The Story of American Freedom

Foner points out that American freedom was born in revolution, but the War for Independence left behind a contradictory legacy because of the rapidly growing slave population in the United States (3). The definition of freedom in Colonial America created by Puritan settlers was more spiritual than political. The Puritans viewed a lack of self-control as a liberty to evil and instead promoted moral liberty, meaning submission to a Christian moral code. This idea of freedom resulted in severe restraints on liberties that would be cherished by later generations, including personal behavior, speech, religion, and movement (4). Foner explains that this “Christian Liberty meant submission not only to the will of God but to secular authority as well” (4).

Across the ocean, the rule of law was central to British freedom also, but British liberty was severely restricted. British political liberty was limited to a small percentage of the male population, and British religious liberty meant that only Protestants could freely worship. Foner argues that “on both sides of the Atlantic, liberty emerged as the battle cry of the rebellious” (7). Two competing ideologies of freedom arose in the Anglo-American world. Republicanism “celebrated active participation in public life as the essence of liberty,” but it was class-based in that only owners of property were seen as virtuous enough to participate in civil matters (7). Liberalism celebrated personal autonomy, meaning “not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown arbitrary will of another man” (8). According to Foner, liberty in the colonial era “stood as a meeting point between liberal and republican understandings of government and society” (9).

Because property was more widely owned, more people in colonial America were able to partake in political life than in Britain, but the Revolution was necessary to reach its democratic potential. Foner argues that “the Revolution unleashed public debates and political and social struggles that democratized the concept of freedom” (12). Although inequality had been a fundamental aspect of colonial life, the Revolution also framed that concept as illegitimate because Americans chose to reject the crown and the principle of hereditary aristocracy (16). By the end of the Revolution, the meaning of freedom had expanded by excluding property ownership requirements to vote, but it still pertained almost exclusively to white men. Concerns over economic inequality were rampant, but the Constitution was designed with checks and balances meant to protect a republican form of government from the rise of such inequality. According to Foner, “[T]he framers of the Constitution viewed freedom both as the foundation of governmental authority and as a threat to proper governance that must be kept in check” (24).

According to Foner, early American ideas of freedom were shaped in large part by the writings of Thomas Paine, whose 1776 pamphlet Common Sense “announced a prophecy from which would spring the nineteenth-century idea of the United States as an empire of liberty” (15).

Foner states that “apart from ‘liberty,’ the word most frequently invoked in the legal and political literature of the eighteenth century was its opposite, ‘slavery’” (29). To Foner, Thomas Jefferson embodies these contradictions. Despite his lofty rhetoric of equality in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson “owned over one hundred enslaved people at the time he wrote the immortal lines affirming the inalienable right to liberty, and everything he cherished in his own manner of life, from lavish entertainments to the leisure that made possible the pursuit of arts and sciences, ultimately rested on slave labor” (32).

Even though the conditions of actual enslaved people in 18th century America were widely known to be abhorrent, use of the word slavery as a metaphor referring to any type of oppression became common among free citizens. The hypocrisy of revering liberty while profiting from slavery was present in America, Britain, Holland, and France, all of which were involved in the Atlantic slave trade (32). The institution of slavery was already entrenched in America by the time of the Revolution, but the War for Independence raised hopes in many that it could be eliminated. Enslaved people had high hopes as they began applying the Revolution’s ideology of freedom to their own cause. Small steps toward emancipation took root in the north in the 1780s, but compromises in the drafting of the Constitution in 1787 assured the existence of slavery for decades. Foner argues that the framers “managed to strengthen the institution of slavery and leave it more deeply embedded in American life and politics” (36).

Because of the compromise in the Constitution that prohibited the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade for at least two decades, states in the deep South took the opportunity to dramatically increase slave importation. Similarly, because of the three-fifths clause, which allowed states to count individual enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of determining congressional representation, southern states held far greater power in Congress. Foner points out that the 1790 census revealed that “the half-million slave population of 1776 had grown to some 700,000” (37). With the Constitution’s opening words of “we the people,” the framers also set out to establish who “the people” were and by extension who could enjoy the blessings of American freedom. The Constitution identified three different populations inhabiting within America: Indigenous Americans, who were viewed in the context of tribal sovereignty, other persons, meaning enslaved people, and finally “the people,” meaning free citizens (38). 

