Fighting Words

The American revolutionaries never chose their words with more care than when they named “liberty” as one of their inalienable rights. Two centuries later, we continue to rank freedom as our most cherished national possession. Pull any random hundred citizens off the street and ask them what freedom is, though, and you’re likely to get a couple of dozen different answers, if not a shouting match or a brawl. Eric Foner’s brilliant, important book, “The Story of American Freedom,” shows how, having invoked liberty to justify their independence in 1776, Americans have fought ever since over what that freedom means and over who may enjoy its blessings.

Our enduring ability to disagree over the meaning of a term that is central to our national identity makes freedom, according to Foner, “an essentially contested concept”--an idea the very existence of which compels debate. Our disagreements have been structured, at the intellectual level, by the fact that definitions of liberty tend to fall into one of two categories: “negative” freedom (the absence of external restraints on citizens’ actions, with the state acting as no more than a referee) and “positive” freedom (the empowerment of individuals and groups to achieve what would otherwise be impossible, with the state taking an activist, enabling role). Unlike previous writers, who have treated freedom as a timeless ideal that we have striven to realize, Foner maintains that the history of American liberty is not linear and progressive but dialectical in character. What we call freedom bears the stamp of every group that has sought to stake its claim to citizenship--and thus to a share in the blessings of liberty--as well as the impress of those who have resisted the extension and expansion of liberty’s realm.

Foner’s achievement, and the reason that his book deserves a wide audience, is to make clear the terms on which excluded groups have gained admission to the body politic, and the ways in which the concept of freedom helped or hindered them in doing it. To describe these processes and to put them in the context of political events and socioeconomic change, he synthesizes a vast range of scholarship into a masterful narrative: a highly readable story in which the partisans of many visions of freedom have long maintained the upper hand. Thus those who looked to the nation-state as the propagator of liberty--such advocates of positive freedom as Federalists, Whigs, Radical Republicans, Progressives, New Dealers and Great Society liberals--have exerted as profound an influence on American liberty as those who recoiled from state activism--Jeffersonian Republicans, Jacksonian Democrats, Gilded Age Republicans, Southern Democrats and Reagan Revolutionaries. Although negative definitions of freedom predominate, especially in that crucial component of politics that deals with economic life, Foner’s story should caution today’s Republicans against assuming their victory is complete and permanent and encourage the remaining liberals in the Democratic Party not to despair.

British colonists understood freedom in terms of privileges granted by the crown or rights inherent in common law. Such “Englishmen’s liberties” included the right to consent to taxation, the privilege of habeas corpus and many other protections that we still cherish. These narrowly focused liberties belonged to a political community that was almost exclusively white, male, Protestant and propertied. Property ownership defined both citizenship and liberty: Free men were those who did not live at any other man’s command. They were independent producers, not wage earners; household heads, not the wives, sons, daughters, apprentices, servants and slaves who lived as their dependents. Freedom could be claimed only by men in mature life, who understood it as something that had to be earned--and something that could be dissipated as easily as an estate. Most of all, however, colonists understood freedom by its opposite, slavery.

Because slavery was both the starkest form of dependency and a condition that left the slave powerless to defend himself, the Revolutionaries found in it the perfect metaphor for tyranny. They did not understand their own possession of slaves as ironic. Slavery seemed less to contradict liberty than to illuminate its value, and American understandings of freedom were thus strongly racialized. Although free blacks had been present in the colonies from the beginning, nowhere in the new United States were they accorded full citizenship. The qualifications for participation in civil society began with whiteness.

What could break apart such interlocking assumptions about the nature and bounds of freedom? In part, it was the Revolution’s ideals; in part, the changes in economic and cultural life that came in the 19th century. To justify declaring independence, the Revolutionaries found it necessary to argue that they were defending not just Englishmen’s liberties--many of which were revocable--but the rights of man. They did not appreciate that in redefining limited privileges as natural rights, they were enabling anyone to claim them. The process by which groups coalesced to stake their claims to the rights of citizens and the ways they used the language of freedom to make those claims stick make up the heart of Foner’s story.

