LIBERTY

In the eighteenth-century English and American political vernacular, no word or concept was as important as "liberty." Celebrated by political theorists, pamphleteers, politicians, and the clergy, English people and Americans often boasted that they possessed greater liberty than anyone else. For all the Anglo-American celebration of liberty, however, the concept was often ill defined.

political literature

Liberty was a common theme in many of the important English and American political treatises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By far the most common form of literature to discuss liberty was the pamphlet. As historian Bernard Bailyn has pointed out, pamphlets were cheap to produce, easy for publishers to turn out, and—since they normally ran from only five thousand to twenty-five thousand words—easy to finish quickly, which meant that the ideas contained within them could be rapidly disseminated throughout society. Some of the most important and influential political writings of the Revolutionary period were pamphlets, including John Dickinson's Letters from a Pennsylvania Farmer (1767–1768), John Adams's Novanglus (1775), and the most famous of all, Thomas Paine's Common Sense (1776).

Beyond pamphlets of the Revolutionary era, British and American political actors and thinkers could rely on a host of book-length works that discussed liberty. Works from diverse authors such as Plato (c. 428–348 b.c.) and Cicero (106–43 b.c.) in the ancient world to Algernon Sidney (1622–1683), James Harrington (1611–1677), James Gordon (d. 1750), and John Trenchard (1622–1723) in the early modern era—to name only a few—lined the shelves of personal libraries. For colonial readers, at least, these works were a sine qua non of proper political thought, and it would be difficult for a well-educated American Revolutionary to be considered a true republican without familiarity with some, if not all, of these works.

political theory before the revolution

Despite the apparent vagueness of the concept of liberty, historians have established what it meant in the eighteenth century. Considering the various writings of political philosophers such as Harrington, Sidney, Gordon, Trenchard, John Locke (1632–1704), Robert Molesworth (1656–1725), Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), and James Burgh (1714–1755) as well as political pamphlets, personal letters, state documents, and sermons, liberty by eighteenth-century standards can be said to have had two distinct definitions. According to the first, which has been largely forgotten, liberty, or public liberty, was the right of the people to establish and maintain some form of self-government. Many English and American political theorists believed that if the people created and served in government, liberty could not be usurped. As a result, public liberty was the most important form of liberty during the eighteenth century. The second definition of liberty concerned the rights of individual citizens, with the most common being property rights and religious freedom. It is this second definition of liberty, the one concerned with individual freedom, or personal liberty, which is more familiar.

Because the two definitions of liberty were distinct, a natural tension existed between them. Unfortunately, historians have compounded this natural tension by separating the two concepts into divergent and exclusive intellectual traditions. The creation of self-government is defined as the "republican," or "civic-humanist," concept of liberty. This republican concept required not only citizen participation in government, but also a citizenry possessed of virtue and disinterestedness. On the other hand, historians have often labeled the concern for individual freedom as the "liberal," or "Lockean liberal," concept of liberty.

However, eighteenth-century Americans were able to easily reconcile the duality and tension of liberty. Neither English people nor Americans defined personal liberty as it later became known, namely personal autonomy or the restraint of government upon civil liberties such as freedom of speech or the press, or freedom from illegal search and seizure. Personal liberty in the eighteenth century had to conform to the norms of society and, more important, to the rule of law. Thus, to most eighteenth-century English people, liberty was the law. This negative form of liberty was often characterized not as the freedom to act, but as freedom from arbitrary government actions. Furthermore, private liberty had to work in tandem with public liberty; one could not be paramount over the other. As long as a proper balance remained between governmental authority and private rights, English and Americans argued, liberty

could exist. Making the natural tension of both concepts of liberty easier to accommodate was the belief that both types of liberty derived from the same source, nature itself. Because humans were endowed with free will, they were afforded certain freedoms naturally. It is important to note, however, that most theorists did not fully explain which liberties were taken from nature. This theory held that once people entered into a contract to create a government, only those liberties surrendered for the creation of the society were lost; all other freedoms remained.

