NATIONALISM IS ALL THE RAGE. IT IS TRUE IN THE world’s oldest democracies. Donald Trump has made securing America’s borders and protecting its industries top priorities. “From this moment on,” he said in his 2017 inaugural address, “it’s going to be America first.”1 Half a year earlier, Britain voted to leave the European Union.
It takes sinister forms elsewhere. Narendra Modi conflates Indian nationalism with Hinduism, to the consternation of India’s other religions. Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan invoke nationalism to make their countries one-party states. Xi Jinping invokes it to guarantee his own power for life. Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, invokes it to ethnically cleanse the Muslim minority of Myanmar.
Nationalism is a given in human society. It supplies feelings of belonging, identity, and recognition. It binds us to our neighbors, tells us who we are, and makes others notice us. But it takes different forms from country to country and from era to era.2
The unique feature of America’s nationalism is its concern for liberty. We have been securing it, defining it, recovering it, and fighting for it for four hundred years. We have been doing it since we were a floundering settlement on a New World river, long before we were a country. We do it now on podiums and battlefields beyond our borders.
Our concern for liberty shapes how we live in society and what we know ourselves to be in the order of things: how we relate to each other and what God has made us. Americans are free and equal men and women, marked for liberty at birth. Ignorance and vice may obscure and sometimes even steal our birthright, but we work, stolidly or heroically, to reclaim it.
American liberty is liberty of the person. If liberty is applied to collections of persons, its meaning changes. When a country liberates itself from a colonial or imperial overlord (as dozens have since we did), it wins independence. When the machinery of the state liberates itself from incompetence or customary restraints, it may achieve efficiency or despotism. When a mob liberates itself from habits of good behavior, it produces chaos. American liberty is about Americans—you, me, her, him.
But this liberty is plural; it cannot be experienced alone. If one person living in a tyrannical state were somehow freed from all its supervision and punishments, he or she would experience the immunity of an alien or practice the duplicity of a spy. That person would not enjoy liberty. My liberty as an American is also yours; ours is others’.
We claim it for no other reason than we are persons, and America recognizes the sovereign importance of this fact. We enjoy liberty not because we are people and: people who have the right ancestors, people who practice the approved creed, or people who spend the most money. We enjoy it because we are men and women.
As Americans we claim to have a uniquely clear understanding of human nature and to act in accordance with it. But a desire for liberty asserts itself in other countries, too. The two with which our history is most bound enjoy elements of liberty, as we understand it. We inherited much from our mother country, Britain, and France’s revolution and republics have mirrored, and fun house–mirrored, our own. But Britain’s liberty is deeply rooted in a mold of custom, while France’s is buffeted by storms of passion. Britain still has a crown and classes; France every so often produces a new constitution. This is not a book about almost liberty elsewhere; it is a book about the real thing, here in America.
A complete history of liberty in America would be a complete history of America. This book focuses instead on thirteen documents, from 1619 to 1987, that represent snapshots from the album of our long marriage to liberty. They say what liberty is. They show who asked for it, when, and why. Since no marriage is ever simple, they track its ups and downs. These thirteen liberty documents define America as the country that it is, different from all others.
Six of the liberty documents are speeches or addresses—one delivered in writing, one over the radio, four to live audiences (a courtroom, a political convention, and two outdoor events). Five are collective statements, written by an individual or a committee, but endorsed by a group. One is the minutes of an assembly; one is a poem on a statue.
The documents vary in length: the assembly met over five days, the briefest speech lasted two or three minutes, and the poem is a sonnet. Some of the liberty documents are official pronouncements; others are appeals to, or by, the marginalized. Some are so famous they are ubiquitous; others are little known. Some are clumsy but earnest, others eloquent. All are important. We are what we are because of them, and we made them because of who we are. We stay true to what we are by staying true to them.
All of them are public statements, making a case to the world—the opinion of mankind, as the Declaration of Independence puts it—or to a relevant public official—“Right Honorable,” begins the Flushing Remonstrance, addressing Dutch governor-general Peter Stuyvesant. None of them is absorbed with personal details or written in a way that is willfully oblique. But standing alone, they would be naked, so I have clothed them with context: who wrote or spoke them, where, and when. You have to know something about the economy of the late nineteenth century to understand William Jennings Bryan or something about the politics of early eighteenth-century New York to understand the trial of John Peter Zenger.
Something isn’t everything. From one document to the next, years, sometimes decades, pass. One speech here was given in Berlin, another in Chicago, the rest on or near the East Coast, but none in California or Hawaii. Whole swaths of the American experience are missing. But I keep a forward momentum.
