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The Story of American Freedom
--------------------------------------------------
By ERIC FONER
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Copyright © 1998 Eric Foner. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-393-04665-6
--------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
Introduction......................................
................xiii
1. The Birth of American
Freedom.....................................3
The Freeborn
Englishman..........................................3
Democratizing
Freedom...........................................12
2. To Call It
Freedom...............................................29
Slavery and the
Republic........................................29
We the
People...................................................37
3. An Empire of
Liberty.............................................47
Democracy in
America............................................50
Labor, Free and
Slave...........................................58
4. The Boundaries of Freedom in the Young
Republic..................69
The Imagined
Community..........................................69
Battles at the
Boundaries.......................................79
5. A New Birth of
Freedom...........................................95
"We All Declare for Liberty"..........
-> SNETNEWS Mailing List
The Story of American Freedom
--------------------------------------------------
By ERIC FONER
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Copyright © 1998 Eric Foner. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-393-04665-6
--------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
Introduction......................................................xiii
1. The Birth of American
Freedom.....................................3
The Freeborn
Englishman..........................................3
Democratizing
Freedom...........................................12
2. To Call It
Freedom...............................................29
Slavery and the
Republic........................................29
We the
People...................................................37
3. An Empire of
Liberty.............................................47
Democracy in
America............................................50
Labor, Free and
Slave...........................................58
4. The Boundaries of Freedom in the Young
Republic..................69
The Imagined
Community..........................................69
Battles at the
Boundaries.......................................79
5. A New Birth of
Freedom...........................................95
"We All Declare for
Liberty"....................................95
"What Is
Freedom?".............................................100
6. Liberty of Contract and Its
Discontents.........................115
Freedom in the Gilded
Age......................................116
Labor and the
Republic.........................................124
Redrawing the
Boundaries.......................................130
7. Progressive
Freedom.............................................139
The Varieties of Economic
Freedom..............................141
Freedom and the Progressive
State..............................152
8. The Birth of Civil
Liberties....................................163
World War I and the Crisis of
Freedom..........................168
Who Is an
American?............................................185
9. The New Deal and the Redefinition of
Freedom....................195
Security and
Freedom...........................................196
"A New Conception of
America"..................................210
10. Fighting for
Freedom...........................................219
The Four
Freedoms..............................................221
Patriotic
Assimilation.........................................236
11. Cold War
Freedom...............................................249
The Free
World.................................................252
The Triumph of Consumer
Freedom................................262
12. Sixties
Freedom................................................275
The Freedom
Movement...........................................276
The New
Left...................................................287
The Rights
Revolution..........................................299
13. Conservative
Freedom...........................................307
The Rebirth of
Conservatism....................................308
The Reagan Revolution and
After................................320
Notes..............................................................333
Acknowledgments....................................................395
Index..............................................................397
Chapter One
The Birth of
American Freedom
AMERICAN FREEDOM was born in revolution. During
the struggle for independence inherited ideas of
liberty were transformed, new ones emerged, and
the definition of those entitled to enjoy what the
Constitution called "the blessings of liberty" was
challenged and extended. The Revolution bequeathed
to future generations an enduring yet
contradictory legacy. Its vision of the new nation
as an asylum for freedom in a world overrun by
oppression resonates in the political culture to
this day. Yet the United States, a nation
conceived in liberty, harbored a rapidly growing
slave population, belying the founders' confident
affirmation of freedom as a universal human
birthright.
The Freeborn Englishman
"Liberty," of course, did not suddenly enter the
American vocabulary in 1776; indeed, few words
were as ubiquitous in the trans-Atlantic political
discourse of the eighteenth century. Colonial
America was heir to many understandings of
liberty, some as old as the city-states of ancient
Greece, others as new as the Enlightenment. Some
laid the foundations for modern conceptions of
freedom; others are quite unfamiliar today.
One common definition in British North America
defined freedom less as a political or social
status than as a spiritual condition. In the
ancient world, lack of self-control was understood
as a form of slavery, the antithesis of the free
life. "Show me a man who isn't a slave," wrote
Seneca. "One is a slave to sex, another to money,
another to ambition." This understanding of
freedom as submission to a moral code was central
to the Christian cosmology that suffused the world
view of the early colonists. Wherever it
flourished, Christianity enshrined the idea of
liberation, but as a spiritual condition rather
than a worldly one. Since the Fall, man had been
prone to succumb to his lusts and passions.
Freedom meant abandoning this life of sin to
embrace the teachings of Christ. "Where the Spirit
of the Lord is," declares the New Testament,
"there is liberty." In this definition, servitude
and freedom were mutually reinforcing, not
contradictory states, since those who accepted the
teachings of Christ simultaneously became "free
from sin" and "servants to God."
The Puritan settlers of colonial
Massachusetts, who believed their colony the
embodiment of true Christianity, planted this
spiritual definition of freedom on American soil.
In a 1645 speech to the Massachusetts legislature
that epitomized Puritan conceptions of freedom,
John Winthrop, the colony's governor,
distinguished sharply between "natural liberty,"
which suggested "a liberty to evil" and "moral
liberty ... a liberty to do only what is good."
This definition of freedom as flowing from
self-denial and moral choice was quite compatible
with severe restraints on freedom of speech,
religion, movement, and personal behavior.
Individual desires must give way to the needs of
the community, and "Christian liberty" meant
submission not only to the will of God but to
secular authority as well, to a well-understood
set of interconnected responsibilities and duties,
a submission no less complete for being voluntary.
The most common civil offense in the courts of
colonial New England was "contempt of authority"
The unrestrained individual enjoying natural
rights, whom later generations would imagine as
the embodiment of freedom, struck these Puritan
settlers as the incarnation of anarchy, the
antithesis of liberty. "When each man hath liberty
to follow his own imagination," declared the
Puritan minister Thomas Hooker, disaster
inevitably resulted, for "all prejudice the public
good."
Communal authority was always weaker in the
more secular colonies to the south of the Puritan
commonwealth. Even in New England, as jeremiads of
the early eighteenth century vigorously lamented,
willingness to accept community regimentation in
the name of liberty soon waned. By the 1750s, the
idea of New England's special place in God's plan
for humanity had been subsumed in the more general
celebration of the entire Anglo-American
Protestant world as a bulwark against tyranny and
popery. Yet the Christian understanding of liberty
as spiritual salvation survived to the Revolution
and, indeed, our own time. The religious revivals
of the late colonial era, known to historians as
the Great Awakening, reinforced this understanding
of freedom. On the eve of independence, ministers
like Jonathan Boucher were insisting that "true
liberty" meant "a liberty to do every thing that
is right, and being restrained from doing any
thing that is wrong," not "a right to do every
thing that we please."
This equation of liberty with moral action
flourished as well in a secularized form in the
Atlantic world of the eighteenth century. If
religious liberty meant obedience to God, "civil
liberty" rested on obedience to law. As far back
as the ancient world, Aristotle had cautioned men
not to "think it slavery to live according to the
rule of the constitution." The law was liberty's
"salvation," not its adversary. Modern
philosophers of liberty also distinguished sharply
between "unrestrained freedom" and "a life lived
under the rule of law." Liberty, wrote John Locke,
meant not leaving every person free to do as he
desired, but "having a standing rule to live by,
common to every one of that society, and made by
the legislative power." As Locke's formulation
suggests, liberty in its civil form depended on
obedience to the law, so long as statutes were
promulgated by elected representatives and did not
operate in an arbitrary manner. Here lay the
essence of the idea of British liberty, a central
element of social and political thought on both
sides of the Atlantic. Until the 1770s, most
colonists believed themselves part of the freest
political system mankind had ever known.
By the eighteenth century, the "invented
tradition" of the freeborn Englishman had become a
central feature of Anglo-American political
culture and a major building block in the sense of
nationhood then being consolidated in Britain. By
self-definition, the British nation was a
community of free individuals and its past a
"history of liberty." Belief in freedom as the
common heritage of all Britons and the British
empire as the world's sole repository of liberty
had helped to legitimize the colonization of North
America in the first place. Subsequently, it
served to cast imperial wars against Catholic
France and Spain as struggles between liberty and
tyranny, a definition widely disseminated in the
colonies as well as the mother country. British
freedom celebrated the rule of law, the right to
live under legislation to which one's community
had consented, restraints on the arbitrary
exercise of political authority, and rights like
trial by jury enshrined in the common law. It was
closely identified with the Protestant religion
and was invoked most stridently to contrast
Britons with the "servile" subjects of Catholic
countries.
Of course, the idea of freedom as the natural
condition of mankind was hardly unknown in a
nation that had produced the writings of John
Milton and John Locke. But British freedom was
anything but universal. Nationalist, often
xenophobic, it viewed nearly every other nation on
earth as "enslaved"--to popery, tyranny, or
barbarism. "Freedom ...in no other land will
thrive," wrote the poet John Dryden; "Freedom an
English subject's sole prerogative." Britons saw
no contradiction between proclaiming themselves
citizens of a land of freedom precisely when
British ships were transporting millions of
Africans to bondage in the New World. "Britons
never, never, never will be slaves," ran the
popular song, "Rule, Britannia." It did not say
that Britons could not own slaves, since for most
of the eighteenth century, almost no one seemed to
consider Africans entitled to the rights of
Englishmen.
Nor was British liberty incompatible with wide
gradations in personal freedom at home--a
hierarchical, aristocratic society with a
restricted "political nation" (those entitled to
vote and hold office). The common law's
protections applied to everyone, but property
qualifications and other restrictions limited the
eighteenth-century electorate to less than 5
percent of the adult male population. (The "right
of magistracy" wrote Joseph Priestley in his Essay
on the First Principles of Government [1768], was
not essential to British freedom. Men "may enjoy
civil liberty, but not political liberty.") Nor
did British law view laborers as wholly free.
Vagrancy statutes punished those without visible
means of support, "master and servant" laws
required strict obedience of employees, and
breaches of labor contracts carried criminal
penalties. The very navy whose domination of the
high seas secured the nation's freedom from
foreign domination was manned by sailors seized by
press gangs from the streets of London and
Liverpool. In this sense, British freedom was the
lineal descendant of an understanding of liberty
derived from the Middle Ages, when "liberties"
meant formal privileges such as self-government or
exemption from taxation granted to particular
groups by contract, charter, or royal decree. Only
those who enjoyed the "freedom of the city," for
example, could engage in certain economic
activities. This medieval understanding of liberty
assumed a hierarchical world in which individual
rights in a modern sense barely existed, and
political and economic entitlements were enjoyed
by some social classes and denied to others.
Echoes of this old, restricted idea of liberty
survived in early America--for example, in New
York City's rule limiting the right to work in
certain trades to those who held the legal status
of "freeman."
Whatever its limitations and exclusions, it
would be impossible, as the historian Gordon Wood
writes, "to overemphasize the degree to which
eighteenth-century Englishmen reveled in their
worldwide reputation for freedom," an observation
as applicable to the American colonies as to the
mother country. One could, if one desired,
subdivide British liberty into its component
parts, as many writers of the era were prone to
do. Political liberty meant the right to
participate in public affairs; civil liberty
protection of one's person and property against
encroachment by government; personal liberty
freedom of conscience and movement; religious
liberty the right of Protestants to worship as
they chose. But the whole exceeded the sum of
these parts. British liberty was simultaneously a
collection of specific rights, a national
characteristic, and a state of mind. So ubiquitous
and protean was the concept that what would later
seem inconsistent elements managed happily to
coexist.
British freedom, for example, incorporated
contradictory attitudes about political power. On
the one hand, the idea's historical development
was inseparable from the rise of the nation-state,
and reached its apotheosis precisely when Britain
emerged as the world's leading imperial power. At
the same time, restraints on the exercise of
political authority were central to British
freedom. Power and liberty were widely believed to
be natural antagonists, and in their balanced
constitution and the principle that no man, even
the king, is above the law, Britons claimed to
have devised the best means of preventing
political absolutism. These ideas sank deep roots
not only within the political nation but far more
broadly in British society. Laborers, sailors, and
artisans spoke the language of common law rights
and British freedom as insistently as pamphleteers
and Parliamentarians. By the eighteenth century,
the category of free person had become not simply
a legal status, as in medieval times, but a
powerful element of popular ideology. On both
sides of the Atlantic, liberty emerged as "the
battle cry of the rebellious." Frequent crowd
actions protesting infringements on traditional
rights gave concrete expression to the definition
of liberty as resistance to tyranny. "We are
Free-men--British subjects--Not Born Slaves," was
a rallying cry of the Regulators, who protested
the underrepresentation of western settlements in
the South Carolina legislature during the 1760s.
This tension between freedom as the power to
participate in public affairs and freedom as a
collection of individual rights requiring
protection against governmental interference helps
define the difference between two political
languages that flourished in the Anglo-American
world. One, termed by scholars "republicanism"
(although few in eighteenth-century England used
the word, which conjured up memories of the time
when Charles I was beheaded), celebrated active
participation in public life as the essence of
liberty. Tracing its lineage back to Renaissance
Florence and beyond that to the ancient world,
republicanism held that as a social being, man
reached his highest fulfillment in setting aside
self-interest to pursue the common good.
Republican freedom could be expansive and
democratic, as when it spoke of the common rights
of the entire community. It also had an exclusive,
class-based dimension, in its assumption that only
property-owning citizens possessed the quality
known as "virtue"--understood in the eighteenth
century not simply as a persona], moral quality
but as a willingness to subordinate private
passions and desires to the public good. "Only a
virtuous people are capable of freedom," wrote
Benjamin Franklin.
If republican liberty was a civic and social
quality, which could only be enjoyed by citizens
of a "free state" (one ruled in accordance with
the consent of the governed), the freedom
celebrated by eighteenth-century liberalism was
essentially individual and private. According to
John Locke, the founding father of modern
liberalism, government is established to offer
security to the "life, liberties, and estates"
that are the natural rights of all mankind, and
essentially should be limited to this task.
Liberty, for Locke and his eighteenth-century
disciples, meant not civic involvement but
personal autonomy--"not to be subject to the
inconstant, uncertain, unknown Arbitrary Will of
another Man." Protecting freedom required
shielding a realm of private life and personal
concerns--including family relations, religious
preferences, and economic activity--from
interference by the state. The public good was
less an ideal to be consciously pursued by
government than the outcome of free individuals'
pursuit of their myriad private ambitions.
Liberalism, as the historian Pierre Manent
puts it, severed the "citizen" from the "man" the
political realm of life from the social. Critics
condemned it as an excuse for selfishness and lack
of civic-mindedness. "The freedom... that I love,"
declared Edmund Burke, "is not solitary,
unconnected, individual, selfish Liberty. As if
every Man was to regulate the whole of his conduct
by his own will. The Liberty I mean is social
liberty." Yet it is easy to understand
liberalism's appeal in the hierarchical Atlantic
world of the eighteenth century. It called into
question all the legal privileges and governmental
arrangements that impeded individual advancement,
from the economic prerogatives of chartered
corporations to legalized religious intolerance.
And in its starting point, that mankind possessed
natural rights no government could violate,
liberalism opened the door to the disenfranchised,
women, and even slaves, to challenge limitations
on their own freedom.
Eventually, liberalism and republicanism would
come to be seen as alternative and contradictory
understandings of freedom. In the eighteenth
century, however, these languages overlapped and
often reinforced one another. Many leaders of the
Revolution seem to the modern eye simultaneously
republican (in their concern for the public good
and citizens' obligations to the polity) and
liberal (in their preoccupation with individual
rights). Both political ideologies could inspire a
commitment to constitutional government, freedom
of speech and religion, and restraints on
arbitrary power. Both emphasized the security of
property as a foundation of freedom. The pervasive
influence of Protestant morality, moreover,
tempered what later would come to be seen as
liberalism's amoralism.
Certainly, in the colonial era, "liberty"
stood as a meeting point between liberal and
republican understandings of government and
society. There seemed no necessary contradiction
between the personal freedom central to liberalism
and the public liberty of the republican
tradition. Moreover, whether liberal, republican,
or some combination of the two, most
eighteenth-century commentators assumed that only
certain kinds of persons were fully capable of
enjoying the benefits and exercising the rights of
freedom. On both sides of the Atlantic, it was an
axiom of political thought that dependents lacked
a will of their own and thus were incapable of
participating in public affairs. Liberty, wrote
the influential political theorist Richard Price,
rested on "one general idea ...the idea of
self-direction or self-government." Those who did
not control their own lives ought not to have a
voice in governing the state. Political freedom
required economic independence.
Property, therefore, was "interwoven" with
eighteenth-century understandings of freedom, as
the New York publisher John Peter Zenger put it in
1735. The independence entailed by property was an
indispensable basis of liberty. Dr. Samuel
Johnson's dictionary defined "independence" as
"freedom" and Thomas Jefferson insisted that
dependence "begets subservience and venality,
suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit
tools for the designs of ambition." Hence the
ubiquity of property qualifications for voting in
Britain and the colonies. The "true reason" for
such requirements, Sir William Blackstone
explained in his Commentaries on the Laws of
England (1765-69), was that men without property
would inevitably fall "under the immediate
domination of others." Lacking a will of their
own, their votes would threaten the "general
liberty." Not only personal dependence, as in the
case of a domestic servant, but working for wages
was widely viewed as disreputable. In seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century England, wage labor was
associated with servility and loss of liberty;
only those who controlled their own labor could be
regarded as fully free. British popular ballads
and folk tales romanticized vagabonds, gypsies,
highwaymen, even beggars as more free than those
who worked for wages. Many years would pass before
the idea that wage labor was compatible with
genuine freedom gained broad public acceptance.
Those who drew up plans to colonize British
North America expected to reproduce the
hierarchical social structure of the mother
country. But from the earliest days of settlement,
migrants from Britain and the Continent held the
promise of the New World to be liberation from the
economic inequalities and widespread economic
dependence of the Old. John Smith had barely
landed at Jamestown in 1607 when he observed that
in America, "every man may be master and owner of
his owne labour and land." During the whole of the
colonial era, most free immigrants expected to
achieve economic autonomy, an anticipation
encouraged by promotional literature that lured
settlers by publicizing the notion of the New
World as a place of exceptional opportunity for
the acquisition of property. The visions of
liberty that emigrants brought to colonial America
always included the promise of economic
independence and the ability to pass a freehold on
to one's children.
Defining freedom in terms of economic
independence drew a sharp line between those
classes capable of fully enjoying its benefits and
those who were not. In the eighteenth century,
economic autonomy was far beyond the reach of most
Britons. Even in colonial America, most of the
population was not, by this standard, truly free.
Lacking a hereditary aristocracy like that of
England, colonists prided themselves on having "no
rank above that of freeman." But there were many
ranks below. The half million slaves who labored
in the mainland colonies on the eve of
independence obviously stood outside the circle of
free persons. For free women, whose civic identity
was subsumed within that of their fathers and
husbands, and who had no legal claim to their own
labor, opportunities for economic autonomy barely
existed. Women, moreover, were deemed by men
deficient in rationality, courage, and the broad
capacity for self-determination--the qualities
necessary in the public-spirited citizen. Indeed,
the ideal of independence was partly defined by
gender; whether in the economy or polity, autonomy
was a masculine trait, dependence the normal lot
of women.
Even among the white male population, it is
sometimes forgotten, many varieties of partial
freedom coexisted in colonial America, including
indentured servants, apprentices, domestic
laborers, transported convicts, and sailors
impressed into service in the Royal Navy. Freedom
in colonial America existed along a continuum from
the slave, stripped of all rights, to the
independent property owner, and during a lifetime
an individual might well occupy more than one
place on this spectrum. Indentured servants, who
voluntarily surrendered their freedom for a
specified time, comprised a major part of the
nonslave labor force throughout the colonial era.
As late as the early 1770s, nearly half the
immigrants who arrived in America from England and
Scotland had entered into contracts for a fixed
period of labor in exchange for passage.
Indentured servants often worked in the fields
alongside slaves. Like slaves, servants could be
bought and sold, were subject to corporal
punishment, and their obligation to fulfill their
duties ("specific performance," in legal
terminology) was enforced by the courts. "Many
Negroes are better used," complained one female
indentured servant in 1756; she went on to
describe being forced to work "day and night
...then tied up and whipped." But, of course,
unlike slaves, servants could look forward to
freedom from their servitude. Assuming they
survived their period of labor (and many in the
early years did not), servants would be released
from dependency and receive "freedom dues"
Servants, a Pennsylvania judge remarked in 1793,
occupied "a middle rank between slaves and
freemen."
The prevalence of so many less than free
workers underpinned the widespread reality of
economic independence, and therefore freedom, for
propertied male heads of households. This was most
obvious in the case of slaveholding planters, who
already equated freedom with mastership, but also
true of the countless artisans in northern cities
who owned a slave or two and employed indentured
servants and apprentices. (In New York City and
Philadelphia, artisans and tradesmen, who prided
themselves on their own independence, dominated
the ranks of slaveholders.) And the vaunted
independence of the yeoman farmer depended in
considerable measure on the labor of dependent
women. The popular adage, "Women's work is never
done," was literally true; the cooking, cleaning,
sewing, and assistance in agricultural chores by
farmers' wives and daughters often spelled the
difference between self-sufficiency and economic
dependence. In the household-based economy of
colonial America, autonomy rested on command over
others. "Freedom and dependence," wrote the
Pennsylvania jurist James Wilson in 1774, were
"opposite and irreconcilable terms." Wilson failed
to note that since the free man was, by
definition, master of a household, freedom and
dependence were also inextricably connected.
The eighteenth century witnessed an increase
in social stratification in colonial America and
the rise of a wealthy gentry exercising more and
more dominance over civil, religious, and economic
institutions, and demanding deference from their
social inferiors. Nonetheless, by the time of the
Revolution, the majority of the non-slave male
population were farmers who owned their own land.
With the household still the center of economic
production, the propertyless were a far smaller
proportion of the population than in Britain and
wage labor far less prevalent. Among the free
population, property was more widely distributed
than anywhere in Europe. In colonial America,
writes one historian, lived "thousands of the
freest individuals the Western world had ever
known."
Thus, an abhorrence of personal dependence and
the equation of freedom with autonomy sank deep
roots in British North America not simply as part
of an ideological inheritance, but because these
beliefs accorded with social reality--a wide
distribution of productive property that made a
modicum of economic independence part of the lived
experience of large numbers of colonists. What the
French essayist Hector St. John Crevecoeur
identified in 1782 as the hallmark of American
society--its "pleasing uniformity of decent
competence"--would form the material basis for the
later definition of the United States as a
"producer's republic," as well as its corollary,
that widespread ownership of property was the
social precondition of freedom.
Democratizing Freedom
with its wide distribution of property (and
therefore a broadly participatory political life),
weak aristocratic power, and an established church
far less powerful than in Britain, colonial
America was a society with deep democratic
potential. But it took the struggle for
independence to transform this society not only
into a republican polity without a king but into a
nation that enshrined equality and opportunity as
its raisons d'etre and proudly proclaimed itself
an asylum for liberty for all mankind. The
Revolution unleashed public debates and political
and social struggles that democratized the concept
of freedom.
The American Revolution was fought in the name
of liberty. On the road to independence, no word
was more frequently invoked, although it rarely
received precise definition. There were liberty
trees, liberty poles, Sons and Daughters of
Liberty, and an endless parade of pamphlets with
titles like A Chariot of Liberty and Oration on
the Beauties of Liberty (the latter, a sermon
delivered in Boston by Joseph Allen in 1772,
became the most popular public address of the
years before independence). Throughout the
colonies, British measures like the Stamp Act of
1765 were greeted by mock funerals of liberty,
carefully choreographed spectacles in which a
coffin was carried to a burial ground only to have
the occupant miraculously revived at the last
moment (whereupon the assembled multitude repaired
to a tavern to celebrate). Liberty was more than
an idea for those resisting British authority; it
was a passion. Sober men spoke longingly of the
"sweets of liberty" Ail sorts of hopes and
expectations came to be embodied in the idea of
freedom. Commented a British emigrant who arrived
in Maryland early in 1775: "They are all liberty
mad."
Americans during the age of revolution did not
start out to transform the rights of Englishmen
into the rights of man. The very first colonial
charter--Virginia's, in 1606--had granted settlers
the same "Liberties, Franchises, and Immunities"
as if they resided "in our Realm of England." And
a century and a half later, American colonists
shared in the intensification of British
nationalism, reaffirming their loyalty to king and
constitution. Resistance to British revenue
measures of the 1760s began by invoking Americans'
"rights as British subjects" within the framework
established by the British constitution, "the best
that ever existed among men." At the outset,
opposition to imperial policies invoked
time-honored British principles (no taxation
without representation, trial by jury) and
employed modes of resistance long familiar in the
mother country, from petitions and pamphlets to
crowd activity. British measures of the 1760s like
the Stamp Act, Quartering Act, and Townshend
Duties were sometimes assailed in terms of natural
rights, but far more frequently in the name of the
"rights and privileges of freeborn Englishmen,"
especially freedom from arbitrary government,
security of property, and the right to live in a
political community to whose laws a people,
through their representatives, had given consent.
As late as 1774, appeals to natural law were often
combined with a hodgepodge of other claims to
liberty, as in the "ancient, constitutional, and
chartered Rights" invoked by Virginians. In the
same year, the first Continental Congress defended
its actions by appealing to the "principles of the
English constitution" and the "liberties ...of
free and natural-born subjects, within the realm
of England."
As the conflict deepened, however, colonial
leaders came to interpret metropolitan policies as
part and parcel of an immense conspiracy to
destroy the liberty of America, and their own
resistance not merely as a struggle over specific
legislation but as an episode in a global conflict
between freedom and despotism. The Intolerable
Acts of 1774, which suspended the Massachusetts
legislature and closed the port of Boston,
represented the final stage in this British design
"for enslaving the colonies." Now, the right to
resist arbitrary authority and the identification
of liberty with the cause of God, so deeply
ingrained by the imperial struggles of the
eighteenth century, were invoked against Britain
itself.
The coming of independence rendered the rights
of freeborn Englishmen irrelevant in America. As
late as March 1775, Edmund Burke assured the
British Parliament that the colonists were devoted
not to "abstract liberty" but to "liberty
according to English ideas, and on English
principles." But the deepening crisis inevitably
pushed Americans to ground their claims in the
more abstract language of natural rights and
universal liberty. In a merging of the evangelical
belief in the New World as the future seat of
"perfect freedom" with the secular vision of the
Old as sunk in debauchery and arbitrary rule, the
idea of British liberty was transformed into a set
of universal rights, with America a sanctuary of
freedom for humanity. Ironically, it took an
emigrant from the lower classes of England, who
only arrived in America in 1774, fully to grasp
this breathtaking vision of the meaning of
independence. As Thomas Paine proclaimed in
January 1776 in the most widely read pamphlet of
the era, Common Sense:
O! ye that love mankind ... stand forth!
Every spot of the old world is overrun
with oppression. Freedom hath been
hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa
have long expelled her. Europe regards
her as a stranger, and England hath
given her warning to depart. O! receive
the fugitive, and prepare in time an
asylum for mankind.
Written, as Paine later observed, to help men
"to be free, Common Sense announced a prophecy
from which would spring the nineteenth-century
idea of the United States as an "empire of
liberty." Unburdened by the
institutions--monarchy, aristocracy, hereditary
privilege--that oppressed the peoples of the Old
World, America, and America alone, was the place
where the principle of universal freedom could
take root. Six months later, the Declaration of
Independence would legitimate American rebellion
not merely by invoking British efforts to
establish "absolute tyranny" over the colonies but
by referring to the natural, unalienable rights of
mankind, among which liberty was second only to
life itself. In the Declaration, "the Laws of
Nature and Nature's God," not the British
constitution or the heritage of the freeborn
Englishman, justified independence. The idea of
liberty as a natural right became a revolutionary
rallying cry, a standard by which to judge
existing institutions and a justification for
their overthrow. No longer a set of specific
rights, no longer a privilege to be enjoyed by a
corporate body or people in specific social
circumstances, liberty had become a universal,
open-ended entitlement. And the contradiction
between the ideal of universal liberty and the
reality of a society beset with inequalities would
bedevil American public life during the Revolution
and long thereafter.
Thus, if the roots of American freedom lay in
the traditions of Christian liberty and of the
freeborn Englishman, its emergence as a new and
distinct ideology grew out of the struggle for
independence and the creation of a nation-state
that defined itself, in James Madison's words, as
the "workshop of liberty to the Civilized World."
In this "republic of the mind," to borrow a phrase
from Rousseau, a newly invented national history
and a putative national destiny both revolved
around the idea of freedom. "Our forefathers,"
Jefferson wrote in 1775, "left their native land
to seek on these shores a residence for civil and
religious freedom," an inspiring if somewhat
limited account of the numerous motives that had
brought colonists to America. As for the future,
Paine's stirring remark in Common Sense, "we have
it in our power to begin the world over again,"
epitomized a sense that the American Revolution
was an event of transcendent historical
importance, an idea reiterated in countless
sermons, political tracts, and newspaper articles
of the time. From the beginning, devotion to
freedom formed the essence of American
nationalism.
A stunning repudiation of imperial authority,
the Revolution also unleashed challenges to
inherited structures of power at home. The real
revolution, Paine would write, was intellectual:
"We see with other eyes; we hear with other ears;
and think with other thoughts, than those we
formerly used." In rejecting the crown, as well as
the principle of hereditary aristocracy, many
Americans also rejected the very idea of human
inequality and the society of privilege,
patronage, and fixed status that these venerable
traditions embodied. Jefferson's seemingly
matter-of-fact assertion in the Declaration--"all
men are created equal"--announced a truly radical
principle, whose full implications no one could
anticipate. In British North America, a
well-ordered society was thought to depend on
obedience to authority--the power of rulers over
their subjects, husbands over wives, parents over
children, masters over servants and apprentices,
slaveholders over slaves. Inequality had been
fundamental to the colonial social order; the
Revolution in many ways made it illegitimate.
Henceforth, American freedom would be inextricably
linked with the idea of equality (at least for
those within the circle of free citizens):
equality before the law, equality in political
rights, equality of economic opportunity, and, for
some, equality of condition. "Whenever I use the
words freedom or rights," Paine explained, "I
desire to be understood to mean a perfect equality
of them ... The floor of Freedom is as level as
water."
In the egalitarian atmosphere of revolutionary
America, long-accepted relations of dependency and
forms of unfreedom suddenly appeared illegitimate.
Abigail Adams's plea to her husband to "remember
the ladies," her reminder that women, no less than
men, ought not to be "bound by any laws in which
we have no voice or representation," is widely
remembered today. Less familiar is John Adams's
response, which illuminated the crumbling of all
sorts of inherited ideas of deference:
We have been told that our struggle has
loosened the bonds of government
everywhere; that children and
apprentices were disobedient; that
schools and colleges were grown
turbulent; that Indians slighted their
guardians, and negroes grew insolent to
their masters.
To John Adams, this egalitarian upheaval,
including his wife's claim to political freedom,
was an affront to the natural order of things.
In the end, the Revolution did not undo the
obedience to which male heads of household were
entitled from their wives, children, employees,
and slaves. For free men, however, the
democratization of freedom was dramatic, and
nowhere more so than in challenges to the
traditional limitation of political participation
to those who owned property. "We are all, from the
cobbler up to the senator, become politicians,"
declared a Boston letterwriter in 1774. Throughout
the colonies, election campaigns became
freewheeling debates on the fundamentals of
government, in which annual elections, universal
manhood suffrage, religious toleration, even the
abolition of slavery, were debated not only by the
educated elite but by artisans, small farmers, and
laborers, now emerging as a self-conscious element
in politics. The militia, composed largely of
members of the "lower orders," including servants
and apprentices, became a "school of political
democracy." Its members demanded the right to
elect all their officers and insisted on the
enfranchisement of all soldiers, whether or not
they met age and property qualifications. They
thereby established a long-lasting tradition
whereby service in the army enabled excluded
groups to stake a claim to full citizenship.
Those who during the Revolution demanded
annual elections and an expansion of the right to
vote envisioned not simply severing the link
between property and suffrage but a redefinition
of "property" itself. By the end of the
revolutionary era, the concept of property had
expanded to include rights and liberties as well
as physical possessions. "A man," Madison declared
at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, "has
property in his opinions and the free
communication of them, he has property in ... the
safety and liberty of his person." A few years
later, he would speak of government's obligation
to protect both the right to hold property and a
citizen's "property" in his rights. Rather than
property serving as a requirement to qualify for
freedom, in other words, freedom could be imagined
as a form of property.
The idea that property included ownership of
one's self helped to democratize the political
nation. If all persons had a property in their
rights, then there was no logical reason why all
should not participate in government. Before
independence, the right to vote had been subject
to complex restrictions, which varied from colony
to colony. Everywhere, property qualifications,
while less exclusionary than in England because of
the wide distribution of ownership, barred those
deemed incapable of independent
judgment--journeymen, servants, apprentices, and
the poor. Women were generally excluded from
voting (although occasionally propertied females,
usually widows, did cast ballots), and many
colonies also imposed religious qualifications of
one kind or another. The struggle for independence
galvanized participation by hundreds of thousands
of those outside the political nation. "Every poor
man," claimed a Maryland writer, "has a life, a
personal liberty, and a right to his earnings."
Hence, voting was a universal entitlement, not a
privilege: the "inherent right of free suffrage
was "the grandest right of a freeman." "The
suffrage," declared a 1776 petition of
disenfranchised North Carolinians, was "a right
essential to and inseparable from freedom."
Conservative patriots struggled valiantly to
reassert the rationale for the old restrictions.
Property, and property alone, John Adams insisted,
meant independence; those without it had no
"judgment of their own. They talk and vote as they
are directed by some man of property." The removal
of property qualifications, Adams feared, would
"confound and destroy all distinctions, and
prostrate all ranks to one common level" This was
precisely the aim, however, of the era's radical
democrats. Yet, while moving much of the way
toward the idea of voting as an entitlement rather
than a privilege, they generally stopped short of
universal suffrage, even for free men. The most
democratic new state constitutions, such as
Pennsylvania's, eliminated property
qualifications, but substituted a taxpaying
requirement, enfranchising nearly all of the
state's free male population but leaving a small
number, mainly paupers and domestic servants,
still barred from voting. Even Paine, who
considered the right to political participation
"to be inseparable from the man as man," believed
it could be forfeited for a time by those who
chose to work as servants in homes and therefore
voluntarily surrendered their autonomy. Paine
still assumed that "freedom is destroyed by
dependence." Nonetheless, since paying taxes did
not make a man economically independent, the
taxpaying requirement for voting represented a
dramatic departure from colonial practice. It
elevated "personal liberty" in the words of one
Maryland essayist, to a position more important
than property ownership in defining the boundaries
of the political nation.
Overall, the Revolution witnessed a great
expansion of the right to vote, through the
substitution of taxpaying for property
requirements in some states, the substantial
reduction of the freehold qualification in others,
and the widespread enfranchisement of soldiers.
The debate over the suffrage would, of course,
continue for many decades. For white men, the
process of democratization did not run its course
until the Age of Jackson; for women and nonwhites,
it would take much longer. But even during the
Revolution, the process had a profound effect on
prevailing definitions of freedom. In the popular
language of politics, if not in law, freedom and
the suffrage had become interchangeable. "How can
a Man be said to [be] free and independent," asked
residents of Lenox, Massachusetts, in 1778, "when
he has not a voice allowed him" in elections?
Henceforth, political freedom--the right to
self-government--would mean not only, as in the
past, a people's right to be ruled by their chosen
representatives, but an individual's right to
political participation.
In economic as well as political affairs, the
Revolution redrew the boundary between the free
and the unfree. In colonial America, slavery was
one less-than-free system of labor among many. In
the generation after independence, with the rapid
decline of indentured servitude and
apprenticeship, and the transformation of paid
domestic service into an occupation for blacks and
white females, the halfway houses between slavery
and freedom disappeared (at least for white men).
The demise of these forms of labor, well before
they ceased to be widespread in Britain, had many
causes, including the growing availability of wage
workers and the actions of considerable numbers of
servants and apprentices who took advantage of the
turmoil of the Revolution to abscond from their
masters. But the democratization of freedom played
an important part. There could be no such thing as
"partial liberty" and servitude increasingly came
to be seen as incompatible with republican
citizenship. In 1784, a group of "respectable" New
Yorkers released a newly arrived shipload of
indentured servants on the grounds that their
status was "contrary to...the idea of liberty this
country has so happily established"
By 1800, indentured servitude had all but
disappeared from the United States, and
apprenticeship was on the wane, developments that
sharpened the dichotomy between freedom and
slavery and between a northern economy relying on
what would come to be called "free labor" and a
South ever more heavily bound to the labor of
slaves. In the process, the very meaning of the
words "master" and "servant" were transformed. In
the North, where they were deemed an affront to
personal liberty, they fell into disuse. Wage
laborers now referred to their employer as the
"boss" rather than the "master" and domestic
servants were now called "help." In the South,
"master" meant slaveowner and "servant" became a
euphemism for slave.
Buffeted by unexpected events, Americans of
the revolutionary era probed not only the
definition of freedom but the means for its
preservation. Preoccupied with the social
conditions of freedom, they worried about whether
a republic could survive with a sizable dependent
class of citizens. Virginia's influential
Declaration of Rights of June 1776, written by the
planter and political leader George Mason, spoke
of citizens as "equally free and independent,"
suggesting a connection between the qualities of
freedom, independence, and equality. "A general
and tolerably equal distribution of landed
property," proclaimed Noah Webster, "is the whole
basis of national freedom." "Equality,' he added,
was "the very soul of a republic," outstripping in
importance liberty of the press, trial by jury,
and other "palladia of freedom." Even a
conservative like John Adams, who distrusted the
era's democratic pretensions, still believed that
"equal liberty" required enabling "every member of
society" to acquire land, "so that the multitude
may be possessed of small estates." The goal was
less real equality of condition than widespread
household independence, and the elimination of
social conditions such as extensive poverty deemed
to make autonomy impossible.
When Jefferson substituted "the pursuit of
happiness" for "property" in the familiar Lockean
triad that opened the Declaration of Independence,
he tied the new nation's star to an open-ended,
democratic process whereby individuals develop
their own potential and seek to realize their own
life goals. Individual self-fulfillment, unimpeded
by government, would become a central element of
American freedom. If taken seriously as a goal,
equality of opportunity can have results nearly as
disruptive of traditional institutions and
hierarchies as demands for equality of condition.
Certainly, many leaders of the Revolution assumed
that in the new republic, equality of opportunity
would lead to a rough equality of condition. With
hereditary privileges and mercantilist monopolies
dismantled, with access to wealth thrown open to
all men of talent, "perfect liberty" of trade and
freedom for laborers to seek desirable employment
would allow all industrious citizens to acquire
property. Especially in the exceptional
circumstances of the New World, with its vast
areas of available land and large population of
independent farmers and artisans, there seemed no
contradiction between a laissez-faire economy and
widespread economic autonomy. In the absence of
government favoritism, the natural workings of
society would produce justice, liberty, and
equality. Jefferson argued that, given the rapid
growth of international demand for American grain,
freedom of commerce would benefit ordinary
Americans, creating the material conditions for an
industrious, property-owning citizenry. A limited
government would allow citizens both to achieve
economic independence and to become virtuous, thus
reconciling order and freedom, equality and
liberty?
The reinforced equation of autonomy and
liberty inevitably raised the question of the
social preconditions of freedom. If economic
dependence created political subservience, should
not the citizens of a republic be guaranteed
access to productive property? The linkage of
property ownership and liberty, previously
employed to draw the political nation's boundary
so as to exclude those without property, could be
transformed into a political entitlement by those
seeking land. From conflict over access to western
lands not only with Britain but with creditors,
landlords, and Indians, for example, settlers on
the frontier forged their own distinctive language
of freedom. When a group of Ohioans petitioned
Congress in 1785 assailing landlords and
speculators who engrossed available acreage, their
motto was "Grant us Liberty." Settlers' claims for
preferential access to land rested on the idea
that possession of property, as a North Carolina
congressman put it, was "a situation incident to
freedom and desired by all."
Others sought different ways for the
government to ensure economic autonomy--and
therefore freedom--to those who did not possess
it. At the Revolution's radical edge, the cry of
equality led to demands for government to ensure
that all Americans enjoyed equally "the blessings
and benefits" arising from national independence.
The democratization of state government after
independence unleashed a flood of enactments aimed
at bolstering economic autonomy: debtor relief,
more equitable taxation, and direct grants of land
to those who did not possess it. In the name of
liberty, demands were even raised for limits on
the amount of property any individual could
accumulate. Whatever the wisdom of individual
measures (and taken together, they so alarmed
proponents of prudent fiscal and economic policy
that they inspired the movement for a stronger
national government that culminated in the writing
of the U.S. Constitution), the debate itself
suggested that the Revolution had thrust to the
forefront of politics the question of the economic
conditions of freedom.
