By Gordon S. Wood
In his 1974 Bicentennial Lecture, the historian Gordon S. Wood argues that the American Revolution had a distinctly “radical character.” It turned the colonies into republics and “made the people sovereign.” Wood contends that this transformation was not bottom-up; rather, American democracy emerged from above. What began as elites’ tactically invoking “the people” would culminate in a new “republican consciousness” in which politics revolved around the interests of ordinary Americans.
Although Wood emphasizes the Revolution’s “egalitarian” posture, he also underscores “the great anomaly” at its heart: slavery. In the early nineteenth century, the “very egalitarianism of America’s republican ideology…worked at the same time to inhibit integrating the free black man into the political nation.” As white suffrage expanded, black voting rights contracted, culminating in the 1857 Dred Scott decision that denied black citizenship outright. Even during Reconstruction, Wood argues, Republican efforts to extend the franchise to black citizens were accepted only “grudgingly” by Northerners to prevent “the resurgence of an unreconstructed Democratic South.” For Wood, the lesson of this history is that Americans place too much “confidence in the suffrage as the sole criterion of representation.” Rather, the fitful evolution of American democratic politics “gives life to the suffrage.”