Often, in the works on the political philosophy or other political writings, liberty was juxtaposed to two other concepts, tyranny and licentiousness. Since tyranny or arbitrary power was defined as the unlimited power of the executive and licentiousness as the absence of order, liberty was seen not as the average of the extremes but as the perfect, if somewhat fragile, balance between the two. For the English to possess liberty, freedom and order had to peacefully coincide. English and colonial writers warned that when either tyranny or licentiousness became too dominant in politics and society, liberty ended and political slavery began. This need for constitutional balance was also found in ideas about English and colonial society. Theorists argued that society was divided into monarchy, aristocracy, and commons—or the one, the few, and the many—and that so should be government. With the monarch stationed in the executive, the aristocracy in the House of Lords, and the commoners in the House of Commons, they would balance each other and ensure that one branch did not obtain too much authority. Theorists further maintained that each branch was responsible for certain functions of government. The monarch was responsible for the energy and dispatch of government, the House of Lords was responsible for deliberating on important issues and applying wisdom to its decisions, and the House of Commons was responsible for maintaining through legislation the protection of liberty and the public good.

Closely related to the need for a balance in the creation of liberty was the need to defend liberty from its antagonist, power. When discussing the dichotomy of liberty and power, liberty was portrayed as a hapless victim, vulnerable to the assaults of an aggressive, self-aggrandizing foe: arbitrary power. Whenever governmental power increased, usually in the form of a power-lusting executive, theorists held that the natural outcome was a decline of the people's liberty. This outcome could be staved off, theorists argued, only if the people remained evervigilant against and jealous towards encroachments upon their liberty.

Another term closely linked to liberty in the pre-Revolutionary era was property. As with so many terms in English and American political theory of the eighteenth century, property held several meanings. The most common definition was material goods, but in connection with the concept of liberty, property moved beyond mere materialism. In the eighteenth century, property in the form of land brought personal independence.

political theory in the early republic

Although, broadly speaking, English concepts of liberty continued to carry tremendous significance in the early American Republic, during the era of the American Revolution, and especially during the adoption and early implementation of the Constitution (ratified 1788) and the Bill of Rights (ratified 1791), subtle changes in the concept of liberty began to develop in America. The first of these shifts in the concept of liberty was in connection with the need for representation in government. Beginning with the famous phrase "no taxation without representation," American theorists argued that only when the people were represented in Parliament, and later in state and national governments, could liberty flourish. The people's representatives, this argument ran, would insure the protection and security of liberty through their power to accept or reject proposed laws and taxes. To be sure, the English House of Commons, the body of the English government most accountable to its subjects, did possess the ability to consent to or reject legislation. American theorists argued, however, that having direct representation instead of the English system of virtual representation (the belief that Parliament represented all the English people whether or not they actually elected a member) meant that liberty would be more secure because the government would be more accountable to the citizenry.

Another subtle change in the concept of liberty occurred with the creation of the state and federal constitutions and the various federal and state bills of rights. Since these documents were the fundamental law of the states and the nation, governmental authority was formally defined and, in most cases, curbed. Thus, for the first time governments would have clear, distinct outlines of their responsibilities. Furthermore, most of these constitutions, including the federal Constitution along with its Bill of Rights, protected many of the rights associated with traditional definitions of liberty: the right to trial by jury; the right to be free of standing armies; the right of habeas corpus; the right to be protected against arbitrary search and seizure. With this constitutional protection of rights and limitation of power, what began to take shape was a more modern definition of liberty wherein government is forbidden to violate particular, specified liberties. Just as important as the establishment of governmental authority was the creation of the constitutions themselves. In creating these documents, the people were exercising public liberty.

Closely linked with the development of constitutions was another shift in the American concept of liberty. With experimentation in public liberty and the crises of the 1780s came the realization that virtue and disinterestedness, which English and European theorists had argued were needed to sustain republican governments, could be achieved only with difficulty, if at all. From this awareness came the redefining of tyranny, which, in turn, meant the redefining of liberty. Tyranny now, unlike before, could come from any branch of government, including the populace itself. Efforts were made to curb this new tyranny, as well as the excesses of liberty that, as a result of events such as Shays's Rebellion, many thought were occurring in the 1780s. These efforts took the form of the federal Constitution of 1787, ratified the following year, and the Bill of Rights, ratified as constitutional amendments in 1791. Through this redefining and tempering of tyranny, the emphasis upon public liberty began to wane. Evidence of this changing understanding of the sources of tyranny, and along with it the changing concept of liberty, can be found in the Constitution's sanctioning of the separation of powers. Before, European and English political theorists had surmised that the people could not threaten liberty and therefore could be trusted with governmental authority. However, the events of the 1780s caused many American political thinkers to reexamine that belief and conclude that only by constitutionally separating governmental power into distinct branches could liberty be safeguarded.

