Conceived in Liberty (128 page)

The growth of libertarian thought in eighteenth-century America was, to be sure, heavily influenced by a preceding growth in England, the main source of cultural influence on its colonies. But the pattern was not so simple. For it must be remembered that parts of America itself had experienced entirely libertarian institutions in the seventeenth century: for example, Rhode Island, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. To a large extent, this libertarianism had been
unarticulated.
In short, the abundance of fertile virgin land in a vast territory enabled individualism to come to full flower in many areas. But only in such cases—important to be sure—as those of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson did practicing libertarianism receive theoretical
articulation and groundwork. This does not mean that no theoretical rationale existed. Indeed, it exploded in a mighty surge during the height of the Puritan revolution; Roger Williams and his friends among the libertarian wing of that revolution helped each other develop these doctrines.

But the significant fact of the mid-seventeenth century was the defeat of the revolution and the victory of the counterrevolution. In England this victory can be pinpointed in Oliver Cromwell’s shift rightward and his suppression of the Levellers—perhaps the finest libertarian movement up to that time. The steady retreat of Roger Williams from libertarian principles and enthusiasm can be dated from the disheartening victory of this Cromwellian counterrevolution. A similar counterrevolution against liberalism occurred in other parts of Europe: in France with the defeat of the Holy League in the late sixteenth century and of the popular Frondeur movements in the seventeenth century; in Holland with the victory of the Orange party over the Republicans. Civil war and foreign wars prevented England from turning its attention to its American colonies until the end of the seventeenth century. When it finally did so, it used its power to crush libertarian reality where it existed in America. Thus England imposed a counterrevolution on virtually libertarian conditions in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and reversed the liberal-tending Leislerian revolution, which had had to force its way against what was in many ways the most reactionary colony of all, New York. Liberal-tending rebellions in the South (for example, Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia) were crushed, and reactionary policies entrenched or deepened. After the vigorous turmoil and turbulence of the late seventeenth century, when so many parts of America struggled in various ways toward freedom, a rather bleak uniformity was imposed on the colonies by England. The first half of the eighteenth century saw an increasing political stalemate between the contending forces, now generally consisting of Crown and privileged oligarchy as against the rest of the population. This period of quiescence was matched in the mother country, in institutions as well as in thought and opinion. In the first half of the eighteenth century, England settled down into a centrist Whig settlement; radical-liberal thought was more or less underground, expressed in thin trickles by lone independent thinkers. These liberals kept alive the torch of seventeenth-century Republican liberalism; when the radical-liberal movement burst forth once again as a political force in England in the later eighteenth century, it came not as a completely new phenomenon but as a renaissance of seventeenth-century radical models.

In the first half of the eighteenth century, America was more eager to learn from British liberalism past and contemporary than were the English themselves. England was, for one thing, the major cultural and ideological influence in the colonies, and Americans were eager to learn. For another, America had the heritage of its virtual epoch of libertarian revolutions in
the last half of the seventeenth century; it was a long time before England was able to clamp down on America. And furthermore, America was not saddled with the enormous encumbrances on liberty that faced the English liberals: a pervasive and oppressive feudal land system—which had broken in America on the rock of vast new land, a drive for proprietary profit, and an American refusal to pay quitrents; an established church hierarchy; a large central state apparatus; and a thoroughly oligarchic polity. Americans suffered from these ailments to some degree, differing from one colony to the next. And such institutions as slavery, especially in the plantation South, and quasi-feudal landholdings in the Hudson Valley, presented great problems—but not nearly to the extent experienced by Great Britain. Above all, the rapid breakdown of attempts at imposing a feudal land system threw open land and areas of American life to a mobility and opportunity that Europe could not yet experience. The far greater democracy in the bulk of the American colonies than in England was a reflection of this breakdown. If liberty was to be achieved in the Western world, it was clear by the eighteenth century that America would have to take the lead—to achieve in practice the fruits of a theory generated in England.

One basic influence on colonial American thought was the fact that two contrasting traditions emerged from its Protestant and Puritan heritage. One was the fanatical theocratic persecuting tradition, which reached its apogee in Massachusetts Bay and in the Dutch Orange Party. The other was optimistic, individualist, libertarian, and even deistic, and was reflected in the Levellers, and in such escapees from Massachusetts as Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, and later in Charles Chauncy and Jonathan Mayhew.

Apart from ancient writers, three sources were the most frequently cited and quoted in eighteenth-century America, especially in the first half of the century: Algernon Sidney, John Locke, and Trenchard and Gordon of
Cato’s Letters.
Each made a profound contribution to the growth and development of libertarian thought in America.

Algernon Sidney was one of the leading theorists of the Republican movement in seventeenth-century England. In particular, the doctrines expounded in his posthumously published
Discourses Concerning Government
were stamped on men’s minds by the circumstances of his martyrdom. Arrested in the early 1680s, Sidney was killed in late 1683 by the Crown and thus dramatized the Republican and libertarian cause. Sidney’s basic importance was his stress on the right of revolution. To Sidney, revolution and freedom were closely linked. Whenever people’s liberties were threatened or invaded, they had the right, nay the
duty,
to rebel. Everyone might legitimately slay a tyrant, and there is much justification for defending the rights of individuals against tyranny. Revolution to Sidney was not an evil but the people’s great weapon for the overthrow of tyranny and for exercising their
rights to popular government. There was nothing sacred about governments, which on the contrary should be changed as required. The types of law necessary in a country were to be discerned by man’s reason investigating the fundamental laws of man’s nature. Against the arbitrary whim of the ruler Sidney championed law as “written Reason” and as defense of life, liberty, and property: “If there be no other law in a kingdom than the will of a Prince, there is no such thing as liberty. Property also is an appendage to liberty; and ‘tis as impossible for a man to have a right to lands or goods, if he has no liberty, and enjoys his life only at the pleasure of another, as it is to enjoy either when he is deprived of them.”

