Self-evident? Perceptions of our constitutional liberties are not without negative tensions.

Self-evident? Perceptions of our constitutional liberties are not without negative tensions.

By PETER S. ONUF

Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — We Americans live in a “land of liberty” where we may pursue happiness in our own ways, without a powerful state prescribing the routes we take. We may not get there in the end, for “happiness” is not specific. But as authors of our own stories we exult in the journey itself. The Declaration of Independence sets forth “self-evident” truths: “that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness.”

In theory, liberty comes first; governments, “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” are “instituted among men” in order “to secure these rights.” This is the American creed, the language that makes us a people. It is also a language that can tear us apart, for liberty can mean — and has meant — very different, sometimes irreconcilable, things to Americans. These differences pivot on the role of government. Jefferson and his fellow congressmen knew that Americans had a war to win. As a practical matter, government — the successful exercise of power — came first and liberty followed.

Revolutionary Patriots insisted that the distinction between their liberty and the despotic, unconstitutional power of the British imperial government was easy to see, even “self-evident.” Yet at this primal, nation-making moment, large numbers of their less-enlightened countrymen failed to grasp the distinction and balked at the break with Britain. Provincial Americans had been raised to believe that their liberties were the product of a long and successful British struggle to limit the boundless prerogative power of kings in a stable constitutional balance of power that was the admiration of the enlightened world.

Loyalists remained loyal to George III because the imperial connection guaranteed their liberties: allegiance and protection were reciprocal. Abjuring the king would reduce former subjects to a state of nature where life, in the memorable words of English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, was “nasty, brutish, and short.” This was not merely a hypothetical conjecture about the way things might have been in the far distant, uncivilized past. The state of nature was the state of war, the condition of modern sovereigns and their peoples in an anarchic, lawless, and violent world. And war is precisely what the Americans got when they declared their independence.

The regime of rebels

It’s small wonder that so many of their liberty-loving countrymen — as many as a third of the population, John Adams estimated — should pull back from the edge of this yawning abyss. They would not “consent” to the rebels’ new regime, calculating that resistance to the crown’s recognized, legitimate authority put their lives and liberties at risk.

We might say that Patriots collectively meant to “pursue” a public or civic “happiness” (the term was often used to describe social welfare and well-being) that American Tories believed they already enjoyed as loyal Britons — and that in doing so they ran roughshod over the rights of loyal fellow colonists, including the fundamental right of consent.

My point is not to expose the hypocrisy of Jefferson and his fellow Revolutionaries but to underscore the tensions within American conceptions of liberty from the beginning. The fundamental tension, according to students of modern liberalism, is between a negative conception of liberty — the freedom from outside interference or encroachment — and a positive conception — to participate on equal terms in the civic life of the commonwealth. Both ideas were critical to the success of the Revolution.

The negative conception was most conspicuous in the Patriots’ rhetoric: George and his minions had committed a “long train of abuses,” a veritable catalog of atrocities, against victimized Americans, violating their fundamental rights and reducing them to the condition of liberty-less slaves.

But Revolutionaries were not naive. They knew that new governments would not emerge spontaneously. They instead mobilized, demonstrating a genius for participation — that is, for a positive conception of liberty — in ad hoc committees, militia companies, congresses and conventions.The primary function of these organizations was to make war, not to make persuasive arguments.

The tension between positive and negative conceptions of liberty is familiar, and it is no surprise that it should be so pronounced in the Revolution. We can see the fundamental fault lines in the circular logic of Jefferson’s Declaration, where appeals to individuals’ “inalienable rights” precede — and proceed from — the premise of their collective identity as a “people.” In other words, “I” and “we” are conflated. Assuming that their fellow colonists would find the bill of particulars against royal rule compelling and that they therefore would identify their liberty with American independence, Congress declared war on Americans who failed to make the right choice.

These loyal British subjects were no part of the real American people: In effect, they had alienated themselves, making themselves into foreigners, even as George III had made himself into a foreign despot.

The American Revolution launched an “experiment” in republican government that could easily have failed. Counterrevolutionary threats at home and abroad emphasized the need to suppress party and faction and to cultivate common principles and purposes. “These principles,” Jefferson proclaimed in his first Inaugural Address (March 4, 1801), “form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation.”

Jefferson’s “creed” spoke to the liberty-loving individual, pursuing happiness in his own way, and to the nation, to a people prepared to make their own blood sacrifices to secure “peace, liberty, and safety.” This was not a libertarian fantasy of no government, not a license to sovereign individuals to declare their own independence. To the contrary, the willingness of Americans to sacrifice themselves — to sublimate the “I” in the “we” — made the United States “the strongest Government on earth.”

What is history’s verdict on the peculiarly American synthesis of individual and collective, negative and positive conceptions of liberty? The Civil War should be a sobering reminder that there have always been tensions within our conceptions of liberty. It should also remind us that our national identity — who exactly “we” are, and what makes us a “people” — has been and will continue to be contested and controversial.

X Peter S. Onuf, of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation of History at the University of Virginia, is the author of many works on Jefferson and his age including, most recently, “The Mind of Thomas Jefferson.” He wrote this for the Fredericksburg (Va.) Free Lance-Star. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.