In 2009, scientists at the Library of Congress rediscovered one of the most fundamental acts of the American Revolution. Using a hyperspectral imaging camera to study an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, they found that Thomas Jefferson at one point had forcefully erased the word “subjects” then carefully written in its place the word “citizens.”
The most immediate effect of the Declaration was, of course, to draw a new border between the people of the 13 colonies and the people and government of Great Britain. The even more revolutionary effect of the Declaration was to reshape the political nature and structure of the society inside the borders of the new nation. This was the aim, as every schoolchild is taught, of the statements that “all men are created equal,” and that all possess “inalienable rights,” including “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
A scientist who took part in the discovery later said Jefferson’s erasure of the word “subjects” was so forceful that historians should view the action itself as important. Jefferson crossed out many other words in the draft, but he obliterated only this one. “It’s almost like … he didn’t even want a record of it,” she said. “Really, it sends chills down the spine.”1
I first read this story in the Washington Post in July 2010, soon after my book Cornered had been published. In my research I had come to understand that the people who had overthrown America’s traditional antimonopoly regime had based much of their effort on the idea that competition policy should promote the “welfare” of the “consumer.” This in turn was obviously based on the idea that within the political economy we should view the individual foremost as a “consumer.” As a result, I already understood this conception of the individual as a “consumer” to be highly problematic. As we will see in chapter seven, it was consciously designed and wielded to promote forms of top-down, “command-and-control” socialism. What I had not yet fully thought through, however, was the role that the concept of “citizen” had played in constructing the American System of Liberty in the first place.
So, right at the moment I was first turning to the project that would become this book, the scientists in the Library of Congress provided me with an important clue. The American Revolution was obviously a fight against certain immediately perceived threats, such as the commercial power of the British East India Company and the taxing power of a parliament over which the Americans had no control. But it was also, necessarily, a fight for certain ideals, and for a certain vision of how society could be organized, and for a certain vision of what a human being could become. This story about Jefferson penning the word “citizen” is what helped me better to understand what the revolutionaries actually fought for.
Similarly, Jefferson’s “citizens” also provided a clue to the principles the revolutionaries used in shaping the foundations of the American political economy. The American political economy is no mere pile of law inscribed in books, accreting like limestone on the bottom of the sea. It is a system based more or less perfectly on principles laid down at the time of the Revolution. And here too the concept of “citizen” helped me—and, I hope, will help us—to understand how the revolutionaries and later generations identified and refined these principles. And further, how they used these principles not only to shape the law but to help guide them in how to use government itself as a tool to positively shape and construct American society and, as we will see, the American citizen.
As we look at the American political economy today, it is ever easier to understand what it is we are against. We see the threats. We see which corporations and which business practices we must target first. But as we rummage through our vast chest of antimonopoly laws and policies, it is vital to understand also what we must stand for, what we must fight for. As we glare at Google and Facebook and Amazon, and sharpen our swords and broadaxes, we must also look past these specific threats—as terrifying as they are—and plan for the society we mean to have, and the people we mean to be, after we win.
Not only will this vision inspire us to the fight, it will help us practically by clarifying how exactly we must structure and harness these corporations and technologies.
One of my main hopes in writing Liberty from All Masters is—as we go about the task of structuring the political economy of our twenty-first-century society—to provide us some guidance from the past. The technologies we face today are in certain respects radically different than any we have wrestled with before. But key aspects of the problem remain the same as always, including the nature of human beings and the nature of commercial and political power within human society. Indeed, even many of the basic facts of how corporate organization shapes corporate behavior, and how corporations wield any particular technology, remain the same.
The struggle for liberty did not begin in 1776. Nor, as we well know, did it end there. In the pages to come, our story will range back to the English Revolution in the seventeenth century, an event that greatly shaped the thinking of America’s revolutionaries. And we will also look at periods in America’s history when citizens fought to achieve the full promise of the Declaration of Independence, such as in the war to destroy slavery and, in the twentieth century, the fight to destroy Jim Crow. In the pages to come we will also trace the story through periods when citizens fought to adapt and update the principles themselves to meet the challenges of new technologies and new international threats, such as during the New Freedom and New Deal in the early decades of the twentieth century.
For our immediate next purposes what is most important about the revolutionary transformation of the individual from subject to citizen is that it allows us to begin the process of answering how the first generation of independent Americans set about securing liberty and democracy and building entirely new forms of community.
Americans made their Revolution at a time when only the most minimal and precarious forms of democracy and personal liberty existed—in the United Kingdom, in Holland—and when most European intellectuals believed that true liberty and democracy was for all intents impossible.
Jefferson himself, as he etched the word “citizens,” could only hope that this act of political and spiritual imagination would ever have any real effect. Yet this conception of the individual as a citizen contained the seeds of the System of Liberty that Americans would construct over the next generation and would refine over the next two centuries of battles to protect and expand human liberty and democracy.
In painting over “subjects” and writing “citizens,” Jefferson radically altered the relationship of the individual with the state and with other individuals. A subject exists below the state, or the king. A citizen is an equal part of the state. A subject petitions power. A citizen grants power.2 A subject’s allegiance is to the ruler. A citizen’s allegiance is to fellow citizens.
This entire new web of relationships, in turn, is what sets our own story into motion. Because to perpetuate this new flat society of equal relationships between individual and individual, and to prevent the restoration of hierarchy and aristocracy, Americans had to establish new rules for how these individuals could compete with one another, not only in politics but in markets, in commerce, and in the accumulation of wealth and economic power. They had to construct a system that would promote and refine the vision of citizenship they had imagined. And they then had to protect and perpetuate that system over time.3
My goal in focusing so closely on the movement of Jefferson’s hands on the parchment, on the movement of his mind through the dreams and terrors and joys and horrors of human life, as he had read them in the pages of his histories and lived them in his public and private lives, is not to resurrect Thomas Jefferson the man. Long before Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote his musical celebrating Jefferson’s archrival, Alexander Hamilton, Jefferson’s personal reputation was in sharp decline. This reconsideration of the man Jefferson is of importance for understanding not just who he was but who we are and what we seek from him and other members of the founding generation.
Americans should feel honest horror at many of the actions of these men. This includes not only their failure to destroy slavery but also their policy of displacing Native Americans, a policy that led all but inevitably to extermination, even genocide. Even though our lives today are radically different, we should never dismiss such sentiments as anachronistic. Such horrified reactions help us to define who we are today. In the specific case of Jefferson, at the time he wrote the Declaration he personally held nearly 200 men, women, and children as slaves. As Edmund Morgan, the historian of colonial Virginia, put it, “To a large degree it may be said that Americans bought their independence with slave labor. The paradox is American, and it behooves Americans to understand it if they would understand themselves.”4
In the specific case of Jefferson, his writings show his own profound disgust for the institution of slavery and its effects on the character of all the human beings involved. And yet in his personal life Jefferson failed to follow the example of contemporaries, such as George Washington, who freed their own enslaved people. Jefferson the man must own his own hypocrisies, his own failings, his own sins. And they are many.
In 1856, in his great oration on the Fourth of July, Frederick Douglass assailed the fundamental fraudulence of an America that chained and whipped and raped men, women, and children, and that destroyed families and even the ties between mother and child. “You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants of Russia and Austria, and pride yourselves on your Democratic Institutions, while you yourselves consent to be the mere tools and bodyguards of the tyrants of Virginia and Carolina,” Douglass said. “Your shout of liberty and equality” is, he concluded, but “hollow mockery.”5
The historian Henry Adams once called Jefferson the “Moses of democracy,” and in the middle of the twentieth century Americans built a temple to Jefferson on the banks of the Potomac in Washington. In the coming years, perhaps we will choose to remove Jefferson’s statue out from under the dome of that temple and replace it with a statue of some other Moses of democracy, perhaps Martin Luther King Jr. But, again, as we set about our task of reckoning with the specific threats posed to us and our society by twenty-first-century monopoly, how we reckon with Jefferson’s personal failings need have no effect on how we wield his words and writings today.
Was Jefferson a seer? Or a mere scribe? A true believer in democracy? Or a wealthy demagogic poser? A tragic figure, a man who behind a benign smile loathed himself? Or a shameless hypocrite? Jefferson has been called all these things. But as we set about our task of reckoning with twenty-first-century monopoly, we need not answer any of these questions.
This story is not about the man Thomas Jefferson or any other individual. It is about the principles Jefferson and James Madison and other leaders of early America developed and put to practical use to shape and regulate competition among individuals within the American political economy. It is about the institutions and intellectual tools that they and their allies first framed and honed to achieve these ends.
Even more important, this book is about how these tools from the very first were also very much our tools, the people’s tools. Yes, a few wealthy white men provided much of the original theoretical and institutional apparatus of American liberty and democracy. But let’s not forget that the American people were able to make their demands felt right from the first. Let’s not forget that thousands of common revolutionaries marched in the streets around the Declaration’s drafters and often engaged in direct debate with them.6
And certainly, from the moment the Declaration was published, these basic tools of liberty were there for all to use. And use them the American people did. It was these tools and this language that landless whites would later use to secure more liberty for themselves. It was these tools and this language that Susan Anthony and John Bright and W. E. B. Du Bois used to fight, respectively, the suppression of women, and the disenfranchisement of British men, and the disenfranchisement of black Americans.
No one ever used these tools with more effect than Frederick Douglass. Before the Civil War, the abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison held that the U.S. Constitution was in essence a pro-slavery document. Douglass, who worked closely with Garrison for many years, ultimately rejected this argument and chose instead to make the Constitution his own. He voluntarily interpreted it as a liberty document and then wielded its emancipatory principles and structures to help enslaved people win their own liberty.
