The Radicalism of the American Revolution Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Equality lay at the heart of republicanism; it was, said David Ramsay, “the life and soul of Commonwealth.” Republican citizenship implied equality. “Citizen” (or sometimes “cit”) was a term that had been commonly used by the premodern monarchical society. It generally had meant the inhabitant of a city or town, who had been thus distinguished from a member of the landed nobility or gentry. Dr. Johnson, in fact, had defined a citizen as “a man of trade, not a gentleman.” In 1762 an English comedy by Edward Ravenscroft was entitled The Citizen Turn’d Gentleman.10 By adopting the title of citizens for members of their new republics, the revolutionaries thereby threatened the distinctive status of “gentleman” and put more egalitarian pressure on their society than they meant to.”
― 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

“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

“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

“the republican revolution was the greatest utopian movement in American history. The revolutionaries aimed at nothing less than a reconstruction of American society....They sought to reconstruct a society and governments based on virtue and distinterested public leadership and to set in motion a moral movement that would eventually be felt around the globe.”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“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

“In Southside Virginia there actually existed parvenu gentlemen who promised the voters anything, magistrates who were habitually drunk, and candidates who stripped off their shirts and prepared to wrestle their way into the House of Burgesses.”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“of the nation came from family households. Only in America, said Congressman Albert Gallatin”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“agriculture. In America even the more urban areas of New England and the mid-Atlantic had 70 percent of their workers still on farms. The American people still lived mostly in the countryside. In 1800 there were only thirty-three towns with a population of 2,500 or more, and only six of these urban areas had populations over 10,000. Only 5 percent of Americans actually lived in cities. By 1820 the number of urban places with populations over 2,500 had increased to sixty-one, but only five of these were cities with populations over 25,000; altogether these urban places held only 7 percent of the population. England in 1821 by contrast had well over a third of its population in cities; more than 20 percent lived in cities larger than 20,000. There was London with its million and a quarter people, and there were dozens of other urban areas, twenty-eight of which had populations over 20,000.17 At that same date the early American Republic was a very different country—”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“manners in this generation.” Violence was perhaps no more common than it had been earlier, but now it seemed more bizarre. During the forty-five years between 1780 and 1825 there occurred ten of the twelve multiple family murders that were reported or written about in America from the seventeenth century through 1900. It was as if all restraints were falling away. Fistfighting even broke out repeatedly in the Congress and the state legislatures.4 Urban rioting became more prevalent and destructive than it had been. Street, tavern, and theater rowdiness, labor strikes, racial and ethnic conflicts—all increased greatly after 1800. These”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“peak of 20,000 by 1830. In 1815 even the little town of Peacham, Vermont, had thirty distilleries. Distilling”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“was suggested in 1771. “The plain, the simple and honestly well-meaning are … infinitely more free, than those whose self-affections are exalted by a mere formal education. Practical knowledge only is valuable.”24 The republican revolution aggravated such anti-intellectual sentiments and rendered suspect all kinds of distinctions, whether naturally derived or not.”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“Kant’s categories—was needed to counteract the worst and most frightening implications of Lockean sensationalism and to keep individuals level and sociable in a confused and chaotic world. If man’s character were simply the consequence of the “impressions” made upon him “from an infinite variety of objects external and internal …,” wrote Nathaniel Chipman, “he would be the sport of blind impulses.” There was a “necessity,” therefore, “for a balance, as well as some arbiter of moral action.” And this balancer or arbiter was not reason, which was too unequally distributed in people, but a common moral sense—a moral intuition existing in every person’s heart or conscience, however humble and however lacking in education that person may have been. This common sense, said James Wilson, “is purely the gift of heaven”; it “makes a man capable of managing his own affairs, and answerable for his conduct toward others.” It made benevolence and indeed moral society possible.22”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“There was something in each human being—some sort of moral sense or sympathetic instinct—that made possible natural compassion and affection and that bound everyone together in a common humanity. Even the lowliest of persons, it was assumed, had this sense of sympathy or moral feeling for others. Young divinity student and schoolmaster of Sheffield, Massachusetts, Thomas Robbins recounted in his diary the incident of a black boy of about four who asked