Gordon Wood’s Enduring Defense of the American Revolution

In 1775, the great British essayist and lexicographer Samuel Johnson entered the political fray over the American Revolution with a scorching pamphlet that attacked the wayward colonials for their disloyalty to the crown and hypocritical talk of freedom. “How is it,” Johnson demanded, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

That sort of question still looms large over many contemporary debates about the American Revolution. “Why should anyone take seriously the founders’ odes to liberty,” the argument may go, “when many of those same founders participated in the vile institution of slavery?”

I got to thinking about Johnson’s pamphlet the other day after I learned about the tragic death of the towering American historian Gordon Wood. The connection came to mind because Wood had offered his own response to such Johnsonian questioning in what was, to my mind, his best book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Here is what Wood had to say:

To focus, as we are today apt to do, on what the Revolution did not accomplish—highlighting and lamenting its failure to abolish slavery and change fundamentally the lot of women—is to miss the great significance of what it did accomplish; indeed, the Revolution made possible the anti-slavery movement and women’s rights movements of the nineteenth century and in fact all our current egalitarian thinking.

The example of John C. Calhoun, the famous South Carolina statesman and inveterate defender of slavery, may help to buttress Wood’s point. In 1848, Calhoun denounced both the Declaration of Independence and its author, Thomas Jefferson, for promulgating the idea that “all men are created equal,” which Calhoun described as “the most false and dangerous of all political errors.” Calhoun was no fool. He well understood that if the Declaration of Independence was ever followed to its logical conclusion, it would spell doom for American slavery.

The great abolitionist hero Frederick Douglass knew that, too. The only difference was that while Calhoun disparaged Jefferson’s words, Douglass celebrated them. By the middle of the 19th century, it was Douglass, and the antislavery movement to which he devoted his life, that truly embodied the radical principles of the American Revolution.

“It was no accident,” Wood wrote, “that Americans in Philadelphia in 1775 formed the first anti-slavery society in the world.” For them, just like for Douglass several decades later, the principles underlying the American Revolution could point nowhere else.

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to issue opinions today in one or more argued cases. As of this writing, we’re still waiting on huge opinions dealing with executive power, birthright citizenship, immigration, and more.

As we wait for those big SCOTUS decisions to drop, I wanted to highlight a fascinating copyright case that’s been bouncing around in the lower courts. If you’re familiar with the tattoo-based reality TV shows Miami Ink or LA Ink, you may also be familiar with the tattoo artist who goes by the name Kat Von D. Well, a few years ago, Von D tattooed an image of Miles Davis on one of her friends. That image was based on a picture of Davis taken by a photographer named Jeff Sedlik. After Sedlik learned about the tattoo, he demanded to be paid a licensing fee. A federal copyright suit eventually followed.

Writing at Courthouse News, Edvard Pettersson lays out the legal and artistic differences between the parties:

Von D testified that no one in the tattoo world gets licenses to use photographs as references for their creations. She maintained her use of the Miles Davis image was “fair use” because it was her interpretation of the image and served an entirely different purpose than Sedlik’s work….

Sedlik, however, turned out to be a stickler when it comes to unlicensed use of his work; he regularly scans the internet to find infringers. He testified how in 2014 he tracked down another tattoo artist who had posted on social media a tattoo he had done based on the same Miles Davis photo.

I am sympathetic to Von D’s fair use argument in this case. And while it’s not exactly pertinent to this particular dispute, I might add that I am sympathetic to the legal plights of tattoo artists in general, as this venerable profession has long suffered under bogus regulations and other unjustifiable government interference. Indeed, it was not until 2010 that a federal judge finally held that “the tattoo itself, the process of tattooing, and the business of tattooing are forms of pure expression fully protected by the First Amendment.”

In any event, Sedlik v. Von Drachenberg looks to be a copyright case to watch, as its final outcome may have costly implications for many tattooists at work today.