Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution

Michal Jan Rozbicki

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780813931548
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

In his new book, Michal Jan Rozbicki undertakes to bridge the gap between the political and the cultural histories of the American Revolution. Through a careful examination of liberty as both the ideological axis and the central metaphor of the age, he is able to offer a fresh model for interpreting the Revolution. By establishing systemic linkages between the histories of the free and the unfree, and between the factual and the symbolic, this framework points to a fundamental reassessment of the ways we think about the American Founding.

Rozbicki moves beyond the two dominant interpretations of Revolutionary liberty—one assuming the Founders invested it with a modern meaning that has in essence continued to the present day, the other highlighting its apparent betrayal by their commitment to inequality. Through a consistent focus on the interplay between culture and power, Rozbicki demonstrates that liberty existed as an intricate fusion of political practices and symbolic forms. His deeply historicized reconstruction of its contemporary meanings makes it clear that liberty was still understood as a set of privileges distributed according to social rank rather than a universal right. In fact, it was because the Founders considered this assumption self-evident that they felt confident in publicizing a highly liberal, symbolic narrative of equal liberty to represent the Revolutionary endeavor. The uncontainable success of this narrative went far beyond the circumstances that gave birth to it because it put new cultural capital—a conceptual arsenal of rights and freedoms—at the disposal of ordinary people as well as political factions competing for their support, providing priceless legitimacy to all those who would insist that its nominal inclusiveness include them in fact.

1

A Critique of Self-Evident Liberty

For the liberal humanist's mistake is not to insist that human beings from very different contexts may share values in common, but to imagine that these values are invariably what is most important in a cultural artefact. It is also to assume that they are always, in however cunningly disguised form, the values of his own civilization.

—Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture

IF LIBERTY WAS THE conceptual axis of the ideology of the American Founding, it was also its dominant metaphor. The overlapping of the two has diverted our attention from the fact that both were political and cultural instruments rather than objective descriptions of the essence of the Revolution. Patriot speeches, constitutional debates, and sermons on liberty were more often depictions of ideal models than measured representations of the Revolutionary process, but modern commentators often make no clear distinction between the two.

A necessary point of departure in reconstructing the eighteenth-century American sense of liberty must be a realization that freedom ultimately derives from the intricate webs of culture and society in which we are all entangled; people are “free” or “equal” only as members of society, not as people as such.¹ Eighteenth-century formulations of freedom could carry only the meanings allowed by the contemporary social and cultural market. This means that when we hold up such articulations for analysis, they first ought to be placed in the practical context of social and cultural relations of power. In other words, intellectual conceptualizations of liberty are not liberty. In 1776, as a few gentlemen were declaring in Philadelphia that all people are by nature created equal and endowed with unalienable rights, slaves, Indians, women, and the propertyless remained, and were long to remain, untouched by the universalism of these formulations. A few years later, heads rolled off the Paris guillotine on orders justified by the defense of liberty, fraternity, and equality. It is not the rhetorical or legal elegance of a given formulation of liberty but the uses to which it is put that tangibly affect lives, and define its real meaning. The issue before us, therefore, should be less whether liberty was verbally defined in this or that way, or whether it derived from this or that philosopher, but what exactly was being communicated by the language of liberty in the Revolutionary era about actual relations within American society.

Such an approach will help avoid a recurrent interpretative problem in studies of freedom in the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world: a uniform, self-evident, and unproblematic concept of equal freedom that has quietly, almost imperceptibly, been adopted as an abstract norm against which all actors and actions are gauged and sweeping classifications of events and individuals are made. Indeed, it is not too much to say that it has made much of American scholarship in this area a history of constraints on liberty, rather than a history of liberty. It is time to reposition the debate and modify this reductionist model, which effectively obscures the fundamentally non-egalitarian nature of early modern liberty. This model endows it with an abstract, teleological universalism and produces a propensity to uncover limitations and contradictions, instead of striving to understand what is truly important: how and why certain liberties surfaced at a particular time and place, who was able to claim them and why, and how those who did not hold them before acquired them when they did. As such, it has had a profound effect on the overall assessment of the role of the Revolution in American history. Alan Taylor's impressive survey of early America, a volume intended to cover United States history, may illustrate this effect; it has only two out of 480 pages devoted to the American Revolution. As the author explains in the introduction, the Revolution and the Founders’ ideology do not warrant much attention, because they promoted a liberty that was restricted to well-off Euro-Americans, they encouraged the dispossession of Indians, they did not abolish slavery, and they inspired colonization.² In other words, because Revolutionary-era liberty still existed in a restricted form and was not universally applied, it does not merit our consideration. It is a view that is not only idealistic, it is startlingly perfectionistic, suggesting that historians should not drink from a glass that is half full. What it tells us is that we need to make a better effort to look beyond the seductive, but often illusory intellectual cocktail of American idealism, ingrained faith in ideas as movers of history, wishful thinking, current politics, and intuitive presentism that our own culture has mixed for us.