In a speech on July 6, 1863, during the Civil War, Douglass declared, “I hold that the federal government was never, in its essence, anything but an antislavery government. Abolish slavery tomorrow, and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution need be altered. It was purposely so framed as to give no claim, no sanction to the claim of property in man. If in its origin slavery had any relation to the government, it was only as the scaffolding to the magnificent structure, to be removed as soon as the building was completed. There is in the Constitution no East, no West, no North, no South, no black, no white, no slave, no slaveholder, but all are citizens who are of American birth.”7
Generation after generation, it was these tools and this language that have empowered different groups of Americans to make American liberty their own. It was this American System of Liberty that empowered the Americans of the nineteenth century to break the power of the planter and the financier who supported him. And that empowered the Americans of the twentieth century to defeat Nazi Germany and, later, Soviet Russia. It was this American System of Liberty that, in the years after the war, inspired millions in India and South Africa and Brazil and Mexico and Malaysia and Taiwan, and across all Europe, to establish their own systems for the mastering of private and public monopoly and the protection and expansion of democracy and individual liberty.
Our problem today is that long before we learned the full extent of Jefferson’s personal weaknesses, the influence of pro-monopoly intellectuals had already led us to let go of his ideas. The result, as we saw in the previous two chapters, is the triumph of monopoly, and hence mass expropriation, the breakdown in rule of law, and the rise of autocratic and atomizing systems of control.
We should all feel at liberty to spit on the grave of any of the founders, should we wish. But we would be foolish to leave the tools they honed with such care out in the rain, rusting, unused. If we are to defeat Google and Amazon and Facebook and the other great private autocracies rising in our society, if we are once again to hold our destiny in our own hands as individuals and as a nation, if we are to understand how to rebuild the American System of Liberty so we can continue the work of Du Bois and King, we must now turn back to those first pages of America and read them afresh.
The origins of the American System of Liberty actually lie outside America. The heart of Jefferson’s Declaration was not a sudden striking inspiration out of nowhere. Rather it was more the culmination of a debate that had raged among English-speaking peoples for more than a century, back to the years of the English Revolution and Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century. Although that rebellion ultimately guttered into a vaguely liberal aristocratic system, with real power concentrated in a tiny class of landlords and bankers, the writings of the English radicals shaped much of the thinking of the Americans of a century later.8
We can trace regulation and prohibition of monopoly to the Old Testament and to ancient Babylonia.9 And throughout medieval times in Europe the protection of competitive markets was a basic responsibility of local government. But antimonopolism in the modern political sense—in which the aim is to clearly limit certain powers so as to protect liberty of action and of speech, rule of law, democracy—took shape only in early seventeenth-century England. It was during the reign of Elizabeth I that we see the first political fights against monopoly, which was seen as corrupting of both government and commerce. It was in antimonopoly fights against King James that English reformers honed much of the thinking and rhetoric that would culminate in open rebellion against monarchy and ultimately the overthrow and beheading of King Charles I in 1649.10
The political writings of John Milton, the poet of Paradise Lost, provide one of the best guides to the fears and dreams of the intellectual leaders of the English Revolution. We see in Milton’s essays and polemics highly sophisticated arguments in favor of freedom of worship, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom from concentrated political power, as well as demands for a written constitution.
But, importantly, it’s not only highly educated writers like Milton who made such demands. We also see that one of the more radical popular groups of the time, the Levelers, in 1647 called for popular suffrage, bans on monopolies, and a republican form of government.11
There is no doubt that America’s revolutionaries were inspired both by the writings of Milton and other scholars and by the people’s own antimonopolism of the English Revolution. This was true both of common Americans and the well-born. In the streets of Boston in the 1770s, the city’s “lower classes” looked for inspiration to George Jones, the tailor who captured King Charles I in 1647 and later served as his executioner.12 Madison’s biographer Ralph Ketcham, meanwhile, describes how at Princeton Madison discovered that “enlightened men took for granted the pattern of thought which from Cromwell’s day had opposed religious establishment, ecclesiastical hierarchy, courtly influence, and every other manifestation of privileged and therefore easily and inevitably corruptible power. The heroes of this tradition were Milton, Algernon Sidney, Locke.” The ultimate result, among the young men who read these texts, was “a commitment to resist ‘domination and tyranny.’”13
The bookshelves of America’s revolutionaries were stocked not only with tracts from the English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century but with the “dissenting writers” from the 100 years in between.14 Alongside the preachers of rule of law such as Edward Coke, there were preachers of property rights like John Locke, preachers of democracy like William Penn, preachers of virtue like James Harrington, preachers of separations of powers such as Montesquieu. There were preachers of free speech like Thomas Paine, and preachers of liberal trade like Adam Smith, and preachers of freedom of conscience: not only Milton, but even more important for Americans, Milton’s friend Roger Williams, the Puritan theologian who founded Rhode Island and who fought for separation of church and state and the abolition of slavery.