The Naturalization Act of 1790 became the first Congressional definition of American nationality (39). It determined that only free white citizens could become American citizens, and that limitation lasted until 1870 (39). Although the hypocrisy of denying freedom and naturalization to non-whites while declaring a love of liberty was obvious, there were many attempts to justify it in the years after Independence. The idea of innate Black inferiority in regard to personal behavior, intellectual capabilities, and rational thought became the primary justification not for restricted citizenship to non-whites and for slavery itself. Foner argues, “Race, which had long constituted one of many kinds of legal and social inequality among colonial Americans, now emerged as a convenient justification for the existence of slavery in a land ideologically committed to freedom as a natural right” (40).

Foner explains three important historical developments unleashed by the Revolution that forcefully impacted the notion of American freedom in the 1800s: “territorial expansion, political democratization, and the rapid spread of market relations” (48). The term manifest destiny, meaning that the United States had a divine mission to expand across all of North America, was coined in 1845, but the idea was put into motion much earlier (50). Manifest destiny meant that the United States “could enjoy both empire and self-government,” and it became a primary component of American freedom (50). Regardless of national borders, American settlers began seizing North American territories belonging to Spain, France, Mexico, and Indian tribes because of the economic opportunity that the land represented. The settlers believed America was an empire of liberty, so they completely disregarded the fact that the land was inhabited by others. Foner argues that “Indian removal—accomplished by fraud, intimidation, and violence—was indispensable to the triumph of manifest destiny and the American mission spreading freedom” (51).

A westward expansion grew in the 19th century, so did political democratization. By 1860, every state had eliminated property qualifications for voting (52). This promoted the idea of America as an empire of liberty and a flourishing democracy, but suffrage was still largely limited to white males. American freedom also came to be symbolized in economic matters in the 1800s. The economic transformation known as the market revolution took place in the first half of the 19th century (55). It featured technological innovations in transportation and communication that connected farmers to national and global markets (55). Foner explains, “The decline of the household as the center of economic production, combined with westward movement and urban development, created a large mobile population no longer tied to local communities “(55). He argues that “the right to compete for advancement in the marketplace became a touchstone of American freedom” (55).

Just as westward expansion and the market revolution impacted the idea of American economic autonomy for small farmers, factors such as an increased scale of manufacturing, increased immigration, and the emergence of wage labor did so for American urban centers. According to Foner, “At midcentury, over two-thirds of the workforce in Boston and New York City consisted of wage workers, and for the nation as a whole, the number of wage earners for the first time exceeded the number of [enslaved people]” (59). The competing ideologies of free labor and slave labor became a divisive issue in the years preceding the Civil War, and it was largely split along the geographic line between north and south. Although many problems arose with the growth of wage labor as the economic basis of expanding capitalism, wage labor still afforded workers the ability for self-improvement and freedom of movement.

Foner examines the contradictory inclusive and exclusive nature of American freedom and democracy. By the 1830s, older exclusions to voting and citizenship such as property and religious qualifications had been removed in some cases and replaced by different exclusions in other cases (69). Foner explains, “Democracy in America was capable of absorbing poor white men at home and waves of immigrants from abroad, yet erected impenetrable barriers to the participation of women and non-white men” (69). As democracy expanded in some ways, the ideological grounds for the continued exclusion of Black Americans and women “shifted from economic dependency to natural incapacity” (71). To many who believed in Black inferiority, it was not seen as exclusionary because their inferiority was innate and part of the natural hierarchal order. The same grounds for exclusion applied to women as well. The common 19th century philosophy of separate spheres, which implied that public life is the realm of men while home life is strictly the role of women, hampered America’s democratic ideals and profoundly limited economic opportunities for women.

The two primary battlegrounds for American freedom in the 19th century were the early women’s rights movement and the movement to abolish slavery. Both growing movements became crusades for activists, and both attempted to redraw the boundaries of freedom by using the language of liberty to accomplish their goals.

