The Freedoms We Lost

Barbara Clark Smith. The Freedoms We Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America.
New York: The New Press, 2010.

In the Preface, Barbara Clark Smith establishes that in many important ways, Americans today enjoy many more--and in many ways, greater--freedoms than colonial and Revolutionary-era Americans did; she assures the reader that "Early America was no golden age." (xi)  Her goal here is not to claim that early Americans were better off or "more free" than today, but rather that they enjoyed and believed in different freedoms. Those freedoms were vested in a radically different conception of the relationship between the individual, and both society and government. That understanding provided a context in which a more consensual notion of "governing", based on a sense that a unified "people" provided consent not only to how law was made but also how--and even if--it was implemented.

The world in which these earlier freedoms existed was one in which "the people" were subjects, rather than citizens, a distinction which on first glance would seem to offer little room for any meaningful freedom as modern-day Americans understand them.  (3)  But while ultimate sovereignty was not vested in the people as a whole, and neither suffrage nor representation were as universal or equitable as contemporary ideals would hold, colonial Americans conceptualized their freedoms in different ways. While their ability to control the reins of government and direct the creation of laws and legal institutions, both common law and custom vested them with an ability to modulate, regulate, and even negate the implementation of law. Through collective public actions, and juries, "the people" participated in the political culture of their society by, in theory at least, embodying and clarifying a unitary sentiment. "The people" did not have direct say in the laws and dictates their government imposed, but they did have the right--even the obligation--to give, or withhold, their consent.

This conception of a collective consensus extended to realms which later Americans would regard as being "economics" rather than "politics." There was a moral dimension to what we call "market relations", in that no transaction was purely a matter between buyer and seller. The community itself had a claim on the terms in which goods and services were produced, distributed, and sold. This consensus, however, would begin to break down during the later years of the Revolution. The sacrifices the Patriot movement required become more and more questionable to many as the war dragged on and the initial enthusiasm for war and revolution abated.

Whether or not this older conception would have survived had the war been shorter is an open question; there were other stresses on the old order. Most importantly, the development of the ideal of popular sovereignty, along with total representation, eliminated much of the rationale for the old ways. The idea that crowds could and should negotiate the terms of compliance with constitutional government became more and more problematic as former Patriots such as Samuel Adams accommodated themselves to the idea that elections were the proper--perhaps the only--arena for political action by "the People." Americans had gained many new freedoms, but they lost others.