In recent decades, the people who fund the writings of libertarian essays and books have invested great amounts of money in efforts to claim that America was created foremost to protect certain specific forms of private property. But in fact no one of these ideas dominated. Instead, in the years leading up to the Revolution, we see an almost chaotic debate in which different ideas of liberty interacted with the actual experience of liberty in America and in Britain, not only among the learned but among all the people, in often unexpected ways. Thomas Paine’s biographer, for instance, writes of how Paine’s practice of Methodism contributed to his political education. “Within the chapel, commoners learned self-respect, self-government, self-reliance, and organizational skills. Often they learned to read and write and to speak ‘in society.’”15
America’s revolutionaries were practical men and women who faced a huge, almost impossible, challenge of engineering an entirely new political economy on the fly while threatened by powerful empires—Great Britain, France, Spain—not only across the seas but directly to the north, south, and west. With the quickening of revolution in the 1770s, they knew they had to bring some order to this chaotic debate about how to organize a system that would guard and promote all these many liberties together, and they had to do so swiftly and practically.
The revolutionaries needed to clarify a line of reasoning on the nature of the individual, the nature of property, the nature of competition, and the nature of community. The concept of “citizen” helped the revolutionaries identify three fundamental liberties on which to focus their political efforts. These were the liberty to think and believe as one wished; to participate fully in all political decisions; and to own one’s own self in all economic life. Together, they formed a mutually reinforcing system. Either you have all three of these liberties or you have none. Each of the three is, at once, a means, a measure, and an end.
Over the years Americans have published innumerable histories of how earlier generations acted to ensure citizens’ liberty to think and believe as they wished and to participate fully in all political decisions. Americans have also published many works on how earlier generations acted to secure their liberty from all forms of political bondage, including economic discrimination by race.
Few recent histories, however, have focused on how earlier generations set about practically achieving the liberty to own one’s own self in all economic life, other than in the case of bondage slavery. My goal in the rest of this chapter and the next three is to identify how exactly earlier generations defined this particular liberty, how they structured institutions to achieve these aims, and how they responded to a variety of political and technological challenges to these institutional structures over the course of two centuries together as a national community.
One of the hottest debates in American society today is Who qualifies as a citizen? Who gets to stand inside the border and who must remain outside? If allowed inside, how long must a person wait to have full access to the law, and how long must they wait to be able to vote? The debate is so controversial that many progressives today want to all but abandon the word “citizen.” To many it seems but code for nativism, tribalism.
There is absolutely nothing new about this debate. The founding generation faced much the same set of questions on July 5, 1776. Who was to share in this new common sovereignty they had declared? And who was now subject to it? In much of the new country, the initial answer was that citizenship must be reserved for men who held real property, mainly in the form of land.
In the years since, this initial focus on ownership of land has led many to conclude that the American Revolution, and especially the framing of the Constitution, were both fundamentally antidemocratic actions. According to this view, the aim from the first was to concentrate control in the hands of an aristocracy, an oligarchy. And certainly there were many among the founders who held that the prime goal of society should indeed be to protect the right of the individual not only to acquire property, but to use it as that individual alone saw fit. And further that this included a right to hold human beings as property.
But another of Jefferson’s edits in the Declaration belies this simple story.
Less than a month before the Declaration, the Fifth Virginia Convention had unanimously adopted a “Declaration of Rights” written by the planter George Mason. This included the statement that the “inherent rights” of the individual include “the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”
In simplifying this phrase to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” Jefferson and the other signers of the Declaration tell us they saw property not as an end in itself, but as a means to other things. Indeed, much the same would prove true in the Constitution itself. There, the word “property” appears only once, in an Article IV clause that refers to government property.16 As the constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar has written, what we in fact see here is “a plain commitment to people over property.”17
The somewhat paradoxical answer as to why so many of the founders initially believed that citizenship should be tied to ownership of land is that they believed property was the only way to truly secure the liberty of an individual to think and believe as one wished and to participate fully in all political decisions. To be a full citizen, they held, a person must be economically independent. In the first days of the Republic, most assumed this meant owning enough land to feed and clothe one’s family.
The reasoning here is simple. If citizens do not depend on any other person for sustenance, then they will be able to think critically and speak freely in public. Only someone who never need beg anything of anyone—someone fully immune to all threats and manipulations—can be counted on to represent his own personal interests, and the interest of the public, at all times.
One of the clearest defenders of this idea was John Adams, a founder who did not own enslaved people and didn’t have all that much land.
