The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026 offers an occasion to reflect on how the American Revolution forged not only a nation but a people. That opportunity makes the work of Gordon Wood as salient as it has ever been. Wood, among America’s most distinguished historians, has devoted his career to elucidating how the revolutionary generation not only established a nation but shaped the identity of its people. His work reveals that the Revolution was far more than a mere transfer of power; it was a radical transformation that forged enduring principles of liberty and equality. In The Creation of the American Republic and Pulitzer prize-winning The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Wood has demonstrated that the revolutionary experience remains foundational to understanding the American ethos.

　　Wood’s brilliance lies in his capacity to place the Founders’ decisions within the constraints and opportunities of their time while illuminating their enduring relevance. Wood possesses a particular capacity to anchor his analysis in the lived realities of the Founders, demonstrating how their ideas sprang not from our hindsight-laden narratives but from the constraints and opportunities they faced. This is most evident in his treatment of slavery. Wood reveals how the Revolution and its Enlightenment ideals cast a new moral light on an institution that had persisted for millennia. The Founders therefore recognized slavery as a moral evil, but their response to this evil was hampered by an incorrect factual belief. Misled by the assumption that slavery was economically unsustainable and nearing its natural end, they underestimated how technological advances like the cotton gin would revitalize the institution. By situating their choices in the uncertainties of their time, Wood compels us to judge the Founders not by our standards but by their lived context.

　　Even more importantly, Wood demonstrates how the Founders’ experiences echo through the centuries, shaping not only our legal and political structures but also our very frameworks of thought. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, this later contribution is all the more relevant. The revolutionary generation not only broke with an empire but forged new ways of thinking about liberty, democracy, and governance that remain foundational to American identity. Wood’s explication of these intellectual legacies helps us understand not just who they were but who we are.

　　In his most recent book, Power and Liberty, Wood does for American constitutionalism what his teacher Bernard Bailyn did for the American Revolution in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. He demonstrates how the Constitution grew organically from the debates about political power animating the revolutionary generation. While constitutional lawyers often view the Constitution as an abstract text, Wood reminds us of how it was forged through historical struggles, and how those struggles continue to inform how we deploy it. For constitutional law, the past is never truly past. It is present in our debates, in our doctrines, and in our very understanding of governance.

　　One of Wood’s key contributions is his analysis of the Constitution as a written document—a foundational concept of constitutional law since Marbury v. Madison. Wood traces this commitment to writtenness to the experiential logic of the Revolution itself. The colonists’ debates with Britain revealed the instability of an unwritten constitution, where fundamental premises were endlessly debated but never settled. This experience of ambiguity naturally led the Framers to demand a written Constitution—something solid, clear, and enduring. As Wood in Power and Liberty quotes the observation of William Paterson,constitutions drafted after the Revolution were notable for their “written exactitude and precision.”

　　Indeed, this precision helps explain why the Constitution, though enacted in the name of the people, is written in the language of law, as Mike Rappaport and I have argued. Legal language, with its technical rigor and interpretive rules, provided a foundation for the clarity and exactitude prompted by the revolutionary experience with ambiguity and lack of clarity. Thus, when constitutional lawyers today draw careful inferences from the text and apply interpretive rules, they are not merely engaging in legalistic exercises but continuing a tradition rooted in the very origins of American constitutionalism.

　　Wood’s scholarship can also help us understand how the revolutionary experience transformed the very meaning of a constitution. In Britain, as Wood aptly quotesLord Bolingbroke, a constitution was merely “an assemblage of laws, institutions, and customs,” with no authority above ordinary legislation. By contrast, the Americans revolting against Parliament conceived of a constitution as supreme law, binding even the legislature.

　　This shift created a political conundrum. If a constitution were to restrain legislatures, it could not be enacted by ordinary legislative processes. From this necessity arose the idea of special conventions to ratify state constitutions. These conventions reinforced the view that constitutions were acts of the people themselves. The majestic preamble of the federal Constitution, beginning with “We the People,” is a direct result of this revolutionary logic.

　　Wood’s analysis of how the revolutionary generation distinguished American constitutions, state and federal, from the British constitution sheds light on a critical contemporary debate in constitutional law. Jonathan Gienapp, in his provocative book The Second Creation, argues that the Constitution should not be seen as fixed, drawing an analogy to the British constitution’s fluidity. Yet Wood’s insights suggest otherwise; his revolutionary focus on writing, precision, and ratification by special assemblies underscores the idea that the Constitution’s meaning was intended to be fixed at its creation.

　　Moreover, sovereignty itself underwent a transformation. In Britain, sovereignty resided in Parliament, but the American Revolution located it in the people. This change makes it more implausible to argue that the Constitution’s meaning was unsettled at enactment. As Wood quotes Samuel Adams declaring in 1768, “In all free States, the Constitution is fixed. And as the supreme Legislature derives its powers and authority from the Constitution, it cannot overleap the bounds of it without destroying its own foundation.”

　　One of the broader lessons I take from Wood is the power of political theorizing. The logic of politics can, at times, overcome the passions of politics.

