(continued from Foner and Taylor)

British Liberty: The “Freeborn Englishman”

Over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the “invented tradition” of the freeborn Englishman became a central feature of Anglo-American political culture and a major building block in the sense of nationhood that was then being consolidated in Britain. By self-definition, the British nation was a community of free individuals and its past a “history of liberty.” Belief in freedom as the common heritage of all Britons and the British empire as the world’s sole repository of liberty had helped to legitimize the colonization of North America in the first place. Subsequently, it served to cast imperial wars against Catholic France and Spain as struggles between liberty and tyranny, a definition widely disseminated in the colonies as well as the mother country.

British freedom celebrated the rule of law, the right to live under legislation to which one’s community had consented, restraints on the arbitrary exercise of political authority, and rights like trial by jury enshrined in the common law. It was closely identified with the Protestant religion and was invoked most stridently to contrast Britons with the “servile” subjects of Catholic countries.

British Liberty vs Universal Liberty

Of course, the idea of freedom as the natural condition of mankind was hardly unknown in a nation that had produced the writings of John Milton (1608-74) and John Locke (1632-1704). But British freedom was anything but universal. Nationalist, often xenophobic, it viewed nearly every other nation on earth as “enslaved” –to popery, tyranny, or barbarism. “Freedom … in no other land will thrive,” wrote the poet John Dryden in 1685; “Freedom an English subject’s sole prerogative.”

Britons saw no contradiction between proclaiming themselves citizens of a land of freedom precisely when British ships were transporting millions of Africans to bondage in the New World. “Britons never, never, never will be slaves,” ran the popular song “Rule, Britannia” (which was set to music in 1740). It did not say that Britons could not own slaves, since until the end of the eighteenth century, almost no one seemed to consider Africans entitled to the rights of Englishmen.

Nor was British liberty incompatible with wide gradations in personal freedom at home– a hierarchical, aristocratic society with a restricted “political nation” (those entitled to vote and hold office). The common law’s protections applied to everyone, but property qualifications and other restrictions limited the eighteenth-century British electorate to approximately 25 percent of the adult male population. The “right of magistracy,” wrote Joseph Priestley in his Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768), was not essential to British freedom. Men “may enjoy civil liberty, but not political liberty.”

Nor did British law view laborers as wholly free. Vagrancy statutes punished those without visible means of support, “master and servant” laws required strict obedience of employees, and breaches of labor contracts carried criminal penalties. The very navy whose domination of the high seas secured the nation’s freedom from foreign domination was manned by sailors seized by press gangs from the streets of London and Liverpool.

British Liberty as a Restricted Privilege

In this sense, British freedom was the lineal descendant of an understanding of liberty derived from the Middle Ages, when “liberties” meant formal privileges such as self-government or exemption from taxation granted to particular groups by contract, charter, or royal decree. Only those who enjoyed the “freedom of the city,” for example, could engage in certain economic activities. This medieval understanding of liberty assumed a hierarchical world in which individual rights in a modern sense barely existed, and political and economic entitlements were enjoyed by some social classes and denied to others.

Echoes of this old, restricted idea of liberty survived in early America—for example in New York City’s rule limiting the right to work in certain trades to those who held the legal status of “freeman.” Whatever its limitations and exclusions, it would be impossible, as the historian Gordon Wood writes, “to overemphasize the degree to which eighteenth-century Englishmen reveled in their worldwide reputation for freedom,” an observation as applicable to the American colonies as to the mother country.

The Components of British Liberty

One can subdivide British liberty into its component parts, as many writers of the era were prone to do. Political liberty meant the right to participate in public affairs; civil liberty protection of one’s person and property against encroachment by government; personal liberty freedom of conscience and movement; religious liberty the right of Protestants to worship as they chose. But the whole exceeded the sum of these parts. British liberty was simultaneously a collection of specific rights, a national characteristic, and a state of mind. So ubiquitous and protean was the concept that what would later seem inconsistent elements managed happily co coexist.

