It could be in fact argued that slavery made republican freedom possible, for by eliminating the great bulk of dependent poor from the political nation, it left the public arena to men or propertied independence. For many Americans, owning slaves offered a route to the economic autonomy widely deemed indispensable to genuine freedom. (查看原文)
So, too, the liberal definition of freedom as essentially private and of the political community as a group of individuals seeking protection for their natural rights could readily be invoked to defend bondage. Nothing was more essential to liberal freedom than the right of self-government and protection of property against interference by the state. These principles suggested that it would be an infringement of liberty to relieve a man of his property (including slave property) without his consent. The right to property, Virginian Arthur Lee insisted, was "the guardian of every other right, and to deprive a people of this, is in fact to deprive them of their liberty." (查看原文)
Much the same point was made by David Ramsay, a South Carolinian whose History of the American Revolution, published in 1789, helped to popularize an understanding of the American past as a progress of freedom. In the southern colonies, wrote Ramsay, slavery "nurtured a spirit of liberty among the free inhabitants," since nothing could excite slaveholders' opposition to British rule more effectively than fear of being "degraded" to a position analogous to that of their slaves. (查看原文)
While rarely mentioned explicitly, the proximity of hundreds of thousands of real slaves was intimately related to the meaning of freedom for the men who made the American Revolution. In his famous speech to the British Parliament warning against attempts to coerce the colonies, Edmund Burke suggested that in the South, at least, it was familiarity with actual slavery that made colonial leaders so sensitive to the threat of metaphorical slavery. (查看原文)
Most were not only uncomfortable with liberal rhetoric but believed, in keeping with the best wisdom of their profession, that the most effective messages were simple slogans, endlessly reiterated. (查看原文)
The authors of the notion of freedom as a universal birthright, a truly human ideal, were not so much the founding fathers, who created a nation dedicated to liberty but resting in large measure on slavery, but abolitionists who sought to extend the blessings of liberty to encompass blacks, slave and free; women who seized upon the rhetorics of democratic freedom to demand the right to vote; and immigrant groups who insisted that nativity and culture ought not to form boundaries of exclusion. The struggles of such groups for freedom elevated equality to central place in the language of liberty, challenging the views of other Americans who held that equality is the antithesis of freedom. (查看原文)
One could, if one desired, 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. (查看原文)
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 depended in considerable measure on the labor of dependent women...In the household-based economy of colonial America, autonomy rested on command over others. "Freedom and dependence," wrote... (查看原文)
For a brief moment, the "contagion of liberty" appeared to threaten the continued existence of slavery...In the North, every state from New Hampshire to Pennsylvania took steps toward emancipation, the first time in recorded history that legislative power had been invoked to eradicate slavery. But even here, where slavery was peripheral to the economy, the slowness of abolition reflected how powerfully the sanctity of property rights impeded emancipation. (查看原文)
By narrowing the gradations of freedom among the white population, the Revolution widened the divide between free Americans and those who remained in slavery. Race, which had long constituted one of many kinds of legal and social inequality among colonial Americans, now emerged as a convenient justification for the existence of slavery in a land ideologically committed to freedom as a natural right. (查看原文)
And if personal self-development--for men at least--required pursuing economic gain in the turbulent world of the marketplace, the ho,e, now emptied of productive functions, was exalted as the site where the self could reach its fullest expression via love, friendship, and mutual obligation--distinctly non-market values. The boundary of the sovereign self--which came to be called "privacy"--was increasingly understood as a realm with which neither other individuals nor government had a right to interfere, Freedom, in this definition, lay within. (查看原文)
In a democratic society, political freedom was simultaneously an individual right and a collective attribute of self-governing communities, a restraint on unaccountable authority and a form of citizen empowerment..."Freedom in this country," declared a Tennessee court in 1827, was not "confined in its operations to privacy," but was a public quality that flourished at "the court house and the election ground." No society that harbored a slave population numbering in the millions could be unfamiliar with vigorous action by government. (查看原文)
