To understand the various meanings of “liberty” or “freedom” (which we may consider as synonyms) in the colonial period, some familiarity with colonial society is necessary. This chapter draws on the succinct analysis of these meanings in their social contexts provided by Eric Foner, in “The Freeborn Englishman,” from his book, The Story of American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1998), ch. 1, pp. 3-12, supplemented for some points by Alan Taylor’s works: American Colonies (New York: Penguin, 2001), pp. 117-203, and American Revolutions (New York: Norton, 2016), pp. 31-53. This chapter begins by examining “spiritual” or “Christian” liberty and the analogous idea of “civil liberty.”

Liberty did not suddenly enter the American vocabulary in 1776. Indeed, few words were as ubiquitous in the trans-Atlantic political discourse of the eighteenth century. Colonial America was heir to many understandings of liberty, some as old as the city-states of ancient Greece, others as new as the Enlightenment. Some laid the foundations for modern conceptions of freedom; others are quite unfamiliar today.

Spiritual or Christian Liberty

One common definition in British North America defined freedom less as a political or social status than as a spiritual condition. In the ancient world, lack of self-control was understood as a form of slavery, the antithesis of the free life. “Show me a man who isn’t a slave,” wrote the Roman Stoic thinker Seneca; “one is a slave to sex, another to money, another to ambition” (1st Century CE).

This understanding of freedom as submission to a moral code was also central to the Christian cosmology that suffused the world view of the early colonists. Wherever it flourished, Christianity enshrined the idea of liberation, but as a spiritual condition rather than a worldly one. Since the Fall, man had been prone to succumb to his lusts and passions. Freedom meant abandoning this life of sin to embrace the teachings of Christ. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is,” declares the New Testament, “there is liberty” (2 Corinthians 3:17). In this definition, servitude and freedom were mutually reinforcing, not contradictory states, since those who accepted the teachings of Christ simultaneously became “free from sin” and “servants to God” (Romans 6:20-22).

The Puritan settlers of colonial Massachusetts, who believed their colony the embodiment of true Christianity, planted this spiritual definition of freedom on American soil. In a 1645 speech to the Massachusetts legislature that epitomized Puritan conceptions of freedom, John Winthrop, the colony’s governor, distinguished sharply between “natural liberty,” which suggested “a liberty to evil,” and “moral liberty . . . a liberty to do only what is good.”

This definition of freedom as flowing from self-denial and moral choice was quite compatible with severe restraints on freedom of speech, religion, movement, and personal behavior. Individual desires must give way to the needs of the community, and “Christian liberty” meant submission not only to the will of God but to secular authority as well, to a well-understood set of interconnected responsibilities and duties, a submission no less complete for being voluntary. The most common civil offense in the courts of colonial New England was “contempt of authority.” The unrestrained individual enjoying natural rights, whom later generations would imagine as the embodiment of freedom, struck these Puritan settlers as the incarnation of anarchy, the antithesis of liberty.

Civil Liberty

This equation of liberty with moral action flourished as well in a secularized form in the Atlantic world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If religious liberty meant obedience to God, “civil liberty” rested on obedience to law. As far back as the ancient world, Aristotle had cautioned men not to “think it slavery to live according to the rule of the constitution” (4th Century BCE). The law was liberty’s “salvation,” not its adversary. Modern philosophers of liberty also distinguished sharply between “unrestrained freedom” and “a life lived under the rule of law.” Liberty, wrote John Locke in 1689, meant not leaving every person free to do as he desired, but “having a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power.”

As Locke’s formulation suggests, liberty in its civil form depended on obedience to the law, so long as statutes were promulgated by elected representatives and did not operate in an arbitrary manner. Here lay the essence of the idea of British liberty, a central element of social and political thought on both sides of the Atlantic. Until the 1770s, most colonists believed themselves part of the freest political system mankind had ever known.