The American Revolution Wasn't an Egalitarian Experiment

And the Founders Show It

Welcome back, and thanks for reading! Today’s article, as might be expected for Independence Day, is an analysis of the American Revolution through the fantastic book Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different by Gordon Wood. Though I have generally kept these paywalled for paid subscribers, such as with the articles on The Case for Colonialism and Why Rhodesia Had to Declare Independence, I wanted to make this one free. For one, it was particularly timely, as I happened to read the book recently. More importantly, I think this point is often lost, but is very important, as it shows what the intent of the Founders was for the government they designed. Thanks again, and as always, if you like this article, please tap the heart icon at the top or bottom of the page to “like” it, as that is how the algo knows to promote it.

A common refrain about the American Revolution is that it was an experiment meant to wipe away the detritus of the old, feudal European order and replace it with something “fairer.” By that, the proponents of such a point mean something democratic and egalitarian.¹

In some ways, they are marginally correct. The Founders did abhor the corruption and self-dealing of the old world, particularly Britain. Similarly, they intentionally decided against creating an American peerage, seeing such a form of hereditary aristocracy and its privileges as being something other than conducive to just and competent rule. And, of course, Thomas Jefferson proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” which would indicate an abhorrence of privileges gained by birth to a certain name.

But besides those relatively minor points, the contention that the American Revolution was a proto-French Revolution, that it was an assault of the “have-nots” against the “haves” in the name of some vague concept of fairness and equality, is totally wrong.

Namely, the “Founding Fathers” would be better termed the “Founding Gentlemen” as,² with the exception of Thomas Paine, they were all members of the gentry. While not titled aristocrats (except Lord Stirling³), they were members of the American gentry in some form or another and brought that perspective to the Constitution they eventually designed.

That is most important in that they never intended for America to be an outright democracy, seeing such a system as promoting government of the worst sort. Rather, they believed that a porous elite, a Natural Aristocracy of virtue and talent, existed in America and should govern it in the name of all. Such men were not only to be the ones running for office, but those who voted, as it was thought that only they could fairly consider and adjudicate matters of public interest. As John Adams put it in a letter railing against the idea of universal white male suffrage:⁴

Is it not equally true, that men in general in every society, who [are poor and do not own property], are also [unfamiliar] with public affairs to form a right judgment, and too dependent upon other men to have a will of their own? …Few men, who have no property, have any judgment of their own. They talk and vote as they are directed by some man of property, who has attached their minds to his interest.

In short, much like the Rhodesians, who used a similar system,⁵ the Founders understood that the purpose of a government is not to promote the concept of total equality, but to rule and govern well for the benefit of all, and that they way to achieve such an end was to limit the franchise to people who generally thought that way.⁶

Further, the Founders—again with the exception of Thomas Paine, and with the venal Aaron Burr—were committed to acting in such a way that reflected why their views on the justice of a natural aristocracy running the country was the right one. Such is the subject of Gordon Wood’s Revolutionary Characters, which I’ll discuss and briefly review below. (I am an Amazon Affiliate, so I will earn a small commission, at no cost to you, if you use the above Amazon link or Amazon links later in the article to purchase the book).

Our Founding Gentleman

The World of the Founding

It is important to remember the world in which the Founders grew up. Theirs was the world of Frederick the Great and his titanic clash with Austria, France, and Russia in the Seven Years War, the worldwide struggle between France and Great Britain in the same conflict, and of mercantilism-minded trade involving vast plantations, hellish islands producing nothing but sugar, and gargantuan East India companies. That was, in short, a world of aristocracy that revolved around favors, prestige, and conflict.

But it was also the world of the so-called Enlightenment. While hard-drinking Tory country squires in England and feudal lords in Russia, Prussia, and Austria tended to be dismissive of such, or reject it entirely, some leading men in the rest of the Western world at least considered it. Salons, coffee houses, and the like flourished as ideas were debated and old ideas of liberty and rights battled with older conceptions of hierarchy and tradition. America’s gentry was particularly drawn to its core tenets.

All in all, that meant their era was one that combined a changing sense of virtue that revolved around the loosely defined public good with an aristocratic culture and sense of politics, and it was such that they represented. They did not hide behind bureaucracy and inaction, but rather led because they understood that they ought do so and the broadly aristocratic system was permissive of such men leading rather than becoming part of the grey mass of equality. As Wood notes:

They were not demigods, but they were not democrats either, certainly not democrats in any modern manner. They were never embarrassed by talk of elitism, and they never hid their sense of superiority to ordinary folk. But neither were they contemptuous of common people; in fact they always believed that the people in general were the source of their authority. As historian Charles S. Sydnor pointed out long ago, they were the beneficiaries of a semiaristocratic political system, and their extraordinary leadership was due in large measure to processes that we today would consider undemocratic and detestable. But even in their own undemocratic time and circumstances they were unusual, if not unique.

That’s not to say they were aristocrats, in the European sense. Even the wealthier ones failed to come anywhere close to the nobility of England, and were much closer to the minor gentry of England than its aristocracy.⁷ However, as Wood notes, it was that difference in wealth and position that helped them take advantage of the philosophical milieu of their day, budding anti-British sentiment that came with its post-Seven Years’ War attempt to tax the colonies into profitability, and propel America into being:

Eighteenth-century Britain remained under the authority of about four hundred noble families whose fabulous scale of landed wealth, political influence, and aristocratic grandeur was unmatched by anyone in North America. While Charles Carroll of Maryland, one of the wealthiest planters in the American South, was earning what Americans regarded as the huge sum of eighteen hundred pounds a year, the earl of Derby's vast estates were bringing in an annual income of over forty thousand pounds. By English standards, American aristocrats like Washington and Jefferson, even with hundreds of slaves, remained minor gentry at best. Moreover, by the English measure of status, lawyers like Adams and Hamilton were even less distinguished, gentlemen no doubt but nothing like the English nobility.

The American revolutionary elite was thus very different from the English aristocracy. By its very difference, however, it was ideally suited to exploit the peculiar character of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

They seemed to understand as much and act in recognition of it, cultivating and developing their personal virtue so as to be reflective of how they thought those in public life ought behave.

To some extent, that was molded by their status as lower gentry in an aristocratic world: it was their response to needing something other than name or position to be the leading men of the nation’s public life that they were intent on becoming and remaining. As relatively “new men” of the sort looked down upon as much in the England of their day as the aristocratic Rome of two millennia prior, they enhanced and defended their conception of themselves by focusing on virtue.

But it was also that they understood, in a way few other American leaders have, that they were exceptional and thus should act in an exceptional manner. Their characters, outlooks, and sense of self were different, and indicative of the justness of their rule. As Wood notes:

The revolutionary leaders knew this and committed themselves to behaving in a certain moral, virtuous, and civilized manner. Indeed, the intense self-conscious seriousness with which they made that commitment was what ultimately separates them from later generations of American leaders. But that commitment also sets them sharply apart from the older world of their fathers and grandfathers. They sought, often unsuccessfully but always sincerely, to play a part, to be what Jefferson called natural aristocrats—aristocrats who measured their status not by birth or family that hereditary aristocrats from time immemorial had valued but by enlightened values and benevolent behavior.

They had good reason for doing so, for they were men of high ambitions yet of relatively modest origins, and this combination made achieved rather than ascribed values naturally appealing to them. Almost all the revolutionary leaders, even including the second and third ranks of leadership, were first-generation gentlemen. That is to say, almost all were the first in their families to attend college, to acquire a liberal arts education, and to display the new eighteenth-century marks of an enlightened gentleman. Of the ninety-nine men who signed the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, only eight are known to have had fathers who attended college.

So, theirs was a world of aristocracy, not democracy, though the changing conception of virtue that came with the Enlightenment shaped who they saw themselves as being, and why they understood that it was they—rather than the mob—that should be in charge.

The Concept of the Gentleman

Key to that understanding was the concept of gentility, or being a “gentleman.” Such was not an American term, but rather one that rose to prominence in Great Britain, particularly England, as the Medieval Era ended.⁸ However, it did take on a somewhat different meaning in the frontier world of America, as could be expected given the unique conditions attendant to settling the New World. Further, it was integral to the Founding, as all the Founders, other than Paine, understood themselves to be gentlemen and were deeply attached to the concept.

Who Was a Gentleman?

As there were no hereditary titles attendant to the status of gentleman in America (“gentleman” was itself the title and earned at each generation),⁹ the meaning of the term was somewhat vague. For one, it meant being somewhat above it all, weighed down (theoretically) by neither the prejudices nor the worries of the average person, and as such was a prerequisite to becoming a politician. As Wood notes:

Being a gentleman was the prerequisite to becoming a political leader. It signified being cosmopolitan, standing on elevated ground in order to have a large view of human affairs, and being free of the prejudices, parochialism, and religious enthusiasm of the vulgar and barbaric. It meant, in short, having all those characteristics that we today sum up in the idea of a liberal arts education. Indeed, the eighteenth century created the modern idea of a liberal arts education in the English-speaking world. Of course, as Noah Webster said, having a liberal arts education and thereby becoming a gentleman "disqualifies a man for business."

But while all might have pointed to being “liberal” as the basis of the title, it wasn’t really that. Such a mindset might have been part of it, but was only necessary rather than sufficient. There was also an element that involved not working for a living, or at least not doing so with one’s hands. Such can be seen in the definition given by John Adams:

When John Adams asked himself what a gentleman was, he answered in just these terms of a liberal arts education. "By gentlemen," he said, "are not meant the rich or the poor, the high-born or the low-born, the industrious or the idle: but all those who have received a liberal education, an ordinary degree of erudition in liberal arts and sciences. Whether by birth they be descended from magistrates and officers of government, or from husbandmen, merchants, mechanics, or laborers; or whether they be rich or poor." Whatever their fathers were, however, gentlemen could not themselves be husbandmen, mechanics, or laborers— that is, men who worked for a living with their hands.

To some extent, it is doubtful many in America would have qualified as gentlemen under the British understanding, where to be a gentleman meant being detached nearly entirely from business. There, a steward made sure the tenanted farms ran properly and an agent might make investments on a gentleman’s behalf. Other than vigilant but infrequent oversight of those decisions, a gentleman was supposed to remain detached and focus on using the wealth garnered by those farms and investments for a life of service in the military or government, whether local, colonial, or national.¹⁰

America, thanks to the aforementioned differences in wealth, was somewhat different. Here, even our landed gentry were not only poorer than their English equivalents, but far more involved with the business of running an estate than their equivalents across the Atlantic.

George Washington, for example, America’s personification of the gentlemanly ideal, not only personally tested different soils on his lands to determine what grew best in them, but ran an iron forge and fishing operation.¹¹ The lower gentry of England would have found such activities tawdry and ungenteel.

Still, it was those planters and the ideal they represented and tried to live up to that America used as its concept of a disinterested gentleman, and it fit well enough with the mercantile mind of America in those days of yore. As Wood notes:

[The Tidewater] planters obviously came closest in America to emulating the English landed aristocracy. But some southern planters kept taverns on the side, and many others were not as removed from the day-to-day management of their estates as were their counterparts among the English landed gentry. Their overseers were not comparable to the stewards of the English aristocracy; thus the planters, despite their aristocratic poses, were often very busy, commercially involved men.

Despite Jefferson's illusion that the subsistence of these planters was not dependent "on the casualties and caprice of customers," their livelihoods were in fact tied directly to the vicissitudes of international trade, and most of them, if not Jefferson, always had an uneasy sense of being dependent on the market to an extent that the English aristocracy never really felt. Still, the great southern planters of Virginia and South Carolina at least approached the classical image of disinterested gentlemanly leadership, and they knew it and made the most of it throughout the decades following the Revolution. In northern American society such independent gentlemen standing above the interests of the marketplace were harder to find, but the ideal remained strong.

And though they might not have been as wealthy as their British equivalents, America’s gentlemen were able to contrast themselves with the savages always at hand, lurking in the woods and ready to fight, to ensure they were living up to the ideal of gentility as understood by a cultivated, enlightened person of the day. As Wood notes:

Living so close to what they regarded as savagery and barbarism, both the Scottish and North American leaders felt compelled to think freshly about the meaning of being civilized, and in the process they put a heightened emphasis on learned and acquired values at the expense of the traditional inherited values of blood and kinship. Wanting to become precisely the kind of gentlemen that their contemporaries Jane Austen and Edmund Burke idealized, they enthusiastically adopted the new enlightened eighteenth-century ideals of gentility: grace without foppishness, refinement without ostentation, virtue without affectation, independence without arrogance.

So, though the standard was somewhat loosely defined and sometimes in conflict with the British definition, it was a standard nonetheless and quite important to the day. America, though it might have had trouble providing a concise and exact definition, knew what a gentleman was and was unwilling to accept those who weren’t gentlemen as being such. It was, as Wood notes, not an egalitarian society:¹²

[R]evolutionary America was far from an egalitarian society, and most middling sorts, however rich, were not readily accepted as gentlemen.

Why Being a Gentleman Mattered

Importantly, the term and what it represented were no trifle. In an undemocratic age, they were the dividing line between those who society generally saw as being equipped to lead and those who really ought better themselves before trying to better the country. That made it an absolutely vital term to the Founders, who premised their rule on being gentlemen and thus being equipped to rule. Wood notes:

This age-old distinction between gentlemen and commoners had a vital meaning for the revolutionary generation that we today have totally lost. It marked a horizontal cleavage that divided the social hierarchy into two unequal parts almost as sharply as the distinction between officers and soldiers divided the army.

The reason why such a distinction was seen as vital is that even liberally-minded sorts of people, men like Adam Smith, thought it clear that only men outside of commerce—meaning, generally, a day-to-day involvement in either labor or business—could have the thought and lack of personal interest necessary to make impartial decisions.

That is to say, the other members of society would either be guided by avarice or ignorance, whereas the “gentlemen,” however that might be defined, were educated in making the right decisions and understanding the issues, and were removed enough from business because of their stable wealth that cupidity wouldn’t lead them astray. As Wood notes:

In the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world gentlemen believed that only independent individuals, free of interested ties and paid by no masters, could practice such virtue. It was thought that those who had occupations and had to work strenuously for a living lacked the leisure for virtuous public leadership. In the ideal polity, Aristotle had written thousands of years earlier, "the citizens must not live a mechanical or commercial life. Such a life is not noble, and it militates against virtue." For Aristotle not even agricultural workers could be citizens. For men "must have leisure to develop their virtue and for the activities of a citizen."

Over several millennia this ancient ideal had lost much of its potency, but some of it lingered even into the eighteenth century. Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations (1776) thought that ordinary people in a modern complicated commercial society were too engaged in their occupations and the making of money to be able to make impartial judgments about the varied interests and occupations of their society.

And that view was not an exceptional belief. Much as Gibbon famously noted that all alive in his day would recognize the rule of the “good emperors,” the Antonines,¹³ 1600 years before he wrote as the happiest period of human existence, and felt justified and correct in saying so, John Adams noted in similarly self-conscious rectitude that all history confirmed mob rule would by tyrannical.

That is not to say he thought the people should be uninvolved. But he did think democratic rule to be incompatible with competent, just rule. Instead, he saw it as leading directly to tyranny as much as any absolute monarch or rapacious oligarchy. Wood notes, quoting Adams:

Indeed, the aristocracy at least had the advantage of wisdom derived from education and breeding, while the people were generally inconstant and ignorant. Unchecked, the people not only would turn on the aristocrats, robbing them and ruining them without hesitation, but also would despoil and plunder among themselves. All history, said Adams, offered irrefutable proof that the people, unrestrained, "have been as unjust, tyrannical, brutal, barbarous, and cruel, as any king or senate possessed of uncontrollable power." Yet without the people's representation in the constitution the government would surely be oppressive. "There can be no free government," wrote Adams, "without a democratical branch in the constitution." In fact the absence of the people's voice in the governments of Europe had rid the Old World of liberty. The people needed to be institutionalized in a separate legislative chamber not only to curb their passions but also to counter the wiles and greed of the aristocracy. Their houses of representatives became the bulwark against the exploitation of the many by the few.

To some extent, that was self-serving, or at least is seen as such by many today. It is, after all, those of established wealth and expensive education saying they ought be in charge because they are wealthy and theoretically able to consider topics of import thanks to education that their laborers couldn’t afford; it is they who ought rule instead of the laborers.

However, that is to cast present reflections on our abominable oligarchs on men who thought differently. In fact, they saw government service (which was largely unpaid in the Anglo world, or at least paid very little) as being a duty attendant to their position because of the privileges Providence had granted them. Their lives of “leisure” were instead to be lives of service, and learning in support of that service. As Wood notes:

These independent gentlemen of leisure who were presumed to be free of occupations and the marketplace were expected to supply the necessary leadership in government. Since well-to-do gentry were "exempted from the lower and less honourable employments," wrote the British philosopher Francis Hutcheson, they were "rather more than others obliged to an active life in some service to mankind. The publick has this claim upon them."

All the American founders felt the weight of this claim and often agonized and complained about it. The revolutionary leaders were not modern men. They did not conceive of politics as a profession and of officeholding as a career as politicians do today. 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." Public office was an obligation required of certain gentlemen because of their talents, independence, and social preeminence."

George Washington Set the Standard

By far the greatest personification of this ideal was George Washington. Like his fellow Virginia planters Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, he was a landed magnate who lived of the income provided by labor that was not his, however attentive he might have been to its production. Like John Adams, he was comfortable with the concept of aristocracy and its benefits to society. Like Alexander Hamilton, he was comfortable with being a great man in an unequal, non-democratic society.

In fact, Washington was not just comfortable with his greatness and sense of being better than the average, ordinary man, but set out to accentuate that difference and cultivate what made him exceptional. That’s not to say his image was a forgery, a mere facade. It was who he was, and what he understood himself as being. But it was intentionally cultivated nevertheless. As Wood notes:

Despite his outward modesty, Washington realized he was an extraordinary man, and he was not ashamed of it. He lived in an era when distinctions of social rank were still accepted. He took for granted the differences between him and more ordinary men. When he could not take those differences for granted, he cultivated them. He used his natural reticence to reinforce the image of a stern and forbidding classical hero. His aloofness was notorious, and he worked at it.

It was that cultivation of the various strands of excellence and gentility that made Washington who he was. It is why he seems like a man out of history, like a man out of Classical Greece or Republican Rome in the heyday of each, rather than a creation of a mere few hundred years ago. It is, as Wood notes, because he stood as a man outside any egalitarian world, as a man who was great in the traditional sense of the term:

[George Washington] seems to come from another time and another place, from another world. That's the whole point about him: He did come from another world. And his countrymen knew it almost before he died in 1799. Washington was the only truly classical hero we have ever had. He was admired as a classical hero in his own lifetime. Among his fellow Americans only Franklin rivaled him for international acclaim, and Franklin's reputation was confined to science and philosophy. Washington was much more of a traditional hero. And he knew it.

That awareness of his heroic stature was crucial to Washington. It affected nearly everything he did for the rest of his life. Washington was a thoroughly eighteenth-century figure. Like Samuel Adams, he was "one of Plutarch's men," and like Adams, he quickly became an anachronism? He belonged to the predemocratic and pre-egalitarian world of the eighteenth century, to a world very different from the one that followed. No wonder he seems to us so remote. He really is. He belonged to a world we have lost, one we were losing even while he lived.

It was that stern, Classical character that allowed Washington to establish America on a firm footing. He was the only man who could have put the country together the way he did, and it was the hierarchy, the American sense of aristocracy, that existed in the world in which he grew up that let him pull America together the way he did.

That is important to note, as it was in his actions that the American sense of a gentleman and the duty attendant to everything surrounding it had its most complete flourishing, which was of paramount importance to the new nation. For it was that, the duty grounded in the privileges of hierarchy, that helped him ensure America didn’t fall apart. As Wood notes:

If any single person was responsible for establishing the young Republic on a firm footing, it was Washington. He was nearly as much of an aristocrat as the United States ever produced, in his acceptance of social hierarchy and in his belief that some were born to command and most to obey. Although he trusted the good sense of the people in the long run, he believed that they could easily be misled by demagogues. He was a realist who had no illusions about human nature. "The motives which predominate most human affairs," he said, "are self-love and self-interest." The common people, like the common soldiers in his army, could not be expected to be "influenced by any other principles than those of interest."

With these assumptions he realized only too keenly the fragility of the new nation. As president he devised a number of schemes for creating a stronger sense of nationhood. He understood the power of symbols; the reason he was willing to sit for long hours to have his portrait painted was to encourage respect for the new national government.

The Rest of the Country

That’s not to say America was all about hierarchy, or that even those who were part of what American gentry existed were honorable in the way Washington was.

Aaron Burr, for example, was as close to aristocracy as America got, yet was also a rapscallion and rake in all the worst ways. A liar, a traitor, a spendthrift, and a philanderer, he burnished his gilded pedigree and the class of which he was a part with his dastardly behavior. In fact, as Wood notes, his behavior was enough of an issue that the other founders were worried he would destroy the delicate system of rule by disinterested gentlemen they had built would crumble:

It was not that Burr's behavior itself was uncommon in American politics of the early Republic. Indeed, it was precisely the prevalence of this kind of self-interested politics in the state legislatures and even in the Congress that made the aristocratic Burr's behavior so alarming to his peers. Madison had foreseen that legislative politics would be a competition among various selfish factions. In the 1780s he had come to realize that state politics were dominated by obscure, middling, narrow-minded, and parochial politicians who could not see beyond their own neighborhoods and responded only to the selfish interests of their constituents.

But Madison and the other founders also expected that someone of Burr's cosmopolitan background, education, and talents would rise above this localism and these special interests and act differently, act in a disinterested manner and promote the common good. Madison in fact had designed the new Constitution in 1787 with the hope of encouraging the election to the national government of these sorts of cosmopolitan and liberally educated gentlemen.

Other sorts at the time acted in the same way, causing the same issues. But Burr was the most prominent, and the most problematic. For it was his vulgar scrambling for money (which he always promptly frittered away) that indicated that while the Founders were exceptional, those who followed might be significantly less so and, whatever their breeding, wealth, and education, likely to behave as poorly as those meant to be screened out by the system. As Wood notes:

Burr's behavior was a direct challenge to this revolutionary hope that enlightened gentry leaders would play the role of impartial umpires among the various interests. It was bad enough when ungenteel merchants, money-hungry stockjobbers, or narrow-minded artisans and businessmen scrambled in the political arena for their parochial interests. But when obviously distinguished and liberally educated gentlemen like Burr, men who, Hamilton said, should have the "commanding eminence... to look down with contempt upon every mean and interested pursuit," behaved like moneymaking, interest-mongering scramblers, then there was no one left to reconcile these narrow, selfish interests and look after the good of the whole society.

Further, there were significantly more democratic elements in politics at the time, as represented (at least in Woods’s work) by Thomas Paine. Sorts who were actively hostile to the social order in the British colonies and wanted to see it wiped away with the Revolution. It was, largely, George Washington who stopped it from going down the same dark path of destruction.¹⁴

So, instead of collapsing into a pit of democratic depravity and expropriation of the sort that characterized the French Revolution, America remained a functional entity and, largely, new men (not unlike the Founders, or at least their parents) aspired to gentility.

Andrew Jackson, for instance, despite his political decision to embrace more open democracy and do away with landed voting, set himself up as a landed gentleman in the manner of Washington, Madison, and Jefferson as soon as he had earned the money to do so. He then used that wealth and position in much the same way: the concept of privilege, position, and duty had survived.

