Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815

by Gordon S. Wood

  Two especially important books that deal with the West and land speculation are Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (1995); and Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (1996). Land policy and land laws are covered in Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789–1837 (1968).

  Writing on the Lewis and Clark expedition is immense. See Stephen Dow Beckham et al., The Literature of the Lewis and Clark Expedition: A Bibliography and Essays (2003). For a fast read, see Stephen E. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (1996). For a more scholarly study, see James P. Ronda, Finding the West: Explorations with Lewis and Clark (2001). Arthur Furtwangler, Acts of Discovery: Visions of America in the Lewis and Clark Journals (1999) and Thomas P. Slaughter, Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness (2003) treat the journals very imaginatively. There are many selectively edited versions of the explorers’ journals. One example is Frank Bergon, ed., The Journals of Lewis and Clark (1995).

  On the Louisiana Purchase, see the superb narrative by Jon Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America (2003) and the relevant chapters in George Dangerfield, Chancellor Robert R. Livingston of New York, 1746–1803 (1960). For more analytical and contextual studies of the Purchase, see Peter J. Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (2004); and Alexander DeConde, This Affair of Louisiana (1976). On the Burr conspiracy, see the books cited earlier on Burr, together with Thomas Abernethy, The Burr Conspiracy (1954); and Buckner F. Melton Jr., Aaron Burr: Conspiracy to Treason (2002).

  On the theories of America having a deleterious effect on all living creatures, Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–1900 (1973) is basic. On the native peoples in this period, see Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (1992); Reginald Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783–1812 (1967); Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years: The Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts, 1790–1834 (1962); and Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Tragic Fate of the First Americans (1999). For a sensitive study of the irony in that tragic fate, see Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (1973). For a pathbreaking work on Indian-white relations, see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (1991). With the Iroquois in upstate New York and Canada, the ground was different, according to Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderlands of the American Revolution (2006). On the Cherokees, see two superb books by William G. McLoughlin, Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789–1839 (1984) and Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (1986).

  On the politics of the judiciary in this period, see William R. Casto, The Supreme Court in the Early Republic: The Chief Justiceships of John Jay and Oliver Ellsworth (1995); Richard E. Ellis, The Jeffersonian Crisis: Courts and Politics in the Young Republic (1971); Andrew Shankman, Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism and Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania (2004); and Maeva Marcus, ed., Origins of the Federal Judiciary: Essays on the Judiciary Act of 1789 (1992). Indispensable for understanding the Supreme Court in its earliest years is Maeva Marcus et al., eds., The Documentary History of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1789–1800 (1985–). On the Court, see also the relevant volumes in the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States, the multi-volume history of the Court endowed by Justice Holmes on his death: Julius Goebel, Antecedents and Beginnings to 1801: History of the Supreme Court of the United States (1971); George Lee Haskins and Herbert A. Johnson, Foundations of Power: John Marshall, 1801–1815 (1981).

  In addition to the books on Marshall cited earlier, see R. Kent Newmyer, John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court (2001); see also Newmyer’s superb biography of Story, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story: Statesman of the Old Republic (1985).

  The origins of judicial review are treated in Edward S. Corwin, The “Higher Law” Background of American Constitutional Law (1955); and Charles G. Haines, The American Doctrine of Judicial Supremacy (1932). For an important corrective to the idea that judicial review meant judicial supremacy, see Larry Kramer, The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review (2004). Efforts to place Marbury v. Madison in historical context include Christopher Wolfe, The Rise of Modern Judicial Review: From Constitutional Interpretation to Judge-Made Law (1986); J. M. Sosin, The Aristocracy of the Long Robe: The Origins of Judicial Review in America (1989); Robert Lowry Clinton, Marbury v. Madison and Judicial Review (1989); and William E. Nelson, Marbury v. Madison: The Origins and Legacy of Judicial Review (2000). Especially important in understanding the development of judicial review is Sylvia Snowiss, Judicial Review and the Law of the Constitution (1990).

  On the development of the corporation see Oscar and Mary Flug Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774–1861 (1947, 1969); E. Merrick Dodd, American Business Corporations Until 1860, with Special Reference to Massachusetts (1954); Ronald E. Seavoy, The Origins of the American Business Corporation, 1784–1855: Broadening the Concept of Public Service During Industrialization (1982); Hendrik Hartog, Public Property and Private Power: The Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730–1870 (1983); and Johann N. Neem, Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts (2008).

