their industriousness and their productivity, then the fear of “luxury” that had bedeviled the eighteenth century died away. It no longer made any sense to say, as John Adams archaically said in 1814, that “human nature, in no form of it, ever could bear Prosperity.” Prosperity was now thought to be good for people; it was their “desire of gain, beyond the supply of the mere necessities of life,” that stimulated enterprise and created this prosperity.”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“In the decades following the Revolution the northern states moved to destroy the institution, and by 1804 every northern state had committed itself to emancipation in one form or another. In many cases blacks themselves took the lead in using the Revolutionary language of liberty to attack slavery. By 1810 the number of free blacks in the northern states had grown from several hundred in 1770 to nearly 50,000. The Revolutionary vision of a society of independent freeholders led Congress in the 1780s specifically to forbid slavery in the newly organized Northwest Territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. The new federal Constitution promised, in 1808, an end to the international importation of slaves, which many hoped would cripple the institution. In fact, all of the Revolutionary leaders, including southerners like Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and Henry Laurens, deplored the injustice of slavery and assumed that it would soon die away. This was perhaps the most illusory of the several illusions the Revolutionary leaders had about the future of America.”
― Gordon S. Wood, The American Revolution: A History

“Yet beneath that seemingly similar surface, everything had changed. America may have been still largely rural, still largely agricultural, but now it was also largely commercial, perhaps the most thoroughly commercialized nation in the world. One measure of that commercialization was the level of literacy; for the strongest motive behind people’s learning to read and write, even more than the need to understand the Scriptures, was the desire to do business—to buy and sell real estate and other goods and to make deals involving signatures and written agreements. When in the early years of the nineteenth century people in New England, including even areas along the Connecticut River in rural Vermont, attained levels of elementary literacy that were higher than any other places in the Western world (with the possible exception of parts of Scandinavia),”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“Here was the real source of democratic equality, an equality that was far more potent than the mere Lockean belief that everyone started at birth with the same blank sheet. Jefferson and others who invoked this egalitarian moral sense, of course, had little inkling of the democratic lengths to which it would be carried.”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“As William Plumer of New Hampshire complained, “It is impossible to censure measures without condemning men.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“The Americans’ new state constitutions would therefore have to be fixed plans—single written documents, as the English constitution had never been—outlining the powers of government and specifying the rights of citizens.”
― Gordon S. Wood, The American Revolution: A History

“Benjamin Franklin admonished New York royal official Cadwallader Colden in 1750. Public service was far more important than science. In fact, said Franklin, even “the finest” of Newton’s “Discoveries” could not have excused his neglect of serving the commonwealth if the public had needed him.22 Republicanism thus put an enormous burden on individuals. They were expected to suppress their private wants and interests and develop disinterestedness—the term the eighteenth century most often used as a synonym for civic virtue: it better conveyed the increasing threats from interests that virtue now faced.”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“Showing oneself eager for office was a sign of being unworthy of it, for the office-seeker probably had selfish views rather than the public good in mind.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“After much jousting between the Congress and the president over the appointment of more officers, Madison by the end of the year had issued commissions to over eleven hundred individuals, 15 percent of whom immediately declined them, followed by an additional 8 percent who resigned after several months of service.”
― Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

“1770s were accused of fomenting rebellion and promoting republican principles, they were surprised and indignant. The spirit of republicanism, they said, the spirit of Milton, Needham, and Sidney, was “so far from being uncompatible with the English constitution, that it is the greatest glory of it.”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution