July 6, 2025
Writes J.K. Baltzersen:
I’ve just read several essays in historian of the American Revolution Gordon Wood’s *The Idea of America*. I in particular recommend “A History of Rights in Early America.” It is a good contribution to the corrective to the perception of the revolution as liberation.
An excerpt:
Since the government, including the king, was only one property holder in a world of property holders, it could not take “private” property for “public” purposes without the consent of the owner of that property; in other words, it had no modern power of eminent domain.
The Revolution was designed to dramatically change all this.
[…]
When in 1775 a frightened Tory warned the people of Massachusetts that a popular revolutionary legislature could become as tyrannical as the crown and deprive the people of their individual liberties, John Adams dismissed the idea out of hand. That the people might tyrannize themselves and harm their own rights and liberties was illogical, declared Adams. “A democratic despotism is a contradiction in terms.”
[…]
The state assemblies began legislating — making and changing law — as never before. Indeed, as Madison complained in 1787, the states passed more laws in the single decade following independence than they had in the entire colonial period.
