Who needs the Constitution? Seriously.

In honor of my road trip to Philadelphia this weekend, I downloaded the audiobook version of Gordon S. Wood’s Empire of Liberty, a history of the United States from 1789 to 1816. Empire is the newest volume in the Oxford History of the United States and Wood has won both the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes for his earlier work. Incidentally, Wood’s son was one of my professors in college, although I didn’t make the connection until I saw it on Wikipedia.

Now, I’m fairly new to audiobooks, which make for troublesome blogging since it’s so hard to go back and look up specific quotes. It’s also very hard to tell which lines in the book are direct quotes, since they don’t sound any different from the regular text (unless the narrator does voices, which is annoying for completely different reasons).

In audio form, Wood’s book is more than 30 hours long, and I have quite a ways to go. But the first chapter, which asks why America wanted the Constitution, actually left me wondering why America wanted the Constitution. Why risk replacing the Articles of Confederation, under which the colonies had won a surprising victory over the might British empire in the War of Independence?

Wood suggests the dominant cause of the Founders’ interest in a new constitution was the unruliness of the United States’ ambitious new middle class, which rapidly asserted itself in all of the state legislatures. The Founders were gentlemen and they were deeply concerned that the grasping materialism of the new middle class would destroy the Republic, which could only survive if governed by those who had in mind the national interest rather than parochial concerns. Under the new constitution, only several dozen men — of the best sort — would have a direct say in the nation’s affairs.

From Wood’s account, I found it hard to understand what was so bad about the state legislatures of the 1780s that required the up-ending of the entire political system just five years after the end of the war with Great Britain. There are hints of corruption and narrow-mindedness, yet the system seemed to be quite popular and the economy continued to surge.

All this left me trying to remember what I learned in high school about the origins of the Constitution. It was about Hamilton versus Jefferson. A great commercial power versus an agrarian republic. British tradition versus enlightenment idealism. And some revisionists argued it was all about privileged white men protecting their land and slaves.

Well, I guess I’ve got a new hypothesis to throw in the mix. Oh, and the Bill of Rights? Wood breezes through the ten amendments, suggesting they didn’t really matter until they become the subject of constant litigation in the 20th century.