The rise of a market economy and the culture of individualism necessary to capitalism’s spread furnished the second set of circumstances that allowed the expansion of the post-Revolutionary franchise. The first group to claim citizenship, equal rights and freedom consisted of non-propertied white men--the wage earners who were capitalism’s foot soldiers--in the early 1800s. White manhood suffrage existed in virtually every state by 1830 and proved the least troubled of all franchise expansions before the late 20th century. This was so because universal white manhood suffrage required neither the direct exertion of federal power nor any rethinking of the racial or gender boundaries of freedom. Insofar as further expansions of the political community would necessitate either of these, the story of American freedom would be anything but peaceful.

The persistence of original notions of a racialized, gendered liberty--that is, of the assumption that freedom belonged only to white men--structures much of Foner’s story, for these notions were anything but easy barriers to break down. Though it would be impossible here to summarize how liberty came to be extended to the nation’s many excluded groups, a thumbnail sketch of the black experience can hint at the richness of Foner’s account and suggest something of its implications for the present day.

To bring black men within the ambit of freedom required both intense moral argument and a severe military emergency. Abolitionists whose evangelical faith had convinced them that it was a sin for any human being to exercise dominion over another opened the argument by seeking to emancipate the slaves; a few radicals--principally free blacks like Frederick Douglass--went on to demand that the political community exclude no one on the basis of race. The abolitionists’ ethical arguments persuaded only a tiny minority of Northerners but horrified the vast majority of Southern whites. Politicians from both sections, knowing what deep divisions a national debate on slavery would bring into the open, kept the issue out of electoral politics until the end of the Mexican American War. At that point, when it became necessary to decide the future of the vast, newly conquered territories, Northerners worried about the future of white free labor began to oppose the extension of slavery beyond the states in which it already existed. They did not do so because they understood slavery as a moral outrage but because they wanted the new Western states to be a white man’s preserve. These racist attitudes did not in the least reassure Southern slaveholders, who now became convinced that a massive antislavery conspiracy was afoot in the North. Their response, secession, precipitated the Civil War, which in turn permitted a revolutionary reformulation of the idea of liberty in America.

Although Abraham Lincoln’s sole avowed intention was to preserve the Union, by 1862 he understood that he could win the war only by striking at the heart of the South’s social and economic system. Lincoln did not foresee that massive exertions of federal power would endure for years after the Confederate armies had surrendered or that the Radical Republicans in Congress would essentially rewrite the Constitution in the name of freedom. The addition of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and their enforcement on the conquered South during Reconstruction, however, would expand political liberty beyond anything imaginable before the war.

America’s white majority could not sustain so unlimited a commitment to freedom or such vast exertions of federal power as to enable African Americans to make good their claim to equality. The post-Reconstruction revival of negative conceptions of freedom and the reversion of power to state and local governments inaugurated the century of segregation and disfranchisement that effectively re-racialized American liberty. It took World War II, and the sustained expansion of federal power that resulted from it, to make good on the Radical Republicans’ promise of a colorblind freedom. Because the Nazis espoused a racist ideology uncomfortably similar to American white supremacist beliefs, Americans had no choice but to confront the contradictions between Jim Crow and the freedom they were fighting to preserve. During the Cold War, the preservation of freedom in the face of the Communist threat justified the further enhancement of federal power, which civil rights leaders capitalized on to end segregation in the armed forces and to fight legal discrimination with measures like the 24th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Could anything but wars fought in the name of freedom justify the political incorporation of traditionally unenfranchised or disfranchised groups? Foner observes that “wars have been a vital force in expanding the boundaries of the nation’s ‘imagined community’ ” but stops short of making a causal connection between war and freedom in American life. It would be difficult, however, to overstate the perception of national emergency as a cause of the de-racialization of freedom in the United States. Foner’s narrative, of course, goes far beyond this single issue, yet it is a testimony to the power and richness of his story that the reader comes away pondering such questions.

With the Cold War over, the power of the federal government in retreat and a prevailing definition of freedom so negatively constructed as to identify the government itself as liberty’s antagonist, one may well wonder what the future of freedom in America holds. Will the current understandings of freedom persist? Under what circumstances might federal activism in the name of freedom revive? How might terrorism or the realignment of international power into blocs governed by cultural affinities rather than universal political ideologies or a prolonged world-wide economic decline affect our notions of freedom? Those who wish to consider such questions could find no better starting point than with this superb book.