Slavery
Indentured servitude in the New World was not a brand new concept. In England, servants usually had yearlong contracts. Indentured servitude in the colonies became especially long (five to seven years) to pay the large expenses of transporting someone across the ocean, obviously not a factor when they stayed in England. Due to the high value of these servants, the governments instituted a system of passes that was not needed in England to control their comings and goings. White servants were treated nearly as bad as black ones if not worse in the minds of some contemporary observers. Apparently they were sold like chattel as well. The big difference though, is that the white servants were on a contract that would end, while black slaves were in bondage for perpetuity. Wood uses this example to illustrate why colonial thinkers took so long to identify the abolition of slavery as a political goal. For the colonial thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, slavery was a difference in degree from indentured servitude, not in kind. Of course, there was still a different, but when society was so harshly graded into strict hierarchies as the society of 18th century America was, abolition of slavery didn't seem so high a priority.
What is really interesting is that the idea for the liberation of the slaves comes out of the same intellectual tradition as the liberation of Englishmen living in America. Once people started to think that they could not be taxed without representation and that colonists had been made slaves of the King and Parliament, they started to think about the freeing of actual slaves. But for all of human history until that point, very few if any had thought that slavery, in any of its many forms, should be abolished. Until the late 18th and early 19th century, slavery was just another low status in a world of low status people. That meant that once white men were transformed from subjects into citizens, the difference between black slaves and white free men (who started calling themselves gentlemen) transformed from a difference in degree into a difference in kind in the early 19th century. Only then did slavery become an aberration that required explanation. It isn't hard to see how the same thing could happen for women. In that way, liberation begets liberation.
The Transition from a Medieval World into a Capitalist World
You could give a rough sketch of the medieval world as a world based on status and hierarchy that emphasized identity, while contrasting it with a Capitalist world that emphasized production and services. To illustrate, a medieval man worked in a trade because he was apprenticed into an appropriate trade due to his status in the community. A capitalist man worked in a trade because it could make him money. There were no businessmen in the medieval world, but in early America, Toqueville describes everyone as a businessman. A medieval nobleman owned land that was in his family for generations. Capitalist men bought and sold land to make money and speculated on its value. A medieval shopkeeper would sell to an aristocrat on credit because of his family name. A capitalist shopkeeper said "show me the money." America was a test case of early diminution of community, dominated by personal connections, in favor of society, dominated by impersonal dealings based on self-interest. Coincidentally, Adam Smith was writing in 1776 that self-interest would be the best basis for running the world. By the 19th century, that's how America was operating.
One change in this category was about who should be serving in government. For a long time, there would hardly be an idea of "corruption" as a public vice. Public servants were not paid a full salary and were not expected to dedicate all their time to public servants. Before the American Revolution, public servants were expected to donate some of their talents to run the country for a time before returning back to their gentlemanly interests. Therefore, corruption wouldn't be looked at the same. It was common for individuals in government to face huge conflicts of interest and resolve them in their own favor. But while we would view this today as exploiting public offices for private interests, in the old world, they would have thought that the government was exploiting those private individuals for public interests, and their gains were an acceptable price to pay. Gentlemen, because of who they were, were expected to supply the officer corps and lead the government. After the American Revolution, all men were gentlemen. Indeed, even before the Revolution, rich Americans didn't have the funds necessary to fund themselves in government. So the idea transformed. Instead of being part time government leaders, America would pay it's officials, and eventually transform their posts into full-time jobs.
Wood points out that in the Revolution, the great divide was not rich vs. poor, workers vs. employers, or democrats vs. aristocrats. Instead, it was patriots vs. courtiers. The self-made men of the colonies rebelled against the men who held positions based on their connections. It was a matter of rank/position coming from below versus above. It was only after the Revolution was complete, starting in the 1780s and becoming most obvious in the debates over ratifying the Constitution, that the key debate became democrats vs. aristocrats, with democrats represented by the Democratic-Republicans and the aristocrats represented by the Federalists.
