Edmund Burke on the roots of American freedom

On March 22, 1775, the great British statesman Edmund Burke gave a speech to the House of Commons advocating conciliation rather than repression of the American colonies.  Here are highlights.

In this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole: and as an ardent is always a jealous affection, your colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable, whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for.  This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies probably than in any other people of the earth; and this from a great variety of powerful causes … …

Edmund Burke

First, the people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen.  England, Sir, is a nation, which still I hope respects, and formerly adored, her freedom.  The colonists emigrated from you when this part of your character was most predominant; and they took this bias and direction the moment they parted from your hands.  They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles. … …

… … Their governments are popular [democratic] in a high degree; … … and this share of the people in their ordinary government never fails to inspire them with lofty sentiments, and with a strong aversion from whatever tends to deprive them of their chief importance.

If anything were wanting to this necessary operation of the form of government, religion would have given it a complete effect.  Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit.  The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion.  This is a persuasion not only favorable to liberty, but built upon it. … …

… In no other country in the world, perhaps, is the law so general a study.  … In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.

The last cause of this disobedient spirit in the colonies is hardly less powerful than the rest, as it is not merely moral, but laid deep in the natural constitution of things. Three thousand miles of ocean lie between you and them. No contrivance can prevent the effect of this distance in weakening government. … …

To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to depreciate the value of freedom itself; and we never seem to gain a paltry advantage over them in debate, without attacking some of those principles, or deriding some of those feelings, for which our ancestors have shed their blood.

Click on Edmund Burke, Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies to read the whole thing.

Hat tip to George McDade.

The American credo divides and unites us

The United States is exceptional in being founded not on loyalty to a monarch or charismatic leader, nor on identification with a racial or ethnic group, but on a set of ideas.   We Americans take this for granted, but foreign visitors do not.

Here’s how the English Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton saw us in the 1920s:

The American Constitution does resemble the Spanish Inquisition in this: that it is founded on a creed.  America is the only nation in the world that is founded upon a creed.  That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature.  It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice and that their authority is for that reason just. …

Here’s how Canadian sociologist Sacvan Bercovitch saw us in the 1960s:

I crossed the border into the United States and found myself inside the myth of America … a country that despite its arbitrary frontiers, despite its bewildering mixture of race and creed, could believe in something called the True America, and could invest that patent fiction with all the moral and emotional appeal of a religious symbol. … Here was the Jewish anarchist Paul Goodman berating the Midwest for abandoning the promise; here, the descendent of American slaves, Martin Luther King, denouncing injustice as a violation of the American way; here, an endless debate about national destiny … conservatives scavaging for un-Americans, New Left historians recalling the country to its sacred mission. … It was a hundred sects and factions, each apparently different from the others, yet all celebrating the same mission.

Our American credo is based on two complementary documents, one radical and one conservative.  The radical document is the Declaration of Independence.  The Declaration proclaims that all human beings are endowed with inalienable rights, that governments are instituted to protect these rights, that there is a right of revolution in defense of those rights, and that 13 British colonies are free and independent states.  The conservative document is the Constitution.  It  joins 13 free and independent states into a nation to form a more perfect union, provide for the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty for themselves and their posterity.

Independence Day, our patriotic holiday, commemorates the signing of the Declaration.  The President of the United States, naturalized citizens, members of the armed forces and federal officers swear to uphold, protect and defend the Constitution.  To understand the United States, it is necessary to understand both the Declaration and the Constitution.

Like the Bible, these documents do not interpret themselves, nor do they make clear what parts are for a particular time and situation, and what parts are truths for all time.  You can pull out quotes from either document to justify many different things.

We Americans have been fighting over the meaning of these documents almost since the signing of the Declaration and the ratification of the Constitution.

Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton were both patriots who contributed greatly to the founding of the United States.  But they hated each other, and each thought the other a traitor to the principles of the American republic as they conceived.

During the Civil War, the Union and Confederate soldiers and statesmen each thought they were fighting for the basic principles of American liberty.  They were not equally right, but they were equally sincere.

In our own time, it is no different.  The Tea Party and the American Civil Liberties Union are fighting to defend basic Constitutional rights as they conceive them.  They are not equally right, but they are equally sincere.

All through American history, different groups of people have tried to define themselves as the true Americans and their opponents as the un-Americans.  This can be, and has been, a very bad thing, but sometimes it is justified.  At least when we argue about the meaning of Americanism, our common loyalty to the Constitution and the Declaration gives us a common point of departure.  Arguing over what it means to be an American is part of our American exceptionalism.

Thomas Jefferson on American freedom

Original draft of the Declaration of Independence (1776)

We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1779)

Thomas Jefferson

That Almighty God hath created the mind free,—that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments, or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget hahits of … hypocrisy and meanness … that the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves by fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible … hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world, and through all time: … that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics and geometry … that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession and propagation of principles on the supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty, … and finally, that truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.

Jonathan Rauch on John Locke’s America

Jonathan Rauch

It was [John] Locke, followed by Adam Smith and others, who first built the theory of liberal social mechanisms – public processes, like voting or trading or performing experiments, in which no one gets special personal authority (no kings, no dictators, no high priests or oracles) and no one in particular gets to control the outcome.  In the liberal scheme of things, no matter who you are, your vote is just a vote, your dollar is just a dollar, and your experiment had better work when anyone else tries it. Moreover, there is no last election, last trade, or last hypothesis.   America is John Locke’s country. …

Outside, perhaps, of the inner circle of my family, there is no man or woman, no president or priest, whom I would fight and die for.  But I would willingly give my life for the U.S. Constitution, which is a set of rules.

Click on JonathanRauch for his web site.

Virginia Postrel on the American paradox

Virginia Prostel

The paradox of America is that we have built a history and tradition, a national culture, on the defiance of history and tradition.  From William Penn, who would not take off his hat, to Rosa Parks, who would not give up her seat, we teach our children the stories of stiff-necked heroes.  

Rhett Butler, not Ashley Wilkes, is the hero of  Gone With the Wind.   Nobody thinks Huck Finn should return Jim to slavery or stick around and be civilized.  We’re not a by-the-book country.

Click on Dynamist for Virginia Postrel’s web site.