We’ll learn more about the Founders later this month, when Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon S. Wood visits Raleigh for a speech linked to the N.C. History Project.
I just finished his latest book, which expands, contracts, and modifies previous essays on Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and other revolutionary-era greats.
Early in the book, we learn the significance of the title Revolutionary Characters:
Preoccupied with their honor or their reputation, or, in other words, the way they were represented and viewed by others, these revolutionary leaders became characters, self-fashioned performers in the theater of life. Theirs was not character as we today are apt to understand it, as the inner personality that contains hidden contradictions and flaws. (This present-day view of character is what leads to the current bashing of the founders.) Instead their idea of character was the outer life, the public person trying to show the world that he was living up to the values and duties that the best of the culture imposed on him.
Wood also discusses how the democratic forces the founders unleashed ultimately assured that the United States would never produce a similar group of leaders in the future.
In … a democratic world of progress, Providence, and innumerable isolated but equal individuals, there could be little place for the kind of extraordinary political and intellectual leadership the revolutionary generation had demonstrated. … [B]ecause of all these leveling and democratizing forces, it was no longer possible for prominent gentlemen, in their speeches and writings, to make themselves felt in the way the founders had.