Like many other Americans of his generation,
Thomas Jefferson believed that to lack economic
resources was to lack freedom. Jefferson favored a
limited state, but simultaneously believed
government could help create freedom's
institutional framework. Among his proudest
achievements were the Virginia laws abolishing
entail (the limitation of inheritance to a
specified line of heirs to keep an estate within a
family) and primogeniture (a law providing for the
passing of a family's land entirely to the eldest
son), so as to prevent the rise of a "future
aristocracy" and lay the foundation for "a
government truly republican." To To the same end,
Jefferson proposed to award fifty acres of land to
"every person of full age" who did not already
possess it, another way government could enhance
the liberty of its subjects.
Jefferson's lifelong friend and colleague,
James Madison, agreed that the small, independent
farmer constituted "the best basis of public
liberty." Legislation in a republic, Madison
wrote, should aim to "reduce extreme wealth toward
a state of mediocrity, and to raise extreme
indigence toward a state of comfort." But lacking
Jefferson's congenital optimism, Madison was
obsessed by fear that conditions of relative
economic equality would prove temporary. Economic
development, he warned the Constitutional
Convention, would inevitably produce a society
with a non-propertied majority and class conflict
between rich and poor. How could government
resting on the popular will survive when a
democratic majority, resenting its propertyless
status, might seek to despoil the rich? For
Madison, the answer was to structure government so
as to prevent any single economic interest from
achieving power. With its elaborate system of
checks and balances and divided sovereignty, the
Constitution was designed, in part, to enable
republican government to survive the rise of
economic inequality (and to render unequal
concentrations of property immune from
governmental interference). But Madison and
Jefferson also believed that the new nation's
unique circumstances could long delay the rise of
economic inequalities on the scale of Great
Britain and Europe. Westward expansion, an option
obviously not available to the Old World, would
underpin the "regime of liberty" in the New. Here,
indeed, was a powerful and enduring American
dream--a society of free individuals made equal by
the bounty of nature.
Was energetic government a threat to liberty,
or, in the hands of a virtuous citizenry, the
embodiment of political freedom? For Paine,
government was a necessary evil, a "badge of lost
innocence." To Samuel Adams, writing in 1785,
political authority could hardly be seen as a
danger to freedom, since "our government at
present has liberty for its object." Yet the
egalitarian upsurge unleashed by the Revolution
produced fears among influential leaders in many
states that the experiment in independence would
founder unless ways were found to insulate
government from popular passions. In creating a
structure of government that aimed, among other
things, at securing "the blessings of liberty,"
the writers of the Constitution institutionalized
new understandings of political freedom and civil
liberty that would profoundly affect the future
course of American history.
During the struggle for independence, a
Massachusetts writer commented while the
Constitution was being debated, "the public rage
was on the side of liberty." Among the framers,
however, liberty had lost some of its luster. In
1775, John Adams had insisted that "a democratic
despotism is a contradiction in terms." But
nationalists like Madison became convinced during
the 1780s that popular self-government, the
essence of political freedom, threatened the
security of property and must be restrained so
that freedom might flourish. "Liberty," Madison
would write in The Federalist, "may be endangered
by the abuses of liberty as well as the abuses of
power." Or to put it another way, private liberty
could be endangered by public liberty, personal
liberty by political liberty--that is, by power in
the hands of the people. Madison had in mind the
boisterous state-level democracy of the 1780s and
collective attacks on public order like Shays'
Rebellion of 1786--87, when debt-ridden farmers,
many of them former soldiers in the War for
Independence, closed the courts in western
Massachusetts to prevent the loss of their
property to creditors. That they employed liberty
trees and liberty poles, the emblems of the
struggle for independence, as symbols of their own
cause did nothing to endear them to defenders of
law and order.
Ultimately, the framers of the Constitution
sought to reconcile republican government and
social stability by diffusing political power,
barring states from abridging the rights of
property, and balancing the self-interested
ambitions of competing social groups against one
another. Madison did not abandon the idea that
"virtue in the people" was the essential
underpinning of freedom. But in a world in which
self-interest appeared to overwhelm civic virtue,
the preservation of liberty would have to rely on
the machinery of government itself, not the
character of the people--a major step in the shift
from republican to liberal premises among the
political elite. Nonetheless, the republican idea
that political decisions and economic
relationships ought to reflect concern for the
common good rather than private gain long survived
the revolutionary era.
Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and the other
architects of the Constitution were
nation-builders. Hamilton was perhaps the most
vigorous proponent of an "energetic" government
that would enable the new nation to become a
powerful commercial and diplomatic presence in
world affairs. Power and liberty, he insisted,
were complementary, not antithetical, for freedom
required "a proper degree of authority, to make
and execute the laws with vigor." Although he did
not envision the federal government as quite so
assertive a power as Hamilton did, Madison too
sought to enhance national authority. The danger
to liberty, Madison believed, lay in unchecked
majority power at the state level. While the
convention rejected Madison's proposal to empower
Congress to override state laws, the Constitution
created a central government far more powerful
than the weak authority established by the
Articles of Confederation, the preceding frame of
government.
Thus the framers of the Constitution viewed
freedom both as the foundation of governmental
authority and as a threat to proper governance
that must be kept in check. In this sense, it
represented a retreat from the ebullient
democratic upsurge that had accompanied the
struggle for independence. "The same enthusiasm,
now pervades all classes in favor of government,"
observed Benjamin Rush, a leader of the
independence struggle in Pennsylvania, "that
actuated us in favor of liberty in the years 1774
and 1775." Whether "all classes" truly concurred
may be doubted, for the ratification process
unleashed a nationwide debate over the best means
of preserving political freedom. Anti-Federalists,
as opponents of ratification were called, insisted
that the Constitution shifted the balance between
liberty and authority too far in the direction of
the latter. Freedom, they believed, was more
secure in the hands of smaller communities
pursuing the common good than a distant federal
power protecting private interests. The
"consolidated government" envisioned by the
Constitution, complained Patrick Henry, might
produce "a great and mighty empire," but at the
cost of freedom. "What is Liberty?" asked James
Lincoln of South Carolina. "The power of governing
yourselves. If you adopt this Constitution, have
you this power? No."
In the end, of course, ratification was
achieved, partly in exchange for adding the Bill
of Rights. The original document, Anti-Federalists
charged, left unprotected from governmental
interference "those unalienable and personal
rights of men" without which "there can be no
liberty." Madison was so convinced that the
balances of the Constitution would protect liberty
that he believed a Bill of Rights "redundant or
pointless." Amendments restraining federal power,
he believed, would have no effect on the danger to
liberty posed by unchecked majorities in the
individual states, and no list of rights could
ever anticipate the myriad ways that legislatures
might operate in the future. "Parchment barriers"
to the abuse of authority would prove least
effective when most needed--an observation amply
borne out in such times of popular hysteria as the
Red Scare following World War I or the McCarthy
era of the 1950s, when all branches of government
joined in trampling with impunity on freedom of
expression.
Today, when Americans are asked to define
freedom, they instinctively turn to the Bill of
Rights and especially the First Amendment, with
its guarantees of freedom of speech, the press,
and religion. Yet the Bill of Rights aroused
little enthusiasm on ratification and for decades
was all but ignored. Not until the twentieth
century would it come to be revered as a
quintessential expression of American freedom.
