Scraping Rust from the Rebar of Early American History

Current political rhetoric is a reminder, if we need one, that conceptions of "liberty" and "freedom" are central to American self-definition. This rhetoric is also a reminder of how quickly such terms may turn the discursive environment into a plasma globe, with crackling declamations anchoring tendrils of illumination that twist through an atmosphere of murky assumptions. It has long been so. "Liberty" and "liberties" antedate the Stars and Stripes, the Constitution, the Revolution and, in fact, the first incursions and settlements of English genealogy in the Western Hemisphere. From the beginnings of the American colonial past, as historian Elizabeth Mancke reminds us, English contributors to their discourses of empire, dominion, and colonization articulated in inventive ways four fundamental "expressions of liberty": 1) "the liberty of travel or passage for certain groups . . . [a liberty] orginat[ing] . . . in natural law or the law of nations"; 2) "English liberties that inhered in the person of a subject"; 3) "liberty of self-government"; 4) "liberty of conscience."¹ These libertarian ideas were shaped by major facets of the English early modern experience, such as parliamentary conflict with "tyrannous" kings at home, English wars with alien kingdoms of various sorts, the deep-trenched divide between Protestant and Catholic champions, and the exceptionalism that flowed from emphasis on the Channel and Atlantic as barriers rather than pathways. And these ideas were central to all the major collective expressions of British colonial and federative identities in the various 17th- and 18th-century Atlantic polities that swore allegiance to English/British monarchs.

Michal Rozbicki has accepted the challenge that is implicit in Professor Mancke's essay: to explore at length the central meanings of liberty in ways that advance our understanding of British colonial North America, the American Revolution, and the new nation. Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution is remarkable for its success in doing just that. Firmly fixed at the center of the book is Rozbicki's clear and consistent acceptance of the central 18th-century British interpretation of liberty: "a metaphor for a cluster of specific immunities and entitlements" such as habeus corpus, trial by jury, representative government, taxation with representation, and the franchise (11). The voices of provincial political elites who exercised power gave sustained emphasis to these liberties, championing them for their essential role in making British North Americans a "free-born people" (13). Tethered to this focus and disciplined by it are a succession of wide-ranging, extraordinarily insightful, and provocative discussions of what the author sees as pertinent expressions of "culture": "the peculiar existence of liberty in this era as an intricate synthesis of political practices and symbolic forms" (2).

"Liberty Triumphs over Tyranny," a Philadelphia engraving from 1775. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-45534].

At the heart of Rozbicki's book is the fundamental insight that 18th-century British colonial conceptions of liberty were rooted in the social relations of the time. Metropolitan and provincial host societies, while always shifting and adjusting like a pier-and-beam supported building perched on clay, were held together by a balance of "social inequities" expressive of their hierarchical character (11). Liberty was a "privilege" (or more accurately a range of privileges) "of advantage, or of power, over those who did not possess it" (2). In polities that "inherently assumed social inequality" liberty was "primarily a relation of difference between people . . . . To be free meant there had to be others who were less free; to become more free meant that others, already more free, had to relinquish some of the freedom they held" (11). Given what we know about the 18th-century British Atlantic colonies, Rozbicki's argument rings out with penetrating clarity. Social hierarchy, corporate understandings, the ways in which various liberties and immunities were institutionalized, and the practices of freedom and un-freedom—all very important features of the British overseas provinces—offer testimony after testimony supporting the liberty-as-privilege insight.

But what happened to this particular culture of liberty over time? What place did this framework of understanding have in...