Robbins about a cut on his thumb. The boy told him, “If I had some plaster I would give you some to put on it.” Robbins was overwhelmed by the boy’s sympathy. “He appears to act from the pure dictates of nature without the least cultivation. If in anyone, I think we can see nature in him.” The conclusion was obvious: “Is there not then in human nature a principle of benevolence?”21”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“No revolutionary expressed more passion than Adams in denouncing aristocracy—its “certain Airs of Wisdom and Superiority,” its “Scorn and Contempt and turning up of the Nose.” And no revolutionary defended with more vehemence common ordinary people against that aristocracy—“against being ridden like horses, fleeced like sheep, worked like cattle, and fed and cloathed like swine and hounds.”19”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“Lockean sensationalism: that all men were born equal and that only the environment working on their senses made them different.”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“everyone in a republic had to have the same amount of property, a few radicals did call for agrarian laws with “the power of lessening property when it became excessive in individuals.” And all took for granted that a society could not long remain republican if only a tiny minority controlled most of the wealth and the bulk of the population remained dependent servants or landless laborers. Equality was related to independence; indeed, Jefferson’s original draft for the Declaration of Independence stated that “all men are created free & independent.” Men were equal in that no one of them should be dependent on the will of another, and property made this independence possible. Americans in 1776 therefore concluded that they were naturally fit for republicanism precisely because they were “a people of property; almost every man is a freeholder.”13”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“to all government, even ours, which is certainly the best.” Better that the United States be “erased from existence than infected with French principles,” declared a rather hysterical young Oliver Wolcott, Jr. Yet by the early nineteenth century, that seemed to many to be precisely what had happened. French Jacobinical principles, spouted by “Voltaire, Priestley and Condorcet and that bloody banditti of atheists,” had poisoned the American mind and perverted the rational principles of the American Revolution. So convinced was John Quincy Adams on this point that in 1800 he translated and published in Philadelphia an essay by the German scholar Friedrich von Gentz contrasting the American and French Revolutions—promoting the pamphlet on the grounds that it rescued the American Revolution “from the disgraceful imputation of having proceeded from the same principles as the French.”5”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“If virtue was based on liberty and independence, then it followed that only autonomous individuals free from any ties of interest and paid by no master were qualified to be citizens. Jefferson and many other republican idealists hoped that all ordinary yeoman farmers who owned their own land and who depended for their subsistence only “on their own soil and industry” and not “on the casualties and caprice of customers” would be independent and free enough of pecuniary temptations and marketplace interests to be virtuous.26 Others, however, questioned the capacity of most ordinary people to rise above self-interest, particularly those who were dependent on “the casualties and caprice of customers.” Common people and others involved in the marketplace were usually overwhelmed by their interests and were incapable of disinterestedness. Yet of course they were not to be the leaders of the society. Although”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“were protected. In this classical republican tradition our modern distinction between positive and negative liberties was not yet clearly perceived, and the two forms of liberty were still often seen as one.21 Liberty was realized when the citizens were virtuous—that is, willing to sacrifice their private interests for the sake of the community, including serving in public office without pecuniary rewards. This virtue could be found only in a republic of equal, active, and independent citizens. To be completely virtuous citizens, men—never women, because it was assumed they were never independent—had to be free from dependence and from the petty interests of the marketplace. Any loss of independence and virtue was corruption. The virtue that classical republicanism encouraged was public virtue. Private virtues such as prudence, frugality,”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“ideals and political and social values that have had a powerful and lasting effect on Western culture.”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“colonies still took for granted that society was and ought to be a hierarchy of ranks and degrees of dependency and that most people were bound together by personal ties of one sort or another. Yet scarcely fifty years later these insignificant borderland provinces had become a giant, almost continent-wide republic of nearly ten million egalitarian-minded bustling citizens who not only had thrust themselves into the vanguard of history but had fundamentally altered their society and their social relationships. Far from remaining monarchical, hierarchy-ridden subjects on the margin of civilization, Americans had become, almost overnight, the most liberal, the most democratic, the most commercially minded, and the most modern people in the world.”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution