Gordon S. Wood and the Analysis of Political Culture in the American Revolutionary Era

ELDOM has a book exerted such powerful and lasting influence on the interpretation of early American history as Gordon S. Wood's The Creation of the American Republic. Probably no other single work has so dominated the political and constitutional historiography of the American Revolutionary and constitutional eras during the past two decades. Why has the book had such a profound effect, and how is it to be regarded, nearly twenty years after its publication, in the historiographical context of 1987? Part of the explanation for the book's initial impact lies in the timing of its publication and its association with the work of Wood's mentor, Bernard Bailyn. In the early i96os Bailyn published two major works that dramatically altered historians' interpretations of the Revolution. In the introduction to his volume of Revolutionary pamphlets, and then at greater length in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Bailyn argued, eloquently and persuasively, that the key to an understanding of American Revolutionary behavior lay in the controlling influence of a powerful political culture centered in the English dissenting or country tradition. Neither conflicts within colonial society nor British efforts at imperial reform, Bailyn argued, fully explain the onset of the Revolution. Rather, one must look to distinctive colonial habits of mind, assumptions about history and human nature, notions of power and liberty, and theories of conspiracy to understand why the colonists broke with England. ' In conceptualization as well as content, Creation of the American Republic can be seen as an extension, elaborate and creative in its own right, of Bailyn's work, for in it Wood explains how that dissenting tradition was transformed during the years following Independence into a distinctive

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