Nonetheless, the Bill of Rights subtly affected
the language of liberty. Applying only to the
federal government, not the states, it reinforced
the idea that concentrated national power posed
the greatest threat to freedom. And it initiated a
long process whereby freedom came to be discussed
in the vocabulary of rights--a descendant of the
old definition of liberty as a set of specific
legalized powers and privileges, now applying to
all "the people" who formed the political nation,
not particular groups or localities. What the
twentieth century would call "rights talk"
embodied a persistent tension in American life
between liberty and democracy. For rights are
simultaneously democratic and a negation of
democracy--democratic in that they can be claimed
by everyone; undemocratic in that they need to be
protected against abuses of power, including the
power of the people themselves. Freedom of speech
and the press, for example, were defended both as
protections against governmental intrusion on
individual expression and as essential elements in
democratic governance, since without a free flow
of ideas and information, voters and legislators
cannot reach decisions intelligently.
Nonetheless, the idea of free speech as a
personal, individual right, a view encouraged by
the First Amendment, was indeed a radical
departure. The term "freedom of speech" had
originated in Britain to protect unrestrained
discussion in Parliament; initially, it referred
to legislators' immunity from prosecution for
statements made during debate, not the right of
citizens to criticize the government. Throughout
the colonial era, individuals and editors were
prosecuted for "seditious" remarks about members
of legislatures and their actions. The colonial
press teemed with polemics on political questions,
and the 1734 acquittal of John Peter Zenger for
his criticisms of New York's royal governor had
long since established truth as a defense against
prosecution for seditious libel. Yet even
Jefferson, who fervently believed that "liberty
depends on freedom of the press," also insisted
that those who misled the public by printing
"false facts" should be liable to punishment.
Nonetheless, if the legal implementation of these
rights remained to be worked out, the Bill of
Rights did much to establish freedom of speech and
the press as cornerstones of the popular
understanding of American freedom.
Even more remarkable was the constitutional
recognition of religious freedom. In Britain,
Dissenters had long invoked the language of
liberty in seeking repeal of the Test and
Corporation Acts, which imposed various
disabilities on non-Anglicans. (Few, however,
included Catholics in their ringing calls for
religious freedom.) With numerous religious
denominations, among them Quakers, Anglicans,
Mennonites, Moravians, Lutherans, Presbyterians,
Baptists, Roman Catholics, and Jews, the colonies
enjoyed a greater degree of religious liberty than
the mother country. But while colonies like Rhode
Island and Pennsylvania had long made a practice
of toleration, religious freedom before the
Revolution arose more from the reality of
religious pluralism than from a theory of
religious toleration. Nowhere in British North
America did the complete separation of church and
state exist. Even in Pennsylvania, which in 1682
offered "Christian Liberty" to all who acknowledge
"one Almighty God," officeholders still had to
take an oath affirming belief in Jesus Christ.
Before the Revolution, most colonies supported
religious institutions with public funds and
discriminated in voting and officeholding against
Catholics, Jews, and even dissenting Protestants.
On the very eve of independence, Baptists who
refused to pay taxes to support local
Congregational ministers were still being jailed
in Massachusetts. ("While our country are pleading
so high for liberty," the victims complained, "yet
they are denying of it to their neighbors.")
As in other realms, the Revolution catalyzed a
movement that transformed the meaning of religious
freedom. The drive to separate church and state
brought together deists like Jefferson, who hoped
to erect a "wall of separation" that would free
politics and the untrammeled exercise of the
intellect from theological control, and members of
evangelical sects, who sought to protect religion
from the corrupting embrace of government and saw
toleration as a way to enable men and women to
lead truly Christian lives. Throughout the new
nation, established churches were
disestablished--that is, deprived of public
revenue and special legal privileges. On the state
level, religion and public authority continued to
reinforce one another, in requirements barring
non-Christians from office and in the continued
prosecution of blasphemy and breaches of the
sabbath. Nevertheless, the Constitution, which
contains no reference to God, is a purely secular
document. In prohibiting religious tests for
federal officeholders and, in the First Amendment,
barring the federal government from legislating on
the subject of religion, it departed dramatically
from both British and colonial practice. Under the
Constitution, it was and remains possible, as one
critic at the time complained, for "a papist, a
Mohomatan, a deist, yea an atheist," to become
president of the United States.
Like freedom of speech and the press,
religious freedom reflected the conviction that,
as Madison put it, conscience was the most
"sacred" of all rights, and that no political
authority should influence or punish its free
exercise. Even more than other freedoms, religious
liberty became the paradigm for the revolutionary
generation's definition of "rights" as private
matters that must be protected from governmental
interference. Religious freedom offered a new
rationale for the idea of the United States as a
beacon of liberty. In successfully opposing a
Virginia tax for the general support of Christian
churches, Madison insisted that one reason for the
complete separation of church and state was to
reinforce the meaning of independence as "offering
asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every
nation and religion." And religious liberty
provided a model for the Madisonian system of
preserving freedom. In a free society, Madison
wrote, "the security for civil rights must be the
same as for religious rights. It consists in the
one case in the multiplicity of interests and, in
the other, in the multiplicity of sects." A free
market in religion would prevent any one group
from using political power to impose its views on
the others. In an overwhelmingly Christian (though
not necessarily churchgoing) nation, the
separation of church and state drew a sharp line
between public authority and a realm defined as
"private," reinforcing the idea that rights exist
as restraints on the power of government.
Thus, the Revolution democratized not only
American Christianity but also the idea of
religious liberty itself. Ironically, even as the
separation of church and state created the social
and political space that allowed a myriad of
religious institutions to flourish, the culture of
individual rights of which that separation was a
part threatened to undermine the authority of
churches. One telling example lay in the
experience of the Moravian Brethren, who had
emigrated from Germany to North Carolina on the
eve of independence. According to the Moravian
elders, younger members of the community, like so
many other Americans of the revolutionary
generation, insisted on asserting "their alleged
freedom and human rights." To the elders, "the
American freedom" was little more than "an
opportunity for temptation," a threat to the
spirit of self-sacrifice and communal loyalty
essential to Christian liberty. But despite such
fears, disestablishment did not end the influence
of religion on American society; quite the
reverse. Thanks to religious freedom, the
post-revolutionary era witnessed an amazing
proliferation of religious denominations. Today,
even as debates continue over the proper
relationship between spiritual and political
concerns, more than one thousand three hundred
religions are practiced in the United States.
"Yield to the mighty current of American
freedom." So a member of the South Carolina
legislature implored his colleagues in 1777. And
the current of freedom swept away not only British
authority but also the principle of hereditary
rule, the established churches, long-standing
habits of deference and hierarchy, and old limits
on the political nation. Yet in one crucial area,
the tide of freedom encountered an obstacle that
did not yield to its powerful flow. For freedom's
antithesis--slavery--emerged from the Revolution
more firmly entrenched than ever in American life.
******************************************************************************
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