Democrats Against Aristocrats
With the actual war against Britain complete, the major conflict in American society centered around populism for decades thereafter. Once the courtiers were ejected by the patriots, the patriots were divided into two groups: those who thought politicians should only be wealthy, disinterested gentlemen, and those who supported the presence of "interest" in politics. The "interested" populists won, and their victory brought about a change in government. A big part of the reason that officeholders needed to be disinterested before the American Revolution was because the legislatures of the states (and Parliament) for that matter, had nearly absolute powers. Like was discussed in Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, the King's absolute authority was replaced by the legislature's absolute authority. Legislatures adjudicated disputes that are now for the courts. They had unitary power over lawmaking and enforcement. The reason that it was possible to run a government with interested officeholders was thanks to checks and balances dividing government into different branches that would check each other. The genius of the system is that it would democratize government by pitting societally forces against each other through their direct representatives, rather than requiring their virtual representation by wealthy landowners who would claim to speak in society's interest.
To illustrate the conflict, Wood hones in on the debate in the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1786 regarding the rechartering of the Bank of North America. The two protagonists of the debate were Robert Morris, the wealthiest merchant in the state, who supported rechartering the bank, and William Findley, a Scotch-Irish ex-weaver from western Pennsylvania, who supported debt-relief and paper money. This debate continues to modern day: monetary hawks versus doves. It is interesting how the same exact debate continues today, in similar form. Findley was accused of being "narrow, illiberal, and interested in the promotion of paper money and debtor-relief legislation," just like Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump. It is interesting to see how liberalism can adopt these aristocratic tendencies time and time again that results in working class debtors aligning themselves with populists. But what is interesting is how the debate between Findley and Morris foreshadowed the victory of the populists. Findley argued that, first of all, Morris was not disinterested, and was advocating for his own interest as a wealthy banker. And Findley, rather than arguing Morris' interestedness was the problem, argued that there was no issue, but that simply Findley was interested in the other direction, and thought it was hypocritical to pass off their interestedness as disinterested virtue. Wood writes that Findley suggested that interest "was quite legitimate, as long as it was open and aboveboard and not disguised by specious claims of genteel disinterestedness. The promotion of private interests was in fact what American politics ought to be about."
Cosmopolitanism
Wood writes that "the revolutionary generation" was the most cosmopolitan of any in American history." They did not make a "national" revolution in any sense, since they considered themselves defending their rights either as Englishmen or as natural rights given by God. Many of them were deists, and thought Freemasonry could serve as a social binding that would replace religion. They were also men of science. Wood writes,
When Franklin was minister to Frace during the Revolutionary War, he issued a document to English explorer Captain Cook protecting him from American depredations at sea during his voyage of 1779. Franklin told all American shop commanders that they must regard all English scientists not as enemies but 'as common friends of Mankind.' When an American captain seized a British ship with some thirty volumes of medical lecture notes, Washington sent them back to England, saying that the United States did not make war on science.
Conclusion
This was another excellent book that taught me about things I didn't even know I didn't know. I came away especially interested in how the Democratic-Republicans, despite essentially being made up of the losers from the fight for ratification of the Constitution, just trounced the Federalists for years and years after Adams was kicked out of the presidency. The country just became much more populist and rekindled the revolutionary spirit after Washington was gone. It was a total social transformation in which gentlemen and aristocrats were ejected from the ruling class. By the middle of the 19th century, the idle leisure that Washington and Jefferson embodied was held in contempt by a massive middle-class that valued hard work. Then, the same principles were applied to slaveholders, another aristocratic class that would lose to the value of hard work.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- Land ownership was completely different in England and the colonies in 1776. At that time, 3/4 of English farmland was owned by noble and gentry landlords, and four hundred families owned a fifth of all land in England. Meanwhile, 2/3 of white American men owned land, while just a fifth of Englishmen owned land.
- Wood writes that young Americans at the end of the 18th century may have used pregnancy to force marriages of their choice rather than their parents'. At that time, between a quarter and a third of all brides were pregnant before their marriage.
- Members of Parliament did not receive salaries until 1911.