Two of the liberty documents, and the important part of a third, are about foreign affairs—what America promises, threatens, or fears from other countries. This may seem surprising in a book about liberty, especially in a book about liberty conceived as the essence of our nationalism. But the world is always close at hand. America began as a collection of colonies and won its independence in a revolution against an imperial master. We live among neighbors and wars. Even when we are not interested in them, they may be interested in us.
Several of the liberty documents are accompanied by lists of names—of signers, audiences, or participants; delegates, jurors, or burgesses. Some of the lists are quite long, with many or most of the names obscure. Read them all. Whether these people were already famous, became famous, or are known only for being there at one moment of history, they all contributed to their liberty and ours. Remembering them is a duty and a pleasure. As a witness to one of the liberty documents said, “How sweet it is to speak of good men!”—and women.3
Two of my linguistic choices in this book require explanation. I use America as a synonym for the United States, even at the risk of confusion when the story overlaps with other countries in the Americas—Mexico, Brazil, Argentina. I do it despite the boisterous stadium chant, USA! USA! I use America partly because one-quarter of my story (and more than a quarter of our history) occurs in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, before there was a United States. I do it because every country in this hemisphere, from Canada to Chile, has its own story, with its own America. Let them tell theirs. I will tell ours.
I also use words like ours, our, we, and us to refer to actions, things, or people that no living American has done, possessed, or known. But that is what a nation is: a many-headed, centuries-old being that embraces the living, the dead, and the still to be born. Before battles, George Washington exhorted his soldiers to fight as if “the fate of unborn millions” depended on their efforts—because it did.4 As he looked ahead, so we must look behind—and see ourselves.
Where are the dark chapters documenting oppression, brutality, injustice? Americans—we—are human, and the heart—yours and mine—is desperately wicked. There are dark pages aplenty in our story, when the light of liberty was unlit or eagerly blown out. Sometimes liberty’s enemies have been foreigners, careless colonizers, or bloody monsters; sometimes they have been all-American. This book is not about them. They loom, of course, since any account of brave men and women—and many of the authors and signers of these documents put their reputations or their lives on the line—must include who and what they struggled against. You cannot read about Abraham Lincoln or John Murray without reading about slavery, about Tobias Feake or Andrew Hamilton without reading about oppression, about Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Rhoda Palmer without reading about inequity. But this book is about what prompted men and women to resist: to think, speak, and sometimes fight for what was right.
My authority for telling this story is my career as a historian and a journalist. For over twenty years, I have been engaged with American lives, particularly those of the founders. I have studied the greatest Americans, describing their achievements (and failures), explaining their beliefs. I know what they worked for. For fifty years I have been writing about contemporary American politics, covering men and women—usually less great than the founders, though sometimes they hit their mark—writing about how they have maintained, advanced, or manhandled their predecessors’ handiwork.
The need for telling this story now is what I see around me. This is the most confused historical moment I have lived in. Between a haggard establishment, a perverse intelligentsia, and an inchoate populist pushback, America’s national essence is being ignored, trampled, or distorted. Those who remember the right words and principles repeat them as platitudes; others spurn them or offer substitutes, do-it-yourself or imported from abroad. Because the people offering substitutes are either less intelligent or less virtuous than the authors and original audiences of the liberty documents, their alternatives are worse.
We always have been a free country; our advances are fulfillments of old promises, not lunges in the direction of new ones. This is our nationalism, and we should be proud of it.
The epigraph of this book is a famous exclamation about American liberty. I did not give it a chapter, so let me quickly tell the story here.
British troops occupying Boston, a disorderly colonial city, set out in April 1775 on a police action to round up troublemakers said to be lurking in the countryside nearby. The mission spiraled out of control, however, when one group of locals, then a second, fired back, then swarms of them sniped at the troops as they returned to base.
News of the clashes spread as fast as horses could convey it. In Richmond, hundreds of miles to the south, an extralegal assembly of colonials met in an Anglican church to debate how they should respond. Patrick Henry, a thirty-nine-year-old attorney and planter, was one of those who spoke. He had a reputation for being ambitious, lazy, and vain. He deplored slavery but owned slaves. One modern historian accuses him of self-interest bordering on corruption, opposing political reform because it queered a land deal he was invested in. He was also the best speaker on the continent. Thomas Jefferson, who disliked him, said simply that he spoke as Homer wrote.
Henry’s speech was not recorded until 1817, when a biographer printed it, which gave rise to the presumption that the biographer, though he interviewed surviving witnesses, had rewritten it himself. Maybe, maybe not. Many of the biographer’s own speeches survive, and they are nothing like this one.
It is short: twelve hundred words, three printed pages. It is urgent: almost a third of its sentences are questions—Is it? Have we? But when? Shall we? It is desperate: Americans everywhere had to support the liberty of Americans in Boston or all our liberty would be undone.
“Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains, and of slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!—I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!”5
Read on.