And yet, practically all current historiographical models explaining Revolutionary change are to some degree premised on the meaning of liberty as an essentialized notion implying universal rights for all classes of people. Broadly speaking, one may discern three major subcategories among these models. One school posits that, with the Revolution, the colonial elite transcended their well-entrenched identity as a dominant class by wrenching their understanding of liberty from its long-standing symbiotic attachment to rank and privilege, to espouse a fundamentally new, universal meaning of freedom. “The language of equality in the Declaration was sincere,” writes one author, stressing that the Founders “set up a government that did what no democracy had done before: It combined majority rule with effective protection for minority rights.” Others note that “what in the end remains remarkable is the degree to which they accepted the equality of all people,” and that the Revolution radically changed “the pattern of beliefs and customs that mediates between men who govern and the people they rule,” with the result that “the year 1776 saw the collapse of virtually all old political relations.”³

A second view, sometimes partially overlapping with the previous one, postulates that Revolutionary society rapidly moved on toward greater egalitarianism, while the republican elite, which initially promoted radical ideas of equality, did not live up to them in political and social practice. America in this period was a country “where social differences were considered incidental rather than essential to community order.” The polity created by the Founders was therefore essentially a “response to the pressures of democratic politics,” and was “peculiarly the product of a democratic society.” The Patriot elite were “unsettled and fearful not because the American Revolution failed but because it had succeeded, and succeeded only too well. What happened in America in the decades following the Declaration of Independence was after all only an extension of all that revolutionary leaders advocated.”⁴ Such a reading of the Revolution assumes that the whole episode was built on an essentially new and wide-reaching meaning of liberty, antagonistic to the old. It typically ends up with the historian rather puzzled by the gap between this supposedly modern meaning promoted by the Founders and the resistance to such modernity by the very same individuals.

A third orientation, today not as prominent but still commanding a sizeable following, derives from Marxist traditions and builds its narrative around class struggle. It emphasizes the use of equal liberty by the Founders as essentially instrumental and therefore hypocritical: “The reality behind the words of the Declaration of Independence (issued in the same year as Adam Smith's capitalist manifesto, The Wealth of Nations) was that a rising class of important people needed to enlist on their side enough Americans to defeat England, without disturbing too much the relations of wealth and power that have developed over 150 years of colonial history.”⁵

Both the “reactionary” and the “radical” perspectives on the Founders’ liberty have long roots in American historiography. The Progressives, who saw the economic realm as the main battleground where the struggle for freedom took place, promoted a framework which stressed the disparity of interests between the propertied ruling class and the common people, and suggested that the rulers successfully marketed a rhetoric of liberty in order to preserve their economic domination. From the 1950s, the “consensus” school pushed the pendulum to the right and deemphasized social conflict, putting stress on an ideology of liberty widely shared across social classes.⁶ By the 1970s, this perspective had waned, replaced by a wide variety of studies of colonial British America viewed through the prism of society and culture, especially race, class, and gender. Meanwhile, scholarship devoted specifically to the Revolution has remained mostly focused on the political. All these approaches uphold the centrality of liberty, but their methods and outcomes diverge. Political historians tend to highlight continuity, and stress the causal role of ideas, laws, constitutional design, and political philosophy. By contrast, many social historians tend to use the antagonistic class model, contrasting the powerful and the powerless: slave owners and slaves, urban laborers and the merchants, sailors and captains.⁷ It is certainly a germane method, because privilege and exclusion were omnipresent in human history, but the model tends to exert too much power over the interpretation by becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, readily supported with abundant evidence showing tension between the possessors of freedom, clinging to their possession and resisting change, and the excluded, resisting exclusion and subjection. In the process, we often lose sight of the substantial collaboration between elites seeking popular support and ordinary people taking advantage of this opportunity to push for their own interests.

