Empire of Liberty
A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815
by Gordon S. Wood
Oxford, 800 pp., $35
Rare has been the multi-installment, multi-authored history of the United States that has offered the consistently authoritative and readable installments being published in the long-ongoing Oxford History of the United States, of which Gordon S. Wood's book is the eighth segment.
The first installment, Robert Middlekauff's The Glorious Cause, on the years of the Revolution, appeared in 1982 and is old enough to have been republished in a revised and expanded edition. Yet there's more to come. The pre-Revolutionary years are still to be covered, as are the decades immediately after the Civil War. Only one subject installment, on American foreign relations, has appeared. We'll be lucky to live long enough to see the completion of the series. And truly so, inasmuch as it includes its installments three Pulitzer Prize recipients, winners of the Bancroft, Parkman, and other prizes, and best-seller list entries.
In this respect, there has never been a project like it. And this installment is a superb companion to its worthy predecessors.
Wood's contribution spans the quarter-century between the implementation of the Constitution of 1789 and the close of the War of 1812, years that commenced in exhilarating promise and ended in confusion. The United States had emerged from its second war with Great Britain comparatively unscathed and in a buoyant mood after Andrew Jackson's victory at New Orleans. But the generation of great leaders of the nation's founding was slowly fading from ...
