The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 Quotes

“The only meaningful classification of governments was by their degree of mixture, and the only good government was a properly mixed one, a regal republic. For Adams this balancing of the forces inevitable in every society was the Enlightenment fulfilled: a principle of political science discovered to be applicable to all times and all peoples. Only by “combining the great divisions of society in one system,” only by forming an “equal, independent mixture” of the three classic kinds of government, “monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy,” could order in any state be achieved. These “three branches of power have an unalterable foundation in nature. ... If all of them are not acknowledged in any constitution of government, it will be found to be imperfect, unstable, and soon enslaved.”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787

“Among every people, and in every species of republics,” said Adams, “we have constantly found a first magistrate, a head, a chief, under various denominations, indeed, and with different degrees of authority.” Yet for all of their differences of titles and power these single magistrates were fundamentally similar: they all sprang from the basic need of every society to realize its monarchical impulse. Hereditary and elective rulers were essentially alike; the American governors, despite their elective dependency and their lack of hereditary sacrosanctity, fulfilled the same social role in politics as did the King of England.”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787

“Take, for example, the issue of whether public officials should be paid salaries. The classical republican tradition that went back to Aristotle and Cicero saw political office as an aristocratic obligation of those who had sufficient wealth, leisure, and talent to serve the commonwealth. Gentlemen, as Jefferson said, ought to undertake political office in accord with “the Roman principle,” without substantial remuneration. The Founders were not modern politicians. They did not conceive of politics as a profession and officeholding as a career. Like Jefferson, they believed that “in a virtuous government . . . public offices are what they should be, burthens to those appointed to them, which it would be wrong to decline, though foreseen to bring with them intense labor, and great private loss.”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787

“Millions must be brought up, whom no principles, no sentiments derived from education, can restrain from trampling on the laws.” It was impossible, said Adams, to reconcile the “diversity of sentiments, contradictory principles, inconsistent interests, and opposite passions” of America “by declamations against discord and panegyrics upon unanimity.” Neither education, religion, superstition, nor oaths could control human appetites. “Nothing,” he told Jefferson, “but Force and Power and Strength can restrain them.”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787

“his equal” with a better coat, hat, house, or horse. “He cannot bear it; he must and will be upon a level with him.” Following the war, noted Adams, America “rushed headlong into a greater degree of luxury than ought to have crept in for a hundred years.” Indeed, because America was “more Avaricious than any other Nation that ever existed,” it would be madness, concluded Adams, to expect the society to be free of luxury and the desire for distinction. The Crown was not, as many had believed, the source of corruption and factionalism after all. Social struggle and division were endemic to every society, and America possessed no immunity.11”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787

“dissipated, Adams set for himself the formidable task of convincing his countrymen that they were after all “like all other people, and shall do like other nations.” In effect he placed himself not only in the path of the American Revolution but in the course of the emerging American myth.5 Americans, Adams now believed, were as driven by the passions for wealth and precedence as any people in history. Ambition, avarice, and resentment, not virtue and benevolence, were the stuff of American society. Those who argued that Americans were especially egalitarian were blind to reality. “Was there, or will there ever be,” asked Adams, “a nation, whose individuals were all equal, in natural and acquired qualities, in virtues, talents, and riches?” Every people, contended Adams, possessed inequalities “which no human legislator ever can eradicate.”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787

“Strength, Hardiness Activity, Courage, Fortitude and Enterprise,” along with a pervasive belief in the principle “that all Things must give Way to the public.” If “pure Virtue,” “the only foundation of a free Constitution ...,” he explained in June 1776, “cannot be inspired into our People, in a greater Measure, than they have it now, They may change their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty. —They will only exchange Tyrants and Tyrannies.” Such reliance as Adams placed on the ameliorative power of republicanism may have been an empty dream, but given his deep apprehension of the American character, an apprehension that sprang from his knowledge of himself, he had little choice. The Revolution had to result in a reformation or it could not succeed.4”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787

“Adams noted, possessed as much public spirit as any people in the modern world. Nevertheless, he had seen all through his life “Such Selfishness and Littleness even in New England” that the cause seemed doubtful, not for lack of power or wisdom, but for lack of virtue. The Revolution had unleashed a bundle of passions—”Hope, Fear, Joy, Sorrow, Love, Hatred, Malice, Envy, Revenge, Jealousy, Ambition, Avarice, Resentment, Gratitude,”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787

“in the people. “It was therefore a want of power in the people which made the Revolution [of 1688] necessary, not a fulness of their power.”56”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787

“other Americans, could without any sense of incongruity cite Rousseau, Plutarch, Blackstone, and a seventeenth-century Puritan all on the same page.14”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787

“perhaps I and others sometimes suggested.”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787

“Society,” said Thomas Paine, “is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness: the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions.” It was society, not politics, that bred the new domesticated virtue of politeness. Mingling in drawing rooms, clubs, coffeehouses, and even counting houses—partaking of the innumerable interchanges of the daily comings and goings of modern life, including those of the marketplace—created affection, fellow feeling, credit, and trust that bound people together in the natural harmony of the social world that was as marvelous to the eighteenth century as the discovery of the force of gravity in the physical world.”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787

“relationship, including even the most severe and unequal dependencies. To the most enlightened, like Thomas Jefferson, sociability became the contemporary substitute for classical virtue. The antique virtue of self-sacrifice was now seen by some as too austere, too forbidding, too harsh for the civilized eighteenth century. People needed a virtue that demanded less in the way of service to the state and more in the way of getting along with others in the society. Unlike the classical virtue of the past, which was martial and masculine, this new virtue was soft and feminized and capable of being expressed by women as well as men. It was much more Addisonian than Spartan, and much more social than political.”
― Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787