What is most striking is that so many authors on both the left and right ends of the methodological spectrum share assumptions of liberty that are nothing short of axiomatic. The results are sometimes akin to replacing George Washington's wig with a baseball cap. Consensus and conservative historians tend to view the Revolution as a struggle for modern liberty, a view that would have surprised a Virginia or South Carolina gentleman acutely proud of his privileged freedoms. Their persuasion is that the Founders “agreed that all men are created equal,’ only disagreeing on “the application of that principle.” Their principle was universal; they just differed on how to enforce it, because some worried that the poor and uneducated would not make responsible decisions.⁸ By contrast, for many liberal historians, the story of early American liberty has often been a morality play staged as a war of social classes. It therefore required uncovering all the ways in which the Age of the Founding did not ensure equal freedom. One may say that consensus historians essentialize the idea of liberty, and class struggle historians essentialize the social subject. The former want a pure beginning of the nation; the latter assume that it should have been pure. Both, however, reveal a pietistic strain in their devotion to abstract liberty.⁹

All these interpretations reflect a perennial American predicament: what to do with an apparent contradiction implied by the coexistence of freedom and inequality at the birth of the nation. Despite a mountainous historiography, this dilemma is far from resolved. It remains the source of a lively academic debate as the pendulum swings back and forth between views of the Founders as either progressives or reactionaries, and the Revolution as either a struggle for power or a struggle for liberty. This predicament is not likely to be unequivocally resolved, but the dynamic of this controversy and the intellectual ferment it has generated is of great interest to a historian.

Different authors have dealt with this dilemma in different ways, but the axiomatic and perfectionist assumptions continue to dominate the historiographical marketplace. Over the last several decades—at least since the demise of the consensus school of history—the most common interpretive response to the Founders’ language of freedom has been to point to their presumed inconsistency. After all, they not only showed more interest in protecting the received, limited meaning of liberty than in any major expansion of its social space, but also appeared oblivious to the ongoing transformation of liberty from an exclusive privilege, attached to the elite, to a more abstract and universal right of citizenry. Surely, nothing short of invoking contradiction can make sense of the gap between their progressive language of equal freedom and what Jack P. Greene has rightly called the “deep and abiding commitment of the revolutionary generation to inequality.”¹⁰ It is not unusual to find a serious and important volume devoted to the origins of liberty in the new American republic start by denouncing its “narrow and selfishly motivated beginnings,” and going on to portray its post-Revolutionary unfolding as “constrained by old traditions and institutions hard to move.”¹¹

Two premises behind statements of this type deserve attention. First, liberty appears as a timeless Geist of sorts, outside of a specific culture and social order, ready to shower its blessings equally on all if only it were not impeded by the self-serving “American reactionaries,” defending their rank and property.¹² The second, quietly stashed behind the logic of the first, is that the Founders should have voluntarily given up their advantaged positions in society—expressed in their possession of fuller liberties than the rest of the people—in the name of a more modern and egalitarian understanding of liberty. This would have gained them a more honorable and “unselfish” place in history. It has become fairly commonplace even among the most renowned colonial historians to explain the “paradox” of liberty and inequality—without questioning its doubtful logic—by the inconsistency rooted in the “flawed” characters of the Founders, who in their lives were unable to reconcile the contradictions they presumably ought to have reconciled. Their proclamations on equal rights have been called a case of “amaurosis,” a “truly wondrous” argument, and an “obvious suggestion of hypocrisy.” Francis Jennings has pointed to the same by asking, “Where is there any thought of the majority of South Carolinians enslaved by the passionate defenders of liberty?” Along the same lines, Thomas Jefferson has been labeled a “self-righteous hypocrite.” Elsewhere, the author of the Declaration of Independence has been treated to a complex logical analysis showing that his views of liberty revealed “a deep incoherence of his theoretical structure.” His culpability lay in sacrificing his “moral sense” by rationalizing slavery with the concept of “tranquility,” which he considered of greater value to society. Others have pointed to the “logical incompatibility” between slavery and republican ideology, resulting in inherent “inconsistencies” within the latter; have decried the “moral absurdity of a society of slaveholders proclaiming the concepts of natural rights, equality, and liberty”; or have tagged the Founders as insincere, because they “spoke of the liberty and equality of citizens,” while “the reality was different” because “promises were not fulfilled.”¹³ Although references to the Founders as “flawed” often seem to be mere liturgical devices to ensure that a recognition of their impressive contribution is not confused with an approval of the various unfreedoms they approved, the implication is clearly that their rhetoric of equal liberty contained modern, egalitarian meanings (one might note that being “flawed” could not have been a distinctive feature of the Founders, because it is a feature of all people—unless the measure is taken against an ahistorical model of perfection). These charges of hypocrisy begin to look a bit eerie when we realize that we are applying our ideal fictions to reproach the Founders for getting carried away by their ideal fictions.

