Tag: philosophy

Well, have not contributed as frequently as I would have liked to since it is now over a year since my last post. And my initial focus was on the US Civil War. Instead, I’ve spent the last 6 months or so reading texts on the so-called American Revolution. I say so-called because I am not convinced the American colonies’ break from England was necessarily a revolution. Some of the texts I’ve read include works by Gordon Wood, including his first book, The Creation of the American Republic, followed by The Radicalism of the American Revolution, and concluding with Empire of Liberty. After reading all three I decided to email Wood and share some of my misgivings with his analysis and interpretation. The one point I wish to share here is Wood’s claim that after the war of independence the American economy became increasingly dynamic and entrepreneurial, particularly in the North. Ordinary people, the “middle-class”, no longer constrained by monarchical traditions, could now become self-made men, working for a living and making money. Others could translate their innovative ideas in the form of patented inventions, thus contributing to society and economic development.

Wood maintains in Radicalism that this entrepreneurial spirit is just one manifestation of the legacy and dynamism of the Revolution. Wood also maintains in Radicalism that another legacy of the Revolution is the rise of abolitionism and the ultimate downfall of slavery. I would argue instead that the legacy of the Revolution did the exact opposite. This entrepreneurial spirit that Wood praises created as well the social conditions for the invention of Yale graduate Eli Whitney’s cotton gin in 1794. The cotton gin and the opening of America’s first cotton textile mill the year before in 1793 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, the latter an example of the North’s supposedly economic dynamism, helped to foster the conditions instead for the wholesale expansion of slavery and the rise of the plantation cotton economy. The legacy of the Revolution therefore is not, as Wood argues, abolitionism but rather expansionism and slavery.