Like the other founders, Adams had been steeped in such thinking through his studies of the English Revolution. One guiding essay was a 1660 polemic by Milton, in which he condemned a political world characterized by “the perpetual bowings and cringings of an abject people.”18 A few decades later the English politician Algernon Sidney provided a more positive vision of who would make a good citizen. “Liberty,” he wrote, “solely consists of an independency on the will of another; and by the name of slave we understand a man who can neither dispose of his person or goods, but enjoys all at the will of his master.”19
For Adams and other founders, this distrust of any man who was subject to some master was not mere theory, not mere book learning. Having grown up in the colonial period, they had all witnessed individual cravenness and servility, up close, in their neighbors and perhaps in themselves. And they wanted to protect their new democracy from all such sycophancy and toadyism, and from all such distortions of democratic debate.
For Adams and many other founders, the question was not a matter of race, and they did not limit their effort to exclude only enslaved people from the voting rolls. They also sought to exclude all bonded servants.20 Adams also made clear that his distrust carried over to renters and tenants, even those without debt.
In a letter to John Taylor, the Virginia politician and constitutional scholar, Adams imagined the political relationship between a rich landowner and those who live on his land. “If he is a humane, easy, generous landlord, will not his tenants feel an attachment to him? Will he not have influence among them? Will they not naturally think and vote as he votes? If, on the contrary, he is an austere, griping, racking, rack-renting tyrant, will not his tenants be afraid to offend him? Will not some, if not all of them, pretend to think with him, and vote as he would have them?”21
For Adams, the problem was not only a matter of the wealthy manipulating the simple people. If anything, what Adams most feared was a similar corruption of the educated and well-born, not least those who held political power. The very wealthy have ample tools with which to “govern the state underhand,” Adams wrote. “The persons elected into office will be their tools, and in constant fear of them, will behave like mere puppets danced upon their wires.”22
The Declaration of Independence, then, can perhaps best be understood as a declaration of independence of man from man. And in these first moments of the nation, many founders believed the only way to measure such independence was through secure ownership of land.
A truism of American history is that formal party politics began only in 1792, when Jefferson and Madison formed their “Democratic-Republican” party to oppose what they viewed as the monopolizing and concentrating tendencies of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton and his allies. From the first, the goal of their new party was to extend the border of citizenship outward, to bring more people into the common sovereignty. The goal, in other words, was to make republican citizenship more democratic.
The result of such thinking was the second fundamental decision of the founding period: property should be divided to as great a degree as possible. If independence required property, and if the nation was to be not an aristocracy but a democracy, then all free men should have property. The only problem with this commonly told history of America’s early democracy is the timing. In fact, we can trace demands to distribute property to the propertyless, mainly in the form of land, to the earliest days of the Republic.
There were many reasons why early Americans feared concentration of power over property. One was simple class resentment. Adams himself, who ended up for a time leading the Federalist Party created by Hamilton, personally expressed this basic anger against wealth and privilege in 1776. “That exuberance of pride, which has produced an insolent domination in a few, a very few, opulent, monopolizing families [must] be brought down nearer to the confines of reason and moderation.”23
A second was the belief that such monopolization of land was immoral. While serving as ambassador to France, Jefferson was shocked to find indigent peasants living next to the uncultivated hunting estates of the rich. It is this “unequal division of property which occasions the numberless instances of wretchedness which I had observed,” he wrote. “The consequence of this enormous inequality” is to produce “misery” for “the bulk of mankind.” Jefferson’s conclusion? Legislatures cannot “invent too many devices for sub-dividing property.”24
A third was fear of counterrevolution. After the English Revolution, control over land and political power had been swiftly concentrated in the hands of the very largest landlords, along with a rising class of bankers. Most Americans were appalled by the idea that their Revolution might do little more than transfer power from a parliament of landlords and bankers in London to a parliament of landlords and bankers in America. And at the time, this did not seem like an abstract danger. The ranks of men calling themselves “patriots” included Lord Baltimore, master of 23 vast estates in Maryland totaling 190,000 acres. (Baltimore’s land was worked not by enslaved people but by tenants.)25 They also included Robert Livingston, who controlled 160,000 acres in the Hudson Valley. Indeed, when Livingston joined the American rebellion in 1775, many of his tenants opted to remain loyal to Britain. In their eyes, any government supported by Livingston was not a government that would support them, hence it was better to “stand by the king.”26
A fourth was fear of the mob. As Daniel Webster, the Massachusetts senator and orator, wrote in 1820, “Those who have not property, and see their neighbors possess much more than they think them to need, cannot be favorable to laws made for the protection of property. When this class becomes numerous, it grows clamorous. It looks on property as its prey and plunder, and is naturally ready, at all times, for violence and revolution.”27
Jefferson, even before putting his final touches on the Declaration, had already taken steps to ensure a much wider distribution of land, at least in his native Virginia. In his draft constitution for the state, published in June 1776, Jefferson attempted to ensure that every white adult male would own at least 50 acres through a direct distribution of lands held directly by the state.
