Liberty: Eighteenth-Century Transatlantic Legacies and Challenges

Since the seventeenth century, the debate among English-speaking peoples over the nature of "liberty" periodically spilled out of the salons of the Enlightenment into the streets and onto the battlefields. When business concerns used what they called their liberty to create scarcities that raised prices, and five hundred Bostonians exercised what they called liberty to turn out with drum and fife to escort four merchants out of the city. Shortly, Abigail Adams reported that when "an eminent, wealthy, stingy merchant" who had refused to sell coffee under six shillings per pound, a hundred or so women descended on his warehouse with their carts and truck, insisting on it. When he snubbed them, one of the women grabbed him by his neck and tossed him into the cart, from which he gave up the keys. The women tipped him into the street, unlocked the warehouse and seized the coffee they wanted. Throughout, "a large concourse of men stood amazed, silent spectators of the whole transaction." Revolutions for liberty required mobilizing broad social currents with diverse and often conflicting interests and ideas of "liberty."

In contrast, the owners and rulers of the society translated this diversity of perspectives into the institutionalized standards of a white republic, said to subsume and codify the aspirations of that Revolution. The issues of the War for American Independence and the establishment of a new government of the United States pose a broad range of complex issues, so many of which have become hard to distinguish from the subsequent course of the nation. To understand the process from the inside out — from the bottom up — a serious appreciation of the revolutionary content of the movement and the aspirations of the people should be the starting point. Still, the elites in each of the thirteen colonies would define its specific and often contradictory impact. The limits on the potential of the Revolution become particularly evident in considering its reaffirmation of the mass exclusions endemic to the colonial condition.

Revolutionary Stirrings

The Stamp Act in 1765 got the independent craftsmen — and those artisans and laborers rampaging through the cities of British America — chanting "Liberty, property, no stamps!" Though many officials complained of "the mob," one British official opined that "the inferior people would have been quiet" had their social "betters" not agitated them. He thought that the sailors "are the only People who may be properly Stiled Mob, are entirely at the Command of the Merchants who employ them." The gentlemen dominated the "Sons of Liberty" which hoped would mobilize the craftsmen and laborers of the port cities where they might block the collection of the taxes. Still, it became quickly obvious that the "mechanics" meant something rather distinct from the merchant princes when they spoke of their "liberty, property." "What will it avail to secure a nominal independence," asked one rebel, "if we suffer our property which is the essence of it, to be wrested from us?"

Once mobilized to resist the Stamp Act, the crowds set a course of their own. The Boston's Sons relied on Ebeneezer Mackintosh, a twenty-eight-year-old cordwainer. The descendant of Scottish rebels and the son of a man so poor he had been "warned out" of several Massachusetts towns, Mackintosh had deep roots in the community as a veteran and a member of the militia leader, the fire company, and the South End gang, which had clubbed its way to victory in the annual "Pope's Day" brawl the previous November. In August 1765, he led a large crowd from "the Liberty Tree" on the Commons and to the Town House, as planned, but then began a three-day rampage by continuing to the docks where it reduced the half-built warehouse of a local Loyalist to kindling. At Newport, John Webber, a young sailor led a similarly independent rampage, after which the local Sons arrested him only to find the threatening "mob" on their own doorsteps. The Sons of Liberty learned early that the people they sought to use learned how to act in their own interests.

From his refuge in Boston Harbor, the royal governor warned that once one permitted popular challenges legitimacy, "Necessity will soon oblige and justify an Insurrection of the Poor against the Rich, those that want the necessaries of Life against those that have them." "Both employers and the employed," wrote another, "much to their mutual shame and inconvenience, no longer live together with anything like attachment and cordiality on either side; and the laboring classes, instead of regarding the rich as their guardians, patrons, and benefactors, now look upon them as so many overgrown colossuses, whom it is no demerit to wrong." Similar fears moved many resistance leaders to revise their approach to the problem.

It would be the working people of the city that faced down the imperial authorities. On March 5, 1770, British soldiers opened fire on a civilian crowd in Boston. Said to be the first American killed in the Revolution, Crispus Attucks remains a terribly obscure figure, though certainly a man of color. Almost certainly a seaman of mixed African and native background, likely held as a slave until his escape around 1750, after which he went to sea. Attucks stood at the fore of a crowd armed with clubs advancing on redcoats at the Old State House. When the troops opened fire, Attucks and four others died and six were wounded. Many years later, William Cooper Nell and other black abolitionists started the celebration of a "Crisups Attucks Day." In the immediate aftermath, both sides pulled back from open conflict.

Yet, "anarchy" of "the mob" unfolded most clearly in the larger Mid-Atlantic cities — Philadelphia and New York — which concentrated them in the most numbers. At the latter, "The mob begin to think and reason," wrote Gouverneur Morris at New York. Yet, the British occupied the city early in the war, providing an immediate common enemy that stymied the debate among the revolutionaries about the nature of the liberty for which they contended.

Certainly, some of the resistance embraced the possibilities of a thinking "mob." After his training as a...