Adam Smith: Historian

This article appeared in The Sunday Times August 26, 2023

Freedom was in the air at the Republican presidential candidates’ debate last week.

The former vice-president Mike Pence said that “America needs to stand for freedom”; the governor of North Dakota, Doug Burgum, said that “we need to get back to freedom”; and the businessman and author Vivek Ramaswamy ended his closing remarks by hailing the constitution as “the strongest guarantor of freedom in human history”.

Afterwards, the current vice-president, Kamala Harris, accused all eight candidates on stage of wanting to strip “basic freedoms from millions of people”. She was echoing a message hammered home in President Biden’s first re-election campaign ad in April, in which a gravel-voiced narrator, speaking over sun-drenched images of children, suburban homes and the American flag being raised, used the word “freedom” seven times in 90 seconds.

Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the Republican presidential candidates, said the US constitution was “the strongest guarantor of freedom in human history”

This then is a battlefield that may define the 2024 election: who gets to claim the word “freedom”? Is it freedom from federal government regulation that matters, or freedom to have an abortion? Freedom to own a gun or freedom for communities to ban them? Perhaps in no other country does the word “freedom” hold such powerful currency.

The history of the United States has been marked by contests over the meaning of freedom, what was necessary to secure it, and who should have it — not in a neat, linear way, but as a constant push and pull.

“Liberty” was an “unalienable right” in the words of the declaration of independence, adopted by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, two days after they had formally voted to secede from the British Empire (one historian has called it the “press release” announcing the decision).

The colonists’ prickly defence of their freedoms, and how they were allegedly being infringed, were a constant source of bemused fascination in London. A sympathetic explanation was offered by Edmund Burke in the House of Commons on March 22, 1775. He argued that the people of the colonies “adored” freedom — “according to English ideas” — in the way that once Englishmen had done. An ocean away from the corruption of the court and the groaning tax burden of late 18th-century Great Britain, and with cheap land, the colonists’ love of freedom had burnt brighter, and, in Burke’s view, we should admire them for it.

“Why is it we hear the loudest yelps for freedom from the drivers of negroes,” Samuel Johnson asked about American colonists who traded in African slaves, as depicted in this painting, After the Sale: Slaves Going South from Richmond by Eyre Crowe in 1853

The next day, on the other side of the Atlantic, Patrick Henry, a Virginian slave-owner, gave a tub-thumping speech likening the attempt by the British government to impose its trade regulations and customs duties to literal enslavement. “There is no retreat but in submission and slavery!” Henry cried, “Our chains are forged!”

Back in London, Samuel Johnson asked sardonically: “Why is it we hear the loudest yelps for freedom from the drivers of negroes?” Burke provided an answer to this apparent paradox: it wasn’t just the enduring influence of old English ideas, but the presence of enslaved people that made the colonists “especially jealous” of their own freedom.

The risk that one’s own freedom is at the expense of someone else’s haunts the politics of freedom. Among the restrictions on their liberty that outraged revolutionary-era Americans was the attempt by the British government to prevent them from speculating in land occupied by indigenous people west of the Appalachians. And when in November 1775 the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, promised freedom to enslaved men who joined the British army to put down the rebellion, elite southerners saw it as the final outrage. As one South Carolina rebel leader put it, the crown’s willingness to destroy the system of slavery did “more effectually work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the colonies than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of”.

Overall, taxes and self-government were much more important than slavery in driving the movement for independence, but, clearly, among the freedoms some white Southern colonists fought to defend was the freedom to enslave others, while many others were motivated by defence of the freedom to dispossess native people of their lands. But while slaveholders played an outsized role in leading the American Revolution, by elevating freedom as a founding creed they inspired untold millions. Very soon after independence, people who were marginalised by class, race, gender or religion started to invoke the declaration of independence’s assertion that all men have an unalienable right to liberty.

Early Victorian British radicals saw the “great republic of the West” as a land of freedom to be emulated, although admittedly the freedom and opportunity they were concerned about was for white working-class men rather than anyone else. Often in American mythology, freedom is negative — freedom from taxes, or government interference, or “tyranny”. But negative freedom can only exist alongside positive freedom: the right to the “pursuit of happiness” is, after all, a classic description of freedom to do something.

At Gettysburg in 1863, Abraham Lincoln invoked a vision of a nation “conceived in liberty”, constantly striving to attain its fullest essence. During the Second World War, Franklin D Roosevelt defined the “four freedoms” that were necessary for the fulfilment of the nation’s founding promise, as a combination of positive freedoms – from want and fear – as well as the “negative” freedoms to worship and speak without restriction. And on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, Martin Luther King spoke of America as a promise of freedom as yet unfulfilled, and said black Americans had come merely to “cash a cheque”— the declaration of independence’s promise of freedom for all.

Ronald Reagan believed that America existed in a form of divine providence “to be found by a special kind of people from every corner of the world”

In its recent ad, Biden’s campaign team seemed to be deliberately reclaiming the spirit of Ronald Reagan’s famous, feelgood “It’s morning again in America” ad from 1984.

They could not have found a more resonant advocate for the idea that freedom defines America. “Call it mysticism if you will,” Reagan once said, “I have always believed there was some divine providence that placed this great land here between the two great oceans, to be found by a special kind of people from every corner of the world, who had a special love for freedom.”

Put like that, you might think that freedom would be a unifying idea in American politics. But the catch is that freedom is always under threat. In Biden’s ad, the threat comes from the right: the sunny images of American flags are harshly contrasted with baying Trump supporters who want to remove women’s freedom to make their own reproductive choices, ban books and overturn free elections. For Republicans, who have been more inclined to politicise freedom in recent decades than Democrats, the threat comes from “woke” liberals who want to take away Americans’ freedom to own military-grade weapons, keep their own hard-earned money and teach patriotic history in schools.

Freedom and paranoia, it seems, go hand-in-hand. In the zero-sum freedom game of American politics, if someone else is becoming more free, maybe that means I’m becoming less free.