Although this proposal failed, Jefferson and his allies did succeed in passing two other laws, in 1776 and in 1785, that together resulted in a system for limiting the concentration of land ownership in Virginia. Traditionally, upon the death of a landowner, his holdings would pass to his firstborn son. After these changes—to the laws of entail and primogeniture—such lands were divided equally among all the children.28 Jefferson later proudly held that in Virginia, these laws “laid the ax to the foot of pseudoaristocracy.”29 And certainly some aristocrats agreed. One planter, Landon Carter, horrified by the new laws, called Jefferson a “midday drunkard” who had betrayed his class.30
In these early years many founders also embraced the idea of a progressive taxation of property that would hit large landholders hardest. In a 1785 letter to Madison, Jefferson wrote that “Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.”31 In the years before the Civil War, citizens in at least seven states enacted progressive taxation of land.32
Noah Webster, who would later author America’s first dictionary, in 1787 imagined that the laws and taxes designed to distribute land and reduce the power of great landowners would function as a sort of antimonopoly system. “Wherever we cast our eyes, we see this truth, that property is the basis of power.” Therefore, he wrote, “an equality of property, with a necessity of alienation constantly operating to destroy combinations of powerful families, is the very soul of a republic.”33
This fight between those who meant to restrict the status of “citizen” to a landed few and those who meant to extend citizenship to the many was the first great political fight within the new nation. And it was a fight that evolved swiftly, as the democratic republicans soon moved beyond their call merely to distribute land to every white adult citizen. They also developed a set of sophisticated arguments designed to seat the independence of the individual in many other forms of property besides land.
One of the most common criticisms of Jefferson and the democratic republicans is that they were radical agrarians who imagined a society of independent farmers living in an idyllic world of buzzing bees and tinkling cowbells while giving no thought to the sorts of industry necessary for material growth and national defense. To be sure, a somewhat pastoral vision infused a short book Jefferson wrote while the Revolutionary War still raged, Notes on the State of Virginia. Yet once America had won its independence, Jefferson and his allies focused at least as closely on the development of manufacturing as did the Federalists. It was Jefferson himself, in fact, who imported the production techniques that laid the foundation for mass manufacturing in America.34 As Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf put it in their smart recent book on Jefferson’s ways of perceiving and thinking, the idea that he believed that “Americans should remain forever in the agricultural state of development” is a “gross mischaracterization of his actual beliefs … He could not have been the progressive he was and think that way.”35
Where we most clearly see the practical nature of the democratic republican approach to power and politics is in the efforts to expand the ranks of citizenship.
Most basic was support for the right of the poor and middling soldiers who had fought in the Revolution, including those who were entirely landless, to participate in politics. The goal was not to reward their skill at arms with land at some point in the future and thereby establish them as “yeoman” citizens in the tradition of the republican periods of English and Roman history. It was to ensure that even if these soldiers never owned half an acre, they could take part as full citizens in all the immediate debates and decisions of the day.36
Democratic republicans also strongly supported the same rights for artisans and mechanics. Even before the end of the Revolutionary War, Ben Franklin was inviting individuals with such skills to settle as full citizens in the new republic. The work of such people, Franklin said, was just as “necessary and useful” as the work of the farmer and indeed was necessary to supply the “Cultivators of the Earth with Houses, and with Furniture and Utensils.”37
The Constitution recognized ideas could be property too and indeed helped to create that property by establishing systems of patent and copyright to protect the individual thinker and writer.38 But soon after the framing, Madison and others had begun to speak of property as any of a wide variety of skills and attributes that a person may develop and possess.
In the political competition of the early days of the nation, between those who sought to limit citizenship and those who sought to expand it, Madison put this thinking to practical use. In doing so he looked back more to Edward Coke’s fights against King James’s monopolies than to Locke’s famous definition of property as whatsoever a man might make or grow with “his labour.”39 In a 1792 essay called “Property,” Madison wrote: “That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where arbitrary restrictions, exemptions, and monopolies deny to part of its citizens that free use of their faculties, and free choice of their occupations, which not only constitute their property in the general sense of the word; but are the means of acquiring property strictly so called.”40
In this same essay, Madison pushed even further away from the idea that citizenship must be seated in ownership of land or, for that matter, even some other particular faculty or skill. “In a word,” Madison said, “as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.” Madison then went on to clarify that such rights include his freedom of expression, his religious opinions, and his own personal safety.
“Government is instituted to protect property of every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of individuals, as that which the term particularly expresses,” Madison concluded. “This being the end of government, that alone is a just government, which impartially secures to every man, whatever is his own.”41
Under pressure, Madison was willing even to entirely abandon any pretense that citizenship need be connected with any form of personal property whatsoever. When the wealthy New York landowner Gouverneur Morris, during the constitutional debates, proposed to restrict the vote to freeholders, Madison made clear he believed all men had an absolute right to consent in their own government and to participate fully.