Although Sidney urged popular government as against monarchy, he was no believer in the unlimited rights of Parliament. On the contrary, it was to be subordinated to the individual rights of the people. Power, he warned, inevitably corrupts and every institutional power must be guarded against. To Sidney, government rested on a contract between government and governed. When government fails to perform its role in the service of the people, it deserves to be removed. Nor can a people give up their liberties permanently or be bound to government by the dead hand of the past. In his
Dying Speech,
Sidney proclaimed that “God has left nations the liberty of setting up such governments as best please themselves.” He thanked God that he had now become a witness to the truth and to the “Old Cause” of liberty against tyranny in “an age which makes truth pass for treason.”

A liberal Republican and friend of Sir Henry Vane (the Massachusetts champion of Anne Hutchinson), Sidney had been unhappy with Cromwell’s turn to tyranny and had spent the Republican years in retirement. He was then forced to spend the bulk of the Restoration years in exile, until his execution. Sidney’s great classical model was Brutus and his stirring motto
Manus haec inimica tyrranis
(“This hand to tyrants ever sworn the foe,” in the translation of John Quincy Adams).

Algernon Sidney’s widening impact on America during the eighteenth century influenced the great liberal Massachusetts Congregational ministers Andrew Eliot and Jonathan Mayhew. Eliot testified that this “martyr to civil liberty” first taught him just principles of government. Indeed, the defense of revolution by the martyred Sidney was far more inspiring to Americans than the defense by the timorous John Locke. Sidney’s historical honor roll consisted of those who had helped their countrymen get rid of tyrants. Injustice, to Sidney, made a government illegal. “Swords were given to men that none be slaves but such as knew not how to use them,” and “the law that forbids injuries were of no use if no penalty might be inflicted on those who will not obey it.” Concluded Sidney: “Let the danger be never so great, there is a possibility of safety whilst men have life, hands, arms, and courage to use them, but the people must certainly perish, who tamely suffer
themselves to be oppressed... by the injustice, cruelty, and malice of an ill magistrate....”
*

If liberty found its martyr in Algernon Sidney, it found its elaborated systematic defense in the
Essay Concerning Civil Government
of the noted philosopher John Locke. The
Essay,
we now know, was written in the early 1680s at about the same time as Sidney’s
Discourses;
it was therefore written when Locke too was a revolutionary plotter against Stuart rule, and
not,
as had been assumed, as a conservative
ex post facto
rationale for the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
**

There were two strains in Locke’s
Essay:
the individualist and libertarian, and the conservative and majoritarian, and examples of caution and inconsistency are easy to find. But the individualist view is the core of the philosophic argument, while the majoritarian and statist strain appears more in the later, applied portions of the theory. We know, furthermore, that Locke was an extraordinarily secretive and timorous writer on political affairs, even for an age when criticism could and did lead to exile and death. Hence, it is not unreasonable to assume that the conservative strain in Locke was a camouflage for the radically libertarian core of his position; certainly it was not difficult to concentrate on that core and make it the groundwork of a libertarian creed. And Locke’s
Essay
was particularly worthwhile in that it soared above the usual narrowly parochial concern of the day for time and place: from English liberty, ancient privileges, and the common law, to a universal abstract political philosophy grounded on the nature of man.

Locke began his analysis with the “state of nature”—not as an historical hypothesis but as a logical construct—a world without government, to penetrate to the proper foundation of the state. In the state of nature, each man as a natural fact has complete ownership or property over his own person. These persons confront unused natural resources or “land,” and they are able to maintain and advance themselves by “mixing their labor with the land.” Through this mixing, the hitherto unowned and unused natural resources
become
the property of the individual mixer. The individual thereby acquires a property right not only in his own person but also in the land that he has brought into use and transformed by his labor.
***
The individual, then, may
keep this property, exchange it for the property of others, or bequeath it to his heirs.
*
He has the “natural right” to the property and to defend it against invasion by others. The moral justification for government, to Locke, was to defend these rights of property. Should government fail to serve this function, and itself become destructive of property rights, the people then have the right to revolt against such government and to replace it with one that will defend their rights.
**
Thus, Locke, by the use of reason in investigating the laws of man’s nature, adumbrated the doctrine of the natural rights of the individual to person and property, rights that are anterior to government and that government is duty-bound to defend, on pain of a justified overthrow.

Locke is clear that aggression and invasion of another’s right can establish no just title to property or rule, and that this holds for great heads of states as well as for petty criminals: “The injury and the crime is equal, whether committed by the wearer of a crown or some petty villain. The title of the offender and the number of his followers make no difference unless it be to aggravate it. The only difference is, great robbers punish little ones to keep them in their obedience, but the great ones are rewarded with laurels and triumphs, because they are too big for the weak hands of justice in this world, and have the power in their own possession which should punish offenders.” As to the legislature,

The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property; and the end why they choose and authorize a legislature is that there may be laws made, and rules set, as guards and fences to the properties of all the members of the society... whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience, and are left to the common refuge which God hath provided for all men against force and violence.

Locke’s reply to the critics of his theory of revolution was trenchant: Those who oppose the right to revolution as turbulent and destructive “may as well say, upon the same ground, that honest men may not oppose robbers or pirates, because this may occasion disorder or bloodshed. If any mischief come in such cases, it is not to be charged upon him who defends his own right, but on him who invades his neighbor’s.”