How the Americans Became a Constitutional People

This latest podcast is a conversation with Gordon Wood, the great historian of the American Founding, on his new book, Power and Liberty, which details how Americans drafted, ratified, and incorporated written constitutions as fundamental laws into their politics and government.

On the creation of the American Constitution, Wood observes, "Instead of reforming the Articles [of Confederation], they throw them out and create an entirely new government, the federal Constitution that we have with us today, something that nobody in 1776 even imagined in their wildest dreams. I know of no one in 1776 that anticipated the kind of federal government that emerged 10 years later. Something awful had to happen in those 10 years to explain the Constitution. I find that it's harder to explain the Constitution than it is to explain the Revolution itself."

Wood also takes on the 1619 Project: "What's interesting about the Revolution is that the Revolution makes slavery a problem for the first time in Western civilization and leads to a massive assault on the slave systems of the New World. . . . The Northern states, almost immediately in 1776, mount a massive assault on slavery, which had been legal in all of these Northern states. By 1804, all the Northern states have abolished slavery, the first states in the history of the world, or at least the modern world, to abolish slavery."

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