Another group of commentators have emphasized the neglect and even rejection by republican elites of their own rhetoric of virtue for egoistic reasons: to preserve themselves as a ruling class, and to hold on to wealth and social ranks established over the preceding century. “If American independence depended on public virtue,” they ask, “how could one resolve the conflict between the demanding ideals and the sharp practice that betrayed them?” A frequent answer is that this “betrayal” took the form of a “repudiation of equality” in the pursuit of ambitions that were “unembarrassedly aristocratic.” The toleration of bondage was a “glaring contradiction in the Republicans’ popular creed.” This behavior reflected “partisan and aristocratic purposes that belied the…democratic language.” Jefferson's words on liberty were merely “glittering generalities” that defied “reality.” The architects of the Constitution made no less than “a colossal error of judgment” in not immediately expanding the rights of American citizens.¹⁴ What is striking in these citations is that reality seems to reside in the new and revolutionary statements of universal liberty, while age-old practices not conforming to them are made to seem aberrant. In other words, the ideals being “repudiated” are presumed real, and the historically entrenched social order a departure from the normative. It is this kind of a priori assumption that has led one author to conclude that Thomas Jefferson's words about the political strife in the United States were a case of “treason against the hopes of the world,” and should apply to Jefferson himself for not living up to his language of equality and unalienable rights. His words are “those of a liberty-loving man of Enlightenment,” but his deeds are “those of a self-indulgent and negrophobic Virginia planter.”¹⁵ In all these quotations, Lady Liberty's cloak has an anachronistic shine to it. The criterion of consistency seems to have been tailored to suit our own taste.

The fact that the above examples represent the thoughts of a group of distinguished scholars without whom there would be no modern history of the American Revolution only serves to illustrate the depth of the epistemological dilemma being raised here. It is not just that they all tend to treat equal liberty as a given; a bigger issue is that this premise has effectively prevented us from appreciating the core of privilege at the heart of early modern liberty. It simply takes freedom out of its complex sociohistorical context, much like Louis Hartz did when he suggested that a cohesive, liberal “fragment” was somehow extracted from the European matrix (a single thread from a spider web of culture, as it were) and transferred to America, where, deprived of burdensome “feudal” elements, it “had been established from the outset in colonial life.”¹⁶ Such an essentialist approach confuses symbolic elements of the Founders’ vision with intentions to reengineer society by levelling its ranks. It makes their belief in inequality an anomaly, a live dinosaur of sorts, surprisingly discovered beyond the 1776 boundary line that was supposed to mark its extinction. But liberty did not have an autonomous existence, nor would it have been “normal” for everyone in late eighteenth-century America to be equally endowed with it. This is why one cannot tell “the story of liberty,” much as one cannot tell “the story of beauty.” It was not a natural phenomenon, an entity waiting to be claimed or denied and surfacing in this or that incarnation at different points in history. If only it were so, it would be a historian's dream come true: once the permanent quintessence of such a liberty were discovered, we would not only know why and when it came to light in history, but could perhaps even predict when it would emerge again.¹⁷

Another unwelcome consequence of the self-evident treatment of equal liberty is that it facilitates the assumption that liberty had one, core meaning, widely shared among various social ranks in eighteenth-century America (and in some cases, even across the whole world). This conjecture implies that beh...