So much is what would have been hoped for by the Founders as the war ended and the Constitution was patched together. It was not a mass democracy they hoped for, but rather a republic led by men of their sort, Burr and his ilk excluded. For, as Wood notes, “when Madison in 1791 referred to public opinion, he was still thinking of it as the intellectual product of limited circles of gentlemen.”

That was many things, but it was not an egalitarian revolution.

Revolutionary Characters as a Book

In some ways, Revolutionary Characters is quite good as a book. Particularly, the introduction and the sections on George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Aaron Burr, and James Madison are particularly good. The ones on Franklin, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Paine are somewhat less so.

Particularly, Wood tells the story of the Founding Fathers well. How they acted, why they acted that way, and what they saw themselves as doing when they did it. Wood tells that particularly well, and does a good job of contrasting the various factions involved, such as the Virginia gentry and Northern professionals or democrats and aristocrats, as a way of telling the story.

That adds a great deal of color to the story of the Founding, and explains why it went the way it did. Particularly, with such men in charge, it explains why our revolution didn’t follow the same path of self-destruction as the French one. An overthrow of British control was desired, not a demolition of a broadly hierarchical social system, and while some had their rankles with it, really the goal of men like Andrew Jackson was to join the upper ranks of the system rather than overthrow it. Though Burr was a reprobate, generally Washington, Jefferson, and the rest wher ehonorable enough and created a system porous enough that destroying it was only desired by a few of life’s losers, not the various classes as a whole. Wood explains as much quite well.

However, there is a serious element lacking in Revolutionary Characters: Wood never explains the Classical learning on which the Founders modeled themselves. He mentions it from time to time, and notes vaguely that Plutarch and other ancient authors were important elements of their writings and political thought. But he never explains in depth how what they found in the works of Classical Antiquity that they studied was impactful on their personal behavior and political thought.

That is a huge missed opportunity. As Alex Petkas noted in my interview with him, at the time of the Founding, Plutarch’s Lives was the most common ancient work on the shelves of the Founders (after the Bible). George Washington and Alexander Hamilton read it frequently, as did others of their generation: the history Plutarch records was a key element in the Founding.¹⁵ So were other authors, with Cicero, Cato, Caesar, and other great men of that sort proving at least as influential as Hume and Voltaire on the Founders, and probably a great deal more so.

So, as the book is on the character of the Founders, and their character was shaped not just by the then-developing concept of gentility but also by the ancient works they read near-religiously, a fuller discussion on what ancient works molded each Founder and how, at least to the extent that such was relevant, would have been very valuable. For whatever reason, Wood left that out nearly entirely.

Still, Revolutionary Characters is a good book. It’s well-written, engaging, and provides a good deal of valuable information about the Founding that puts it in a somewhat different light than most such books. So, it’s worth reading. But the lack of engagement with what molded their characters is a major missed opportunity.

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1. Read here for what I think egalitarian means:

2. What the “gentleman” term means in practice, or at least should mean:

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Alexander,_Lord_Stirling

4. https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/1645

5. Discussed here:

6. This is discussed here:

7. This is a point well made and proven by Huston in The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America

8. Laslett explains this in The World We Have Lost: Further Explored

9. This was somewhat different than Britain, where becoming a baronet put one at the upper ranks of the gentry and was a hereditary title, though not part of the peerage

10.

11. This is all discussed quite well in Washington by Douglas Southall Freeman

12. What “egalitarian” means discussed here:

13. As Gibbon put it in Volume 1 of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus. The vast extent of the Roman empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom. The armies were restrained by the firm but gentle hand of four successive emperors, whose characters and authority commanded involuntary respect. The forms of the civil administration were carefully preserved by Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines, who delighted in the image of liberty, and were pleased with considering themselves as the accountable ministers of the laws.

14. This aspect of Washington’s leadership is covered in various sources, but noted particularly well by Ben Wilson in his podcast episode on Washington’s war leadership: https://www.takeoverpod.com/episodes/george-washington

15. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118316450.ch42