  Benjamin Rush has yet to find a biographer worthy of his importance. But see Nathan G. Goodman, Benjamin Rush: Physician and Citizen, 1746–1813 (1934); Carl Binger, Revolutionary Doctor: Benjamin Rush, 1746–1813 (1966); and David F. Hawke, Benjamin Rush: Revolutionary Gadfly (1971). On education in the early Republic, see Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876 (1980); and Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (1983). Important for understanding newspapers and the spread of information in the period are Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (1989); Richard D. Brown, The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650–1870 (1996); and Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History of American Newspapers in the United States Through 250 Years, 1690–1940 (1941). On the emergence of humanitarian institutions, see Conrad E. Wright, The Transformation of Charity in Post-Revolutionary New England (1992).

  On criminal punishment and penal reform, see Louis Masur, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776–1865 (1989); Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760–1835 (1996); and Adam Jay Hirsch, The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in Early America (1992).

  John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (2001) is the best study of the politics of internal improvements in the period.

  On the development of various moral reform associations, see Charles I. Foster, An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front, 1790–1837 (1960); and Clifford S. Griffin, Their Brothers’ Keepers: Moral Stewardship in the United States, 1800–1865 (1960). On missionaries, see Oliver Wendell Elsbree, The Rise of the Missionary Spirit in America, 1790–1815 (1928); and William R. Hutchison, Errand to the World: American Protestant Thought and Foreign Missions (1987).

  On women in the period, see Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (1980); and Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (2006). Linda K. Kerber has two importa
nt books on women in the early Republic: Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (1980) and Toward an Intellectual History of Women: Essays (1997). Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (2007) is a particularly significant study.

  The literature on slavery has been growing rapidly in the past several decades. Basic for understanding the subject are David Brion Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966) and his The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (1975). For the best and most thorough account of slave life in the Chesapeake and in the Low-country of South Carolina and Georgia, see Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and the Lowcountry (1998). Also indispensable are two books by Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (1998) and Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves (2003). Additional studies of slave culture are John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Anti-Bellum South (1972); Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (1991); Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1977); and Shane White and Graham White, The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History Through Songs, Sermons, and Speech (2005). Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (2005) and Steven Doyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (2005) are important for the domestic slave trade. Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (1968) remains a classic.

  For studies of the plantations of two important Founders, see Robert F. Dalzell Jr. and Lee Baldwin Dalzell, George Washington’s Mount Vernon: At Home in Revolutionary America (1998); Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (2003); and Lucia C. Stanton, Free Some Day: The African-American Families of Monticello (2000). But for a detailed study of slavery at a less well known plantation, see Lorena S. Walsh, From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (1997).

  On Gabriel’s Rebellion, see Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (1993); and James Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730–1810 (1997).

  On free blacks, see Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (1974); and Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (1961). Gary B. Nash has several important books on blacks in the Revolution and in the following decades: Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (1988); Race and Revolution (1990); and The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (2006). See also Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (2009). For abolitionism, see Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (1967); and especially Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (2002). Duncan J. MacLeod, Slavery, Race and the American Revolution (1974) demonstrates how republican equality helped to create racism.

  The standard surveys of culture in the period are Russell B. Nye, The Cultural Life of the New Nation, 1776–1830 (1960) and Jean V. Matthews, Toward a New Society: American Thought and Culture, 1800–1830 (Boston, 1990). Especially important are Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution: Painting, Music, Literature, and the Theater in the Colonies and the United States from the Treaty of Paris to the Inauguration of George Washington (1976); and Joseph J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture (1979).

  On the theater, see Jeffrey H. Richards, Drama, Theater, and Identity in the American New Republic (2005); and Heather Nathans, Early American Theater from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the Hands of the People (2003). On painting, see Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790–1860 (1966); and James Thomas Flexner, The Light of Distant Skies: American Painting, 1760–1835 (1969). Harris’s book is particularly rich and imaginative. On the novel, see Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (1986).