Madison made clear he agreed with Morris that owning property was important. “Viewing the subject in its merits alone, the freeholders of the Country would be the safest depositories of Republican liberty,” he said in direct response to Morris.42
“But this does not satisfy the fundamental principle that men cannot be justly bound by laws in making of which they have no part.”43
Madison, in the words of Ketcham, believed that “If a conflict arose, it was more just to weaken property rights than personal rights.” Indeed, Madison “consistently regarded the doctrine of consent as more vital than mere protection of property.”44
Yet in his debates with Morris, Madison had also set a challenge for himself. “In future times a great majority of the people will not only be without landed, but any other sort of, property,” he said. “These will either combine under the influence of their common situation; in which case, the rights of property & the public liberty, will not be secure in their hands: or which is more probable, they will become the tools of opulence & ambition.”
That’s why, only four years later, Madison would turn back to the task of figuring out how to make each individual citizen as economically independent as possible. For our history of America’s System of Liberty, it is not Madison’s absolute support of the right of all citizens to vote that is most important. It is his effort—carried forward by later generations—to redefine property in ways that would promote the true economic independence of as great a proportion of these citizens as possible.
In 1780, John Adams drafted a Constitution for the state of Massachusetts. In the preamble, he wrote: “It is the duty of the people … in framing a constitution of government, to provide for an equitable mode of making laws, as well as for an impartial interpretation, and a faithful execution of them.” Later in the document he expressed the goal even more concisely. “The end,” Adams wrote, is “a government of laws and not of men.”45
The argument that independence required property had carried Adams and the other founders straight—indeed ineluctably—to a focus on rule of law. The line of reasoning was simple. If someone can take what you own, at will, you are as much under that person’s sway as if you did not own any property at all.
Here again, Adams and the other founders were able to study the lessons of English history. A century before, under the centralized monopoly rule of a strong king, no property was safe. Under such rule, the sovereign was able to give and take, to create and destroy, property for whatever reason he or she might choose. From the point of view of the king, this was no flaw. Rather it was key to creating a perfect pyramid of power in which the sovereign could force even the most powerful to bend to his will.
Perhaps the most honest defense of such a system was made by King James. In words that would have gladdened Donald Trump, he said, in 1610, “Kings make and unmake their subjects; they have power of raising and casting down; of life and of death.” Kings, James went on, “make of their subjects like men at the chess; a pawn to take a Bishop or a Knight, and to cry up or down any of their subjects as they do their money.”46
One way the sovereign manipulated the powerful was to grant and revoke the license to live on one particular estate or another. Another way, directly pertinent to our discussion here, was to grant and revoke lucrative patents and other monopolies. Queen Elizabeth, for instance, awarded her favorite, Walter Raleigh, with monopolies in cloth, tin, wine, even playing cards.47
The immediate goal of such arbitrary bestowals of power—a goal very much intended by the sovereign—was to atomize both the aristocracy and the people and to keep them hustling for place and pennies, in concentric circles, around the court.
The inevitable result of such arbitrary bestowals was to deprive—sometimes suddenly—many ordinary people of their ability to pursue their work, such as the manufacture of cloth or tin or playing cards, or the importing of wine. As Edward Coke put it in Parliament in 1614, “The monopolizer engrosseth to himself what should be free to all men.”
That’s why the fight to bring the monarch under the control of the common law centered, for most of the early years of the seventeenth century, on a fight against monopoly. Indeed, it was Parliament’s vote in 1624 to declare all “royal patents” forever illegal, and to leave all decisions over monopoly to the common law, that counts as the first great victory over arbitrary power of the modern era.48
At the time of the American Revolution, the prerogatives of the king remained highly restricted. But even if the king enjoyed far less arbitrary power than before, the British political economy was still a very hierarchical world, with many forms of unrestrained power. The Scottish philosopher David Hume in 1742 described this “civilized monarchy” as a world characterized by “a long train of dependence from the prince to the peasant, which is … sufficient to beget in every one an inclination to please his superiors and to form himself upon those models, which are most acceptable to people of condition and education.”49
As Adams and the other founders were well aware, this train of dependence continued straight into America, and the fear that someone powerful could take the property of someone less powerful remained very real. This indeed was one of the main lessons of the fight with the British East India Company, which was held by many merchants to be a threat to their properties.50
Educated Americans of the time were well versed in the fights between Parliament and the king in the seventeenth century. And the writings of Edward Coke were especially favored by Adams, who described him as “the oracle of the law,” and by Jefferson, who credited Coke with “the profounder learning” in the “doctrines of British liberties.”51
Adams’s immediate goal in writing the Massachusetts Constitution was to establish a clear separation of powers among the legislature, the executive branch, and the courts. But it is also very clear that when he speaks of “a government of laws and not of men,” he and his allies fully intend that these basic rules apply not only to public officials but also to anyone wielding the power of a great estate or corporation and indeed to all monopolies and any other forms of private government.