British freedom, for example, incorporated contradictory attitudes about political power. On the one hand, the idea’s historical development was inseparable from the rise of the nation-state, and reached its apotheosis precisely when Britain emerged as the world’s leading imperial power. At the same time, restraints on the exercise of political authority were central to British freedom. Power and liberty were widely believed to be natural antagonists, and in their “balanced constitution” and the principle that no man, even the king, is above the law, Britons claimed to have devised the best means of preventing political absolutism.

These ideas sank deep roots not only within the political nation but far more broadly in British society. Laborers, sailors, and artisans spoke the language of common law rights and British freedom as insistently as pamphleteers and Parliamentarians. By the eighteenth century, the category of free person had become not simply a legal status, as in medieval times, but a powerful element of popular ideology.

On both sides of the Atlantic, liberty emerged as “the battle-cry of the rebellious.” Frequent crowd actions protesting infringements on traditional rights gave concrete expression to the definition of liberty as resistance to tyranny. “We are Free-men—British subjects—Not Born Slaves,” was a rallying cry of the Regulators, who protested the under-representation of western settlements in the South Carolina legislature during the 1760s.

Republicanism

This tension between freedom as the power to participate in public affairs and freedom as a collection of individual rights requiring protection against governmental interference helps define the difference between two political languages that flourished in the Anglo-American world. One, termed by scholars “republicanism,” celebrated active participation in public life as the essence of liberty. Tracing its lineage back to Renaissance Florence and beyond that to the ancient world, republicanism held that as a social being, man reached his highest fulfillment in setting aside self-interest to pursue the common good.

Republican freedom could be expansive and democratic, as when it spoke of the common rights of the entire community. It also had an exclusive, class-based dimension, in its assumption that only property-owning citizens possessed the quality known as “virtue”—understood through the eighteenth-century not simply as a personal, moral quality, but as a willingness to subordinate private passions and desires to the public good. “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1787.

Liberalism

If republican liberty was a civic and social quality, which could only be enjoyed by citizens of a “free state” (one ruled in accordance with the consent of the governed), the freedom celebrated by eighteenth-century liberalism was essentially individual and private. According to John Locke, whose Second Treatise on Government of 1689 is considered a key foundation for modern liberalism, government is established to offer security to the “life, liberties, and estates” that are the natural rights of all mankind, and essentially should be limited to this task.

Liberty, for Locke and his eighteenth-century disciples, meant not civic involvement but personal autonomy—“not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown arbitrary will of another man.” Protecting freedom required shielding a realm of private life and personal concerns—including family relations, religious preferences, and economic activity—from interference by the state. The public good was less an idea to be consciously pursued by government than the outcome of free individuals’ pursuit of their myriad private ambitions.

Liberalism, as the historian Pierre Manent puts it, severed the “citizen” from the “man,” the political realm of life from the social. Critics condemned it as an excuse for selfishness and lack of civic-mindedness. “The freedom … that I love,” declared Edmund Burke, “is not solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish liberty. As if every man was to regulate the whole of his conduct by his own will. The liberty I mean is social liberty.”

Yet it is easy to understand liberalism’s appeal in the hierarchical Atlantic world of the eighteenth century. It called into question all the legal privileges and governmental arrangements that impeded individual advancement, from the economic prerogatives of chartered corporations to legalized religious intolerance. And in its starting point, that mankind possessed natural rights no government could violate, liberalism opened the door to the disenfranchised, women, and even slaves, to challenge limitations on their own freedom.

British Liberty: Both Republican and Liberal

Eventually, liberalism and republicanism would come to be seen as alternative and contradictory understandings of freedom. In the eighteenth century, however, these languages overlapped and often reinforced one another. Many leaders of the Revolution seem to the modern eye simultaneously republican (in their concern for the public good and citizens’ obligations to the polity) and liberal (in their preoccupation with individual rights).

Both political ideologies could inspire a commitment to constitutional government, freedom of speech and religion, and restraints on arbitrary power. Both emphasized the security of property as a foundation of freedom. The pervasive influence of Protestant morality, moreover, tempered what later would come to be seen as liberalism’s amoralism.

Certainly, in the colonial era, “liberty” stood as a meeting point between liberal and republican understandings of government and society. There seemed no necessary contradiction between the personal freedom central to liberalism and the public liberty of the republican tradition.