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II. The Universalization of the Language of Freedom
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the revolution 87 II. The Universalization of the Language of Freedom Columbia, Columbia, to glory arise, the queen of the world and the child of the skies! —Timothy Dwight, Columbia, Gem of the Ocean, 1777 Perhaps the foremost reason why we today perceive such a discrepancy between the Revolutionary narrative and contemporary political practice is that its authors had a penchant for speaking about liberty in absolute and all-embracing, rather than specific, terms. It was a mannerism de rigueur among late-Enlightenment writers, although it was also practiced, to a lesser extent, in the seventeenth century. Not only did monarchs traditionally speak for all the people, but, after the English Revolution, so did o≈cials and theorists, using broadly inclusive language and drawing on its power to validate their political arguments. The great theorist of natural law, John Selden, best explained the persuasiveness of such idiom when he observed that calling liberty absolute was ‘‘just as a line is often extended indefinitely to demonstrate something in geometry.’’ James Madison was clearly aware of this when he wrote that the equality of the consent principle was a hypothesis of sorts, rather than a literal goal to be pursued. A society that would achieve it would no doubt be ‘‘happy,’’ but ‘‘this is a Theory, which like most Theories, confessedly requires limitations and modifications’’ when applied. ‘‘Experience alone,’’ he noted, ‘‘can decide how far the practice in this case would correspond with Theory.’’∞≤ Awareness of their rhetorical value notwithstanding, such ‘‘theories’’ were nevertheless at the heart of Revolutionary thinking. Both Je√erson and Franklin believed that there existed a basic universality of human experience, and that its understanding could be achieved through reason and then applied to improve the human condition. A second source of the broad inclusiveness of contemporary American language of liberty was the pressing necessity to defend the Revolution and Independence. It was a most urgent incentive. Not only had an entire people who had heretofore been part of one nation, all subjects of the Crown, been abruptly separated from the mother country, but the new republican state, facing a world map of monarchies, cried out for intellectual justification. 88 culture and liberty in the age of the american revolution American leaders needed to assure themselves and the unprepared public that the disruption of a system sanctioned by long history and deeply entrenched in social psychology was based on principles su≈ciently valid to override loyalty to Britain. At the level of political philosophy, Locke had already provided highly abstract and transnational arguments for equality and natural rights—an enormously useful arsenal for colonial leaders, because it enabled them to double-dip, bringing up principles ostensibly higher than traditions limited to British history even as they proclaimed themselves to be the true defenders of these very traditions. But at the grassroots level, amid the disorder and uncertainty of war, their greatest challenge was to transform the political language used to describe liberty in order to make it both more sweeping and more accessible to ordinary people. It was this challenge, rather than the weight of philosophical theories, that prompted the American political class to formulate in a short period of time a rhetoric of freedom so dramatically inclusive that almost as soon as it was introduced, its authors began to express fears that the social stability and order might be upset if ordinary folk took it too literally. There already existed a well-established tradition among British elites of using a universal and inclusive language of rights and liberties, especially in struggles for political influence. In 1754 the English landowner Thomas Beckford became engaged in a blatant manipulation of elections through the corrupt system of ‘‘rotten boroughs,’’ in an attempt to have all four of his brothers elected to Parliament. But in his plea to the Duke of Bedford, who controlled the boroughs, he not only asserted that ‘‘the liberty of the country’’ was at stake, but he also insisted that there were ‘‘not four men in the kingdom more zealously attached to . . . the liberties of the people.’’ To properly understand the meaning of such claims is to realize that they did not derive from a world view based on the political primacy of the people, but from one that presumed that only the elites could represent the entire population. The colonial American speaking class widely employed the same meta-language to express their own, provincial interests. Prominent Virginians like Edmund Pendleton, George...