　　A written constitution enacted by the people also solved another problem exposed by the Revolution: the problem of divided powers. British critics claimed the colonists’ demand for divided authority between parliament and the colonies created an imperium in imperio, violating the principle that sovereignty must be in Wood’s summary “final, supreme, and indivisible.” But by locating ultimate sovereignty in the people, the Constitution allowed the Americans to delegate powers as they chose, thereby dividing sovereignty. This innovation, which Wood aptly describes, enabled the Framers to “split the atom of sovereignty,” granting enumerated powers to the federal government while leaving the residuum to the states.

　　In my view, this principle of enumerated powers has direct relevance to today’s debates over the scope of federal authority. Those who argue for plenary federal powers overlook the Framers’ conceptual commitment to enumerated powers as a reflection of the sovereignty of the people. For the revolutionaries, enumeration was not merely a technical constraint but a profound assertion of popular will.

　　Creating a supreme fundamental law for the people leads directly to the idea of judicial review. It is no surprise that state constitutions embraced judicial review even before the federal Constitution, because the very nature of the Constitution suggested judicial enforcement. As Wood quotes James Iredell, a constitution was no longer “a mere imaginary thing, about which ten thousand different opinions may be formed, but a written document to which all may have recourse, and to which, therefore, the judges cannot wilfully blind themselves.” Their revolutionary experience created a type of constitution that, unlike the British constitution, was amenable to running as law in the courts.

　　One of the broader lessons I take from Wood is the power of political theorizing. Judges in colonial America had a poor reputation, often viewed as merely the British Crown’s elite enforcers. However, the dialectic of fundamental law in the new republic restored their essential role as guardians of constitutional principles. The logic of politics can, at times, overcome the passions of politics.

　　Wood’s analysis of this experiential logic dismantles the claim that judicial review was a usurpation by the Marshall Court. More interesting, however, is the nature of judicial review that Wood argues flowed from revolutionary experience. It did not make the judiciary the sole arbiter of constitutional meaning. The people, having actively engaged in revolutionary constitutional debates, expected shared interpretive authority. Thus, Framers like Madison believed their representatives had a “concurrent right to expound the Constitution.” This insight is also highly relevant to modern debates, supporting the constitutional stance known as Departmentalism: courts can expound the Constitution in cases before them, but officials in the legislative and executive branches can also do so as part of their duties.

　　Wood also describes the character of judicial review at the Founding. While judicial review followed logically from revolutionary thought, it was not the robust judicial supremacy we see today. Many Framers, including George Washington, believed in a presumption of constitutionality, with laws to be invalidated only if clearly unconstitutional. Wood argues that the Marshall Court later collapsed the distinction between fundamental law and regular law.

　　I see more continuity between the Marshall Court and the other Founders in this respect than Wood. To be sure, on the specific question of the standard for judicial review, I agree with Wood and have argued myself in the Duty of Clarity, that at the time of the Constitution’s enactment, it was recognized that a statute had to be plainly and clearly invalid to be unconstitutional. But Chief Justice Marshall agreed with that standard at least in theory when he himself acknowledged that the judiciary should not decline to follow a statute when the incongruity with the Constitution was subject to doubt.

　　More generally, in interpreting the content of the Constitution much like ordinary law, specifically like statutes, the Marshall Court was not innovating but following a strand of thought already present at the Founding. In Federalist #78, Publius had already likened the judicial task of measuring statutes against the Constitution to that of comparing statutes to see which applies, thus analogizing statutory to constitutional interpretation. Moreover, Wood himself quotes Hamilton as he asserts in his opinion on the constitutionality of the Bank of the United States that the Constitution should be interpreted according to “the usual and established rules of interpretation.” The opinion was written in 1791—substantially before Marbury. The Constitution’s own Supremacy Clause itself refers to a previous interpretive legal rule applied to statues by the using the phrase“any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.” That phrase was a legal term of art used in statutes to block another legal rule that would have required courts to try to harmonize conflicting rules. Its presence demonstrates that the Framers thought the ordinary rules of statutory interpretation were applicable to the Constitution.

　　In my view, at the time the Constitution was enacted, judicial review was already becoming surrounded by the interpretive rules governing other laws. It had been recognized that as law, constitutions could not be seen as created ex nihilo. Instead, like all law, it must be understood against the rich backdrop of prior jurisprudence.

　　But, whatever the resolution of this particular issue, Wood here raises a central challenge for originalism: while history flows like a river, originalism must try to bottle the flow at a particular moment. How do we pinpoint at a particular time the meaning of complex concepts, like judicial or executive power, that may be evolving?

　　We live in difficult times for writing history, as Wood observes in the introduction to Power and Liberty. Today, historians question even the possibility of objectivity. Yet our republic was founded on truths that require evidence as well as those that are self-evident. It is, therefore, an essential task for historians of the early republic to make the case for those enduring truths. In this endeavor, Gordon Wood has succeeded as much as any historian in our nation’s history.