Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution

I. Privilege at the Heart of Freedom

2 British Legacies I. Privilege at the Heart of Freedom One privilege is taken away after another, and where we shall be landed God knows, and I trust will protect and provide for us even should we be driven and persecuted into a more western wilderness on the score of liberty, civil and religious, as many of our ancestors were to these once unhospitable shores of America. —James Otis, Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, 1764 The historical genesis of early modern British liberty was inseparably tied to privilege, and American liberty as formulated and understood by the Founders was part of this blueprint. Acknowledging this more fully would bring about profound historiographical consequences. First of all, it would make clear that the widespread acceptance of various forms of unfreedom (including even slavery) by eighteenth-century advocates of liberty in the British world was neither an aberration nor an exception.∞ What these advocates were saying was not antithetical to all inequality and exclusion. In fact, claiming allegiance to the liberty of the people e√ectively enabled the claimers to assert authority and advantage in society. This empowerment was concealed in the contention that they spoke for all people. The political attraction of this stance, and not any abstract idea of universal rights, became the main catalyst for putting liberty on a pedestal. Only if we recognize this pattern can we attempt to explain why and how originally elite-bound freedom successfully expanded within a few decades of 1776 into non-elite social space. Although this may not be immediately obvious, if we look closely at the british legacies 35 centuries preceding the American Revolution, we will observe that for all liberties (as a rule granted exclusively to select groups) to make sense as privileges, they had to be denied to others. Only then could they e√ectively construct social order and mark clear lines of class distinction. One person’s liberty was another’s constraint. Particular liberties carried cultural substance only if within their very essence privilege was bound up with exclusion, and di√erent amounts of freedom were dispensed across society in proportion to social rank. For instance, the medieval spectrum of this distribution extended from the freedom of an ordinary freeman, through the more expansive freedom of a nobleman, to the imperial liberty of the king. In medieval as well as early modern England, the meaning of a particular liberty to its owner existed as his or her relation to other people. When a sixteenth-century English merchant obtained the privilege of a royal monopoly to import lumber from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, its meaning to him depended on his relation to those who did not hold such a privilege, and were excluded from the trade. If a seventeenth-century propertied freeman was free from arbitrary arrest (by virtue of the privilege of habeas corpus), the worth of this freedom to him lay in his relation to those—the poor, the masterless, the unemployed—who could be arrested and sold as indentured servants to the colonies against their will. One can track this manner of identifying freedom with unfreedom all the way back to ancient Rome, where unfreedom was defined by both law and culture more fully than freedom: in the broadest sense, a free person was someone who was not a slave. It was especially visible in the attitude to those who had been freed from slavery; they sometimes continued to be called freedmen—that is, ‘‘no longer slaves’’—for more than a generation.≤ If we can agree that the origin of liberty was located in privilege, then we must also acknowledge that there have always been arbiters who defined who could be granted such privileges and who were backed by su≈cient power to enforce their definitions. They were the ones who defined the contemporary paradigm of liberty: what it meant and how it should properly be interpreted, what liberties were ‘‘natural,’’ and who should possess them. The scope of their influence was usually limited by the current balance of power. Particular freedoms were almost never freely given; any analysis of their genealogy must begin with the relationship between the controlling arbiters and those who at a given point had su≈cient bargaining muscle to extract concessions. Perhaps the reason we do not always pay su≈cient attention to this 36 culture and liberty in the...