One of the foremost proponents of the early women’s right movement was Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Born in 1815, she was the chief organizer of the historic gathering to discuss the issue of women’s rights at Seneca Falls in 1848. According to Foner, “To the end of her long life, [she] maintained that woman, like man, was ultimately the 'arbiter of her own destiny,' and must rely on her own inner resources for self-realization" (81).

An early demand for the women’s rights movement was equal opportunity to enter the labor force. Foner argues that if Black Americans “saw wage labor as a definite improvement over slavery, many nineteenth century women found in working for wages an escape from the paternalistic bonds and personal dependence of the household” (80). As many women began to see true freedom as an impossibility without the ability to vote, the women’s suffrage movement began (81). Abolitionists similarly challenged longstanding ideas of freedom by using the language of liberty to call for emancipation. However, they entirely rejected the common metaphorical comparison of wage labor and marriage laws to slavery. The anti-slavery movement instead focused on the notion that freedom should be a truly universal entitlement. The movement also advocated for birthright citizenship, the idea that being born in America made one an American citizen rather than property (86).

Among the individuals at the forefront of abolitionism was Frederick Douglass, a formerly enslaved person who became one of the prominent orators and reformers of his time. In 1852, Douglass delivered one of his most famous speeches, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Foner explains that Douglass, in pointing out the hypocrisy of celebrating Independence Day, “laid claim to the founders’ legacy” (89).

Even before becoming President, Abraham Lincoln also highlighted the moral hypocrisy of slavery. Foner writes, “In his speeches opposing the expansion of slavery, [Lincoln] hammered away at the theme that slavery was incompatible with the founders’ ideals and the nation’s world-historical mission” (90-91).

Foner explores new freedoms that came to many Americans following the Civil War and the new power that the federal government had in creating such freedom. Foner argues, “Never was freedom’s protean and contested nature more evident than during the Civil War” (97). This is because freedom had clearly different meanings to the combatants in the Civil War. To the North, freedom meant that each man should enjoy the product of his own labor, but to the South it meant mastership—doing as one pleases “with other men and the product of other men’s labor” (97). The Supreme Court ruled in 1857 in the Dred Scott decision that Black Americans were excluded from American citizenship, but when 200,000 Black men enlisted in the Union Army during the war, Black citizenship became a postwar issue. According to Foner, the war did more than redraw the boundaries of citizenship; it “linked the progress of freedom directly to the power of the national state” (98).

With the Union victory in the Civil War, the vision America hoped for was the principle of free labor (100). This came to be, as eventually “the South would come to resemble the ‘free society’ of the North, with public schools, small towns, and independent producers” (100). However, the definition of freedom became a source of conflict because citizens had differing interpretations of the concept. For former enslaved people, freedom meant more than emancipation; it meant the personal empowerment and autonomy that comes with the right to vote and the economic independence that comes with reaping the fruits of one’s own labor. For southern whites of the planter class, freedom meant being able to continue the plantation system as if little had changed. In the 12 years following the Civil War, the period known as Reconstruction, Black Codes were established in the South which sought to keep emancipated former enslaved people a part of the plantation workforce by denying them political rights and equal protection under the law (104).

Passed in the early years of Reconstruction, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments came to be collectively known as the Reconstruction Amendments. Ratified in 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery; ratified in 1869, the Fourteenth Amendment ensured birthright citizenship and equal protection of the law; and ratified in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment barred states from making race a qualification for voting. Foner argues that the amendments “reflected the intersection of the two products of the Civil War era—the newly empowered national state and the idea of a national citizenship enjoying equality before the law” (106). The women’s rights movement, which blossomed at mid-century but took a back seat during the Civil War, began to seek out new freedoms for women during this postwar period. In addition to a renewed fight for women’s suffrage, it sought to ensure that women had the economic opportunities of free labor. The movement also advocated for a liberalization of divorce laws. Although large steps were taken in organizing, Foner explains, “All in all, Reconstruction did little to expand the definition of women’s freedom” (111).