  On Charles Willson Peale, see David R. Brigham, Public Culture in the Early Republic: Peale’s Museum and its Audience (1995); and Charles Coleman Sellers, Charles Willson Peale (1947) and Mr. Peale’s Museum: Charles Willson Peale and the First Popular Museum of Natural Science and Art (1980).

  The most important work on religion in the early Republic is Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (1989). On the separation of church and state, see Thomas J. Curry, The First Freedoms: Church and State in America to the Passage of the First Amendment (1986); and A. James Reichley, Religion in American Public Life (1985). Other important studies of religion in the early Republic are Edwin S. Gaustad, Neither King nor Prelate: Religion and the New Nation, 1776–1826 (1993); Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (2002); Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (1990); Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (1997); and Dee E. Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–1800: The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture (2000). The essays collected in Elwyn A. Smith, ed., The Religion of the Republic (1971), are important in relating evangelical Protestantism to republicanism.

  Peter S. Field, The Crisis of the Standing Order: Clerical Intellectuals and Cultural Authority in Massachusetts, 1780–1833 (1998) is important for the Unitarian controversy in Massachusetts. For the background to the Unitarian movement, see Conrad Wright, The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (1955). On the New Divinity movement, see Joseph A. Conforti, Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement: Calvinism, the Congregational Ministry, and Reform in New England Between the Great Awakenings (1981). John R. Boles, The Great Revival, 1787–1805 (1972) and Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South (1977) are important for evangelical revivalism. Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (1985), is an excellent survey of American Catholicism.

  The issue of the Founders and religion has generated an enormous amount of writing, especially in the past two decades. Among the most moderate and sensible accounts are James H. Hutson, Religion and the Founding of the American Republic (1998); Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (2006); Frank Lambert, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America (2003); and Forrest Church, So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle over Church and State (2007).

  On millennialism, see James West Davidson, The Logic of Millennial Thought: Eighteenth-Century New England (1977); J.F.C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780–1850 (1979); and Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (1985).

  The underlying eighteenth-century liberal assumptions about international politics are explored in Felix Gilbert, To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy (1961). Gilbert’s book has not been taken as seriously as it ought to have been, largely because he relied heavily on French instead of English sources; but the English materials back up his thesis. On another important work that investigates the thinking behind the commercial and foreign policy of the Jeffersonians, see Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (1980). On the foreign policy itself, see Bradford Perkins, Prologue to War: England and the United States, 1805–1812 (1968); and Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (1990). Lawrence S. Kaplan, Jefferson and France: An Essay on Politics and Political Ideas (1967) captures the idealism of Jefferson. On the embargo, see Burton Spivak, Jefferson’s English Crisis: Commerce, Embargo, and the Republican Revolution (1979). On the Southern Spanish-American borderland
s, see J.C.A. Stagg, Borderlines in Borderlands: James Madison and the Spanish-American Frontier, 1776–1821 (2009).

  On the Barbary pirates, see Robert J. Allison, The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815 (1995); and Frank Lambert, The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World (2005).

  J.C.A. Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American Republic, 1783–1830 (1983) is indispensable for understanding the War of 1812, as, of course, is Henry Adams, History of the United States of America During the Administration of James Madison (1889–1891). Roger H. Brown, The Republic in Peril: 1812 (1964) and Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790–1820 (1987) have imaginative accounts of America’s willingness to go to war. See also Bradford Perkins, Castlereagh and Adams: England and the United States, 1812–1823 (1964).

  Of the many brief accounts of the war, the best is Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (1989). See also his Don’t Give Up the Ship: Myths of the War of 1812 (2006). Jon Latimer, 1812: War with America (2007) views the war from a British or Canadian point of view. Richard Buel Jr., America on the Brink: How the Political Struggle over the War of 1812 Almost Destroyed the Young Republic (2005) provocatively indicts the Federalists for their seditious behavior. James M. Banner Jr., To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789–1815 (1970) superbly describes the Federalists’ attitudes and stresses their moderate purposes in calling the Convention.

  On the economy of the period, see Curtis P. Nettles, The Emergence of a National Economy, 1775–1815 (1962); Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 2, The Long Nineteenth Century (2000); Douglas C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (1966); and James L. Huston, Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concepts of Wealth Distribution, 1765–1900 (1998). Barbara M. Tucker, Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 1790–1860 (1984) is the best study of that extraordinary entrepreneur.