As we today move toward dealing with Amazon and Google, the most important lesson we must keep in mind is that the arbitrary nature of their power—as we saw in the last chapter—directly undermines rule of law and in its place establishes a rule of man, of Mark Zuckerberg, of Jeff Bezos. Hence our most important goal is to restore a “government of laws and not of men.” To do so requires constructing a system in which every individual—and their property—enjoys equal protection from arbitrary power and equal access to the market, with no favoritism and no discrimination whatsoever.
In the years after the Revolution, Americans who lived through this radical breaking of one society and making of another often spoke of how they had come to understand themselves and the world in entirely new ways.
“We see with other eyes, we hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used,” Thomas Paine wrote in a 1782 letter. “We are now really another people, and cannot again go back to ignorance and prejudice. The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.”52
John Adams, looking back on the founding from the age of 83, said the Revolution had little to do with the actual war for political independence from Britain. The “real American Revolution” was a “radical change” in “Principles, Opinions, Sentiments, and Affections,” he wrote. “The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.”53
In recent decades Americans have been much more comfortable analyzing big changes in society through political and economic, rather than spiritual, lenses. Even in the case of Paine and Adams, it can be tempting to view their statements as but the byproduct of political revolution, or perhaps even a stepping-stone toward political revolution.
Yet these testaments of radical change in one’s own intellect, one’s own soul, were very much an intended result of the Revolution. Many of the founders, and many of those whose writings inspired them, fully understood that in creating a new architecture of power in society, they were also creating a new architecture of mind and thought and spirit.
We see this in a remarkable document from 1654 by Roger Williams, the theologian who founded Rhode Island and whose thinking influenced Adams and other founders. In a pamphlet published while he was living in London, Williams directly connected religious and political freedom. The aim must be, Williams wrote, “A true and absolute Soul-freedom to all the people of the Land impartially; so that no person be forced to pray nor pay, otherwise then as his Soul believeth and consenteth.”54
Among the founders, we see this most famously in James Madison’s editing of the text of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was adopted on June 12, 1776. Madison felt that the original language promising the “fullest Toleration” of religion implied that one religion—Anglicanism—was the right religion, while others should at best be abided. Madison succeeded in getting the wording changed to “all men are entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.”55
“Conscience,” Madison wrote later, “is the most sacred of all property.”56
Many over the years have faulted America’s founders for creating an atomistic society, with every individual a discrete and lonely island. This is a critique I understand well, having lived and worked for many years in South America, often among people who believe that the way to establish individual liberty is by first strengthening community. Yet what we see in the early United States is almost the exact opposite of atomism. It is an entirely new vision of how to achieve community, with ties between citizen and citizen, and between citizen and God, forged through direct interaction with one another, on terms of absolute equality in the market, in the town hall, and in spiritual debate. We see a vision of a community of free thinkers able to use both reason and a sense of morality—as exercised day to day through open and democratic debate—to govern themselves and their world.57
Many have similarly faulted America’s founders for unleashing a liberty of appetite, in the form of an economic system that depends on every individual acting foremost to serve one’s own selfish interest. And certainly, in the debates over how to structure checks and balances, it is evident that the founders believed selfishness lies in every person. Yet at the same time we see here also an effort to free the individual, at least some of the time, from the dictates of gross appetite so as to liberate the citizen to truly deliberate.
Americans today are often not comfortable speaking of issues of faith. But it is vital to remember that the founding generation measured liberty not only in the number of town halls where citizens could debate, and not only in the amount of wealth that was created by citizens free to run their farms and businesses without interference by powerful private actors. They also measured liberty in the number and variety of churches and faiths available to the citizen.58
Over the course of just a few years before and after the Declaration, white male Americans made their society a bastion of not merely political and commercial liberty but also intellectual and spiritual liberty, with these citizens free to believe what they wanted, how they wanted, when they wanted. Similar liberty existed elsewhere, in Britain especially, but it was a liberty mainly for the aristocrat, and even then it was highly circumscribed. In America, citizens democratized this liberty. They dragged it outside academy, club, and class and began to make it a liberty for every white male everywhere.
In the eyes of the founders, the full liberty of both citizen and society depended on the creation of open competition and debate in all human activities and hence on the destruction of all economic, political, and spiritual monopoly.
Of the many distillations of what Americans wrought in these years, perhaps the most concise and eloquent summation was written by W. E. B. Du Bois. America’s great contribution to the world, he wrote in 1935, is “a vision of democratic self-government: the domination of political life by the intelligent decision of free and self-sustaining men.”
Americans first dreamed of liberty. Then they used that liberty to build a system to allow themselves—even those still in chains—to keep dreaming.