Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution

Introduction

Introduction Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet su≈ciently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. —Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776 This book is not a history of liberty in the age of the American Revolution. It is a book about the history of liberty in the age of the American Revolution. It is less concerned with constitutional issues, jurisprudence , and philosophical theories (which already have a very large literature ), and more with extending our knowledge about the various modes of liberty’s existence in the minds and experiences of eighteenth-century actors. It looks not only at what we know, but at how we know what we know. The intention is to recover the contemporary meaning of liberty—the core concept of the era—and in the process suggest revising some of the ways we currently understand the founding of the nation. The reflections that follow are exploratory, and are o√ered in the spirit of inquiry. They do not seek to dismiss, endorse, or replace the existing scholarship, but to advance a di√erent way to interpret its subject, one that bridges the current gap between the political and cultural history of the Revolution and that encourages these two fields to ‘‘speak’’ to each other more often and more creatively. The constructions of eighteenth-century culture by present-day academics were not on the minds of the people who populated late colonial British America and were immersed in the realities of their own experiences. ‘‘Liberty ’’ and its role in the American Founding has been wrapped in so many veils of modern analyses, politics, social conflicts, morality, and hindsight that 2 culture and liberty in the age of the american revolution the only way for us to more fully recover its actual nature is to historicize our subject as deeply as possible. To this end, attention will be called to two dimensions of ‘‘liberty’’ that have hitherto not been widely considered, and even less often applied together. The first is the exercise of power through culture, and, more specifically, through the ownership of liberty and the ability to define its public meaning. The second dimension, crucial to any such exercise, is the peculiar existence of liberty in this era as an intricate synthesis of political practices and symbolic forms. The point of departure is that, contrary to our ingrained illusion, the meaning of ‘‘liberty,’’ as outlined by the Founders and understood by their contemporaries, was one of ‘‘privilege’’—that is, of advantage, or of power, over those who did not possess it—and therefore an ingredient of a world view that inherently assumed social inequality. This is why trying to capture its nature—as is so frequently done—by asking to what extent it was, or was not, modern and egalitarian is an attempt to fit a square peg into a round hole. The revolutionaries of 1776 could not suddenly discard a concept of society made up of ranks (with a corresponding hierarchy of liberties) while holding on to all the other norms and views of the world contained in the ethos of British culture. It would be like expecting the inhabitants of Salem in 1692 to selectively discard their belief in the existence of witches while retaining the rest of their theologically based world views. Early modern liberty was a social relation between unequals, and as such could not have existed in and of itself as an abstract right, nor should it be examined as such. Mindful that it took two more centuries for its proclaimed, symbolic equality to evolve into literal practice, we should be looking more closely at the origins of this transformation to understand its nature. For decades, the historiography of the Revolution has been divided between those who stressed the centrality of the Founders and those who o√ered alternative accounts highlighting the contributions of women, poor whites, African Americans, and Indians, long left out of the traditional narrative . The latter approach revealed conflicts and di√erences of interest rather than consensus, and demonstrated that the stage was populated by many di√erent actors—the ‘‘unknown revolutionaries’’ of Gary Nash, the ‘‘forced founders’’ of Woody Holton, and the ‘‘common people’’ of Alfred F. Young.∞ The former stance still reigns in popular history. Both schools have been...