Ch. 2.2. The Social Conditions of Freedom

(Continued from Foner and Taylor.)

Whether liberal, republican, or some combination of the two, most eighteenth-century commentators assumed that only certain kinds of persons were fully capable of enjoying the benefits and exercising the rights of freedom.

On both sides of the Atlantic, it was an axiom of political thought that dependents lacked a will of their own and thus were incapable of participating in public affairs. Liberty, wrote the influential political theorist Richard Price in 1776, rested on “one general idea, the idea of self-direction or self-government.” Those who did not control their own lives ought not to have a voice in governing the state. Political freedom required economic independence.

Property, therefore, was “interwoven” with eighteenth-century understandings of freedom, as the New York publisher John Peter Zenger put it in 1735. The independence entailed by property was an indispensable basis of liberty. Dr. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary (1755) defined “independence” as “freedom,” and Thomas Jefferson insisted that dependence “begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition” (Notes on the State of Virginia, 1785).

Hence the ubiquity of property qualifications for voting in Britain and the colonies. The “true reason” for such requirements, Sir William Blackstone explained in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69), was that men without property would inevitably fall “under the immediate domination of others.” Lacking a will of their own, their votes would threaten the “general liberty.”

Not only personal dependence, as in the case of a domestic servant, but working for wages was widely viewed as disreputable. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, wage labor was associated with servility and loss of liberty; only those who controlled their own labor could be regarded as fully free. British popular ballads and folk tales romanticized vagabonds, gypsies, highwaymen, even beggars, as more free than chose who worked for wages. Many years would pass before the idea that wage labor was compatible with genuine freedom gained broad public acceptance.

Those who drew up plans to colonize British North America expected to reproduce the hierarchical social structure of the mother country. But from the earliest days of settlement, migrants from Britain and the Continent held the promise of the New World to be liberation from the economic inequalities and widespread economic dependence of the Old. John Smith had barely landed at Jamestown in 1607 when be observed that in America, “every man may be master and owner of his own labor and land.”

During the whole of the colonial era, most free immigrants expected to achieve economic autonomy, an anticipation encouraged by promotional literature that lured settlers by publicizing the notion of the New World as a place of exceptional opportunity for the acquisition of property. The visions of liberty that emigrants brought to colonial America always included the promise of economic independence and the ability to pass a freehold on to one’s children.

Defining freedom in terms of economic independence drew a sharp line between those classes capable of fully enjoying its benefits and those who were not. In the eighteenth century, economic autonomy was far beyond the reach of most Britons.

Even in colonial America, most of the population was not, by this standard, truly free. Lacking a hereditary aristocracy like that of England, colonists prided themselves on having “no rank above that of freeman.” But there were many ranks below. The half million slaves who labored in the mainland colonies on the eve of independence obviously stood outside the circle of free persons.

For free women, whose civic identity was subsumed within that of their fathers and husbands, and who had no legal claim to their own labor, opportunities for economic autonomy barely existed. Women, moreover, were deemed by men deficient in rationality, courage, and the broad capacity for self­-determination—the qualities necessary in the public-spirited citizen. Indeed, the ideal of independence was partly defined by gender; whether in the economy or polity, autonomy was a masculine trait, dependence the normal lot of women.

Even among the white male population, it is sometimes forgotten, many varieties of partial freedom coexisted in colonial America, including indentured servants, apprentices, domestic laborers, transported convicts, and sailors impressed into service in the Royal Navy. Freedom in colonial America existed along a continuum from the slave, stripped of all rights, to the independent property owner, and during a lifetime an individual might well occupy more than one place on this spectrum.

Servants, who voluntarily surrendered their freedom for a specified time, comprised a major part of the non­slave labor force throughout the colonial era. For example, three-fourths of the emigrants to the Chesapeake (Virginia and Maryland) in the seventeenth-century (about 90,000 of a total of 120,000) were servants. Too poor to pay the cost (about 6 pounds) of the transatlantic passage, servants mortgaged four to seven years of their lives to a ship captain or merchant, who carried them to the Chesapeake for sale to tobacco planters. Unpaid except for room and board during these years, at the end of their term servants were supposed to be provided with clothes, tools and, at least where the “headright” system was enacted, 50 acres of land. The evidence suggests, however, that only some of those who survived their servitude actually received any land.

As late as the early 1770s, nearly half the immigrants who arrived in America from England and Scotland were ‘indentured servants,’ had entered into contracts for a fixed period of labor in exchange for passage. Indentured servants often worked in the fields alongside slaves. Like slaves, in legal terms servants resembled property more than persons: they could be bought and sold, were subject to corporal punishment, and their obligation to fulfill their duties (“specific performance,” in legal terminology) was enforced by the courts.

“Many Negroes are better used,” complained one female indentured servant in 1756; she went on to describe being forced to work “day and night… then tied up and whipped.” But, of course, unlike slaves, servants could look forward to freedom from their servitude. Assuming they survived their period of labor (and many in the early years did not), servants would be released from dependency and receive “freedom dues.” Servants, a Pennsylvania judge remarked in 1793, occupied “a middle rank between slaves and freemen.”

The prevalence of so many less than free workers underpinned the widespread reality of economic independence, and therefore freedom, for propertied male heads of households. This was most obvious in the case of slaveholding planters, who already equated freedom with mastership, but also true of the countless artisans in northern cities who owned a slave or two and employed indentured servants and apprentices. In New York City and Philadelphia, artisans and tradesmen, who prided themselves on their own independence, dominated the ranks of slaveholders.

And the vaunted independence of the yeoman farmer [i.e., a small, independent farmer] depended in considerable measure on the labor of dependent women. The popular adage, “women’s work is never done,” was literally true; the cooking, cleaning. sewing, and assistance in agricultural chores by farmers’ wives and daughters often spelled the difference between self-sufficiency and economic dependence.

In the household-based economy of colonial America, autonomy rested on command over others. “Freedom and dependence,” wrote the Pennsylvania jurist James Wilson in 1774, were “opposite and irreconcilable terms.” Wilson failed to note that since the free man was, by definition, master of a household, freedom and dependence were also inextricably connected.

The eighteenth century witnessed an increase in social stratification in colonial America and the rise of a wealthy gentry [i.e., affluent or wealthy farmers] exercising more and more dominance over civil, religious, and economic institutions, and demanding deference from their social inferiors.

Nonetheless, by the mid-eighteenth century, the majority of the non-slave male population were farmers who owned their own land. With the household still the center of economic production, the propertyless were a far smaller proportion of the population than in Britain and wage labor far less prevalent. Among the free population, property was more widely distributed than anywhere in Europe.

Thus, while essentially the same property qualifications for voting, the possession of a small farm or urban shop, prevailed on both sides of the British Atlantic, only about a quarter of English men owned this much property, compared to two-thirds of free (non-slave) colonial American men. In America, writes one historian, lived “thousands of the freest individuals the Western world had ever known.”

An abhorrence of personal dependence and the equation of freedom with autonomy sank deep roots in British North America not simply as part of an ideological inheritance, but because these beliefs accorded with social reality—a wide distribution of productive property that made a modicum of economic independence part of the lived experience of large numbers of colonists. What the French essayist Hector St. John Crevecoeur identified in 1782 as the hallmark of American society—its “pleasing uniformity of decent competence”—would form the material basis for the later definition of the United States as a “producer’s republic,” as well as its corollary, that widespread ownership of property was the social precondition of freedom.