Liberty

Liberty. Rich and poor, the leaders and the led, from Carolina to New England, almost any group of Revolutionary War–era Americans, if asked what they were seeking, would almost certainly have used this word—liberty or death, as Patrick Henry put it. A representative collection of late twentieth‐century Americans might say “democracy” and have as many different things in mind. The revolutionaries drew on several interlinking patterns of ideas, less distinct for them than for modern analysts looking for roots in different intellectual traditions.

By liberty, the revolutionaries clearly meant, from the beginning of the crisis in imperial relations, the liberties or rights to which all Englishmen, including British Americans, were entitled by birth—that is, by virtue of the traditions, common‐law decisions, colonial charters, and parliamentary statutes (such as the Magna Carta or the English Bill of Rights of 1689) that eighteenth‐century Britons called their “constitution.” Trial by jury, security against cruel punishments or warrantless searches, the writ of habeas corpus, freedom of the press, and toleration of dissenting religious faiths were generally agreed to be among these rights. When Americans could no longer claim them as Englishmen and had come to insist on written rather than unwritten constitutions, they wrote them into the states' first declarations of rights and ultimately into amendments to the new federal Constitution.

Between 1765 and 1776, Britons on opposite sides of the Atlantic increasingly differed in their definitions of English rights. As this happened, Americans appealed to the rights of man, which they had long supposed to be closely related to English rights in any case. In doing so, they drew on a long succession of modern natural‐law and law‐of‐nations writers—most famously, John Locke—who taught that it was “sacred,” “undeniable,” or evident to any inquiring mind that no man was born with a natural right to rule another or to take by force what others had by right: their lives, their property, and their capacity to make their own decisions about the things in which their happiness might seem to consist. Thomas Jefferson captured much of what the revolutionary generation meant by liberty in the eloquent second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, including the conclusion that legitimate political authority can only rest on the consent of the governed and that the governed retain a right to withdraw their consent and make their government anew if it threatens the natural rights that governments are instituted to protect.

But liberty in this final sense, for Revolutionary War–era Americans, meant more than ultimate or tacit consent to whatever sort of government might rule. It meant the right, initially of Englishmen and then of citizens of the American republics, to a representative political system: the right of a people to govern themselves continuously and actively through elections, petitions, and free assemblies. Valuing this participation for its own sake, not merely as a means of protecting their individual rights, they drew on a republican tradition extending back to ancient Greece and Rome. James Madison was plainly using the word in this sense when he wrote in Federalist Paper number 51 that “justice” or security for fundamental rights was “the end of civil society” and would “ever be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.” Self‐governance, inalienable rights, and ancient, common‐law protections and procedures were all encapsulated in this potent word.
See also Conservatism; Laissez‐faire; Liberalism; Republicanism; Revolution and Constitution, Era of.

Bibliography

Jack P. Greene, ed., Colonies to Nation: A Documentary History of the American Revolution, 1763–1789, 1975.

Lance Banning