The crises of the 1780s also demonstrated that the traditional arguments regarding the clash of power and liberty needed recasting. No longer did American theorists view power as the automatic antithesis of liberty. Instead, they developed a new theory which argued that governmental power does not necessarily translate into a loss of liberty. As long as laws were enacted by a government of the people, the people themselves remained ever vigilant towards their liberty, and the people sanctioned a constitution that officially limited government responsibilities and authority, power could be entrusted to the government. This new political theory received its greatest confirmation in the federal Constitution of 1787.

Even more important than the addition of representation, constitutionalism, and the separation of powers to the concept of liberty was the intertwining of liberty and equality. Before the American Revolution, equality and liberty were seldom, if ever, linked, but by the time the American Republic was established, the two concepts were becoming inseparable. The enslavement of hundreds of thousands of blacks during this period makes this linkage appear hypocritical, but when the revolutionaries referred to equality as liberty, they did not mean that the law should force the equality of people. Instead, they desired the equal application of the law. Although modern Americans have become accustomed to a government that legally enforces the equality of people, to eighteenth-century American political theorists, who harbored a deep distrust of governmental power, government could not be trusted to create or enforce such equality. To be sure, associating liberty with the equality of people was becoming part of the American concept of liberty, but this change did not fully emerge until well into the nineteenth and then the twentieth century.

politics, 1765–1820

The concept of liberty played an important role in the politics of the Revolutionary period. Beginning with the Stamp Act of 1765 and ending with the Declaration of Independence of 1776, the colonies justified their resistance to parliamentary measures by claiming to defend their liberty. Although the colonies made continual attempts to reconcile with Britain, each rejection only reinforced the colonists' belief that their liberty was threatened. Seeing no alternative method of securing their liberty, they formally declared independence.

After the Revolution, liberty continued to play an important role in the politics of the new nation. The decade after the Revolution was filled with a series of crises that threatened to overtake the fragile country. In each crisis, whether concerning the financial situation of the states and the nation or the growing power of the states, the concept of liberty played some role. That was particularly so in regard to Shays's Rebellion of 1786–1787 and the Constitutional Convention along with the ratification debates. When disgruntled debtor farmers from western Massachusetts revolted against heavy taxation, among other things, they claimed they were defending their liberty from tyrannical actions of the state legislature. Most political figures disagreed, however, and the rebellion was quickly suppressed. At the Constitutional Convention and the ratification debates, securing liberty was a great concern of every participant. Although concepts of liberty were undergoing change at that very time, the older conceptions remained and were an important element in both the defense of and attacks on the Constitution.

During the Federalist period from 1789 to 1801, and then the Jeffersonian revolution of 1800, liberty was the dominant feature of the political landscape. Nearly every controversial measure during this period, including Alexander Hamilton's financial program, the Jay Treaty (1794), the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), the Louisiana Purchase (1803), the Embargo Act (1807), the War of 1812, and even the Missouri Compromise (1820), were all judged by whether or not they threatened liberty. Even the rise of political parties in the 1790s is due in large measure to the fact that both Federalists and Republicans believed that the other side threatened liberty and that only their side could defend and protect it.

culture and society

American society remained deferential during the eighteenth century in the sense that those with better social and economic standing were expected to lead government and society. However, there were increasing strains upon this traditional order of things. Because of the ideas of liberty promulgated during the imperial crisis and the termination of monarchical and aristocratic government with victory in the American Revolution, the idea of equality under the law began to take root. Taking the place of hierarchical arrangements was a culture that began to celebrate the natural equality of people with the argument that liberty should create a level playing field for all individuals and allow those with natural talent to rise to the top levels of their fields of endeavor. This new meaning of liberty was in its embryonic form in the early Republic and excluded both slaves and women, but later events greatly furthered the cause of equality.

See alsoAlien and Sedition Acts; Anti-Federalists; Bill of Rights; Constitutional Convention; Constitutionalism; Democratic Republicans; Federalists; Politics: Political Pamphlets; Politics: Political Thought; Shays's Rebellion .

bibliography

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Aaron N. Coleman