THESE ARE THE DOCUMENTS THAT MADE THIS A country of liberty. A country where men and women, of all backgrounds, worship and think, write and speak, vote and aspire to office. A country that believes in rights that cannot be unmade because they were never made—only found to be aspects of our natures, put there by God. A country that is the partisan—sometimes active, always tacit—of liberty in the world.
The General Assembly of Jamestown set a precedent of elected representatives voting equally on matters of public importance. The Flushing Remonstrance declared religious liberty to be a matter of supreme importance. The trial of John Peter Zenger secured the freedom to publish even mockery of those who rule us, elected or not.
The Declaration of Independence set liberty, ordained by our Creator and inseparable from our equality, in black and white, at the top of our national birth certificate. The Constitution, among many other things, secured equality by forbidding kings and nobles and refusing to acknowledge slavery.
Glaring omissions had to be filled. The worst was slavery; silence was not enough. The New-York Manumission Society worked for the liberation of “our brethren.” The Seneca Falls Declaration called for the vote to be given to our sisters.
The nineteenth century and the turn of the next saw restatements and iterations: we really mean it. In the midst of our worst tragedy, as grotesque as it was bloody, the Gettysburg Address embraced both Declaration of Independence and Constitution: we are better than this; we will prevail. The best lines of the Cross of Gold speech declared that no amount of money should create a belief in human inequality; Liberty Enlightening the World told all the world that came here that they were coming to a land of liberty.
What about the world that stays where it is but nevertheless concerns us? The Monroe Doctrine asserted that there should be no kings in this hemisphere; the “Arsenal of Democracy” fireside chat that there should be no Nazis in Britain; the “Tear Down This Wall” speech that Communists should not forever rule the heart of Europe. These were bold and definite statements, backed, as we became stronger, by years of planning and strenuous follow-through.
There could be a different set of thirteen documents. When twentieth-century historian Clinton Rossiter wrote about the Constitutional Convention, he devised as a thought experiment an alternate slate of delegates—different men from every state, but the same number from each, who could have done the job equally well. He thought America in 1787 could have fielded a B team as well as an A team, and so it can, looking over its history, with liberty documents. (A few—the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address—would probably have to be on any list, just as Rossiter acknowledged that, of the actual delegates to the Constitutional Convention, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were unique and irreplaceable.) That is a quality of a nation devoted to liberty—it declares itself, over and over. If I have omitted a favorite—where is the Mayflower Compact, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” the Federalist Papers, or “I Have a Dream”—it is there, in the wings, with brothers and sisters. More, we may hope, will come, repeatedly.
We may hope—but we cannot rest in the hope. Misunderstanding is always an option. The ignorant, the careless, the actively malicious are always with us. They may be us, if we are not careful. Maybe slavery was a positive good; maybe liberty, under the conditions of neoliberalism, is slavery. Maybe America is a collection of unmixable and mutually incomprehensible races; people of color have been held down long enough, time for them to switch places. Or maybe affirmative action has disadvantaged working-class whites, and it is time for them to push back. Or maybe race is a social construct, but so is truth; all truth claims are masks for power, so we should grab our own. Or maybe the system basically works (it must, since it has made us rich and powerful), so let us buy off whoever is buyable, or whoever we like, and not rock the boat by insisting on definitions. There are a million seductive exits from the highway of liberty (liberty itself, ironically, allows them).
A former president had an important conversation about liberty in the late nineteenth century. After serving two terms, Ulysses Grant took a world tour; a reporter from the New York Herald, John Russell Young, accompanied him and recorded his meetings and conversations. In the summer of 1878, he visited Berlin, where an international congress was meeting to settle frontiers in the Balkans (its arrangements would last thirty some years, a little less than Stalin’s and Churchill’s). While there, he met Prince Otto von Bismarck, the statesman who had united modern Germany only seven years earlier.
Here were two great nationalists of the modern era—one who had beaten the armies of secession in the world’s largest republic and one who had, through shrewdness and carefully chosen wars against neighbors, forged a collection of kingdoms and statelets into an empire. The American came to Bismarck’s palace on foot, tossing away a cigar before approaching the door. Bismarck, who had never fired a shot in battle, was in uniform; Grant, who had led thousands of men to their deaths, wore a suit.
Bismarck spoke English, well but a bit haltingly; when at a loss for words, wrote Young, he “seeks refuge in French.”
Their talk moved, as conversation between strangers must, from the news to scattered points of contact. Bismarck uttered a few bland bulletins about the international congress—“I wish it were over, for Berlin is warm and I want to leave it.” Grant asked after the emperor, Wilhelm I; Bismarck asked after an American officer he had met. Guest and host had a meeting of minds on the subject of assassins. Only a last-minute change of plan had kept Grant from being in Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theater the night he was murdered, and Bismarck himself had been shot at on two occasions.
“All you can do with such people,” said Grant, “is to kill them.”
“Precisely so,” answered Bismarck.
Then their minds politely, but dramatically, diverged. The subject was the Civil War.
“What always seemed so sad to me about your last great war,” Bismarck began, “was that you were fighting your own people. That is always so terrible in wars, so very hard.”
“But it had to be done,” said Grant.
“Yes, you had to save the Union just as we had to save Germany.” Bismarck’s wars of unification had involved the defeat and dissolution of several German states, some dating to the Middle Ages, holdouts against the new order; the countries that accepted it were allowed to maintain a shadowy pretend existence, like ghost territories scattered across the new German map. Bismarck assumed that Grant, and America, had been engaged in a similar process of consolidation.
“Not only save the Union,” Grant corrected him, “but destroy slavery.”
Bismarck tried to assimilate this new idea. “I suppose, however, the Union was the real sentiment, the dominant sentiment.” Liberty is fine, but nationalism is what counts.
“In the beginning, yes,” Grant agreed. “But as soon as slavery fired upon the flag, it was felt, we all felt, even those who did not object to slaves, that slavery must be destroyed.” Grant was compressing events here: the idea that the nation—America—had to end slavery to save itself had taken a few years to sink in. The peace party in the North never accepted it. But the Lincoln administration did, and it won reelection with that goal in view and followed through on its intention.
Grant finished. “We felt that it was a stain to the Union that men should be bought and sold like cattle.” A union in which denial of liberty was a permanent feature, not a stain to be deplored, contained, or eradicated, was not a union worth saving. It would not be America.
Bismarck was half right. Nationalism, including national unity, is the organizing principle of the modern world.
But Grant was entirely right. American nationalism embodies the principle of liberty. Without that, it is nothing. Without that, we are a more populous Canada or an efficient Mexico. Grant was not as eloquent as Lincoln at Gettysburg, but he had spoken for a new birth of freedom, soldier’s version, all the same.
Bismarck ended the conversation graciously. “It was a long war, and a great work well done—and I suppose it means a long peace.”
“I believe so,” said Grant.1
It was, for black Americans, a long, bad peace. By 1878, despite Grant’s best efforts, the federal government, no longer supported by voters weary of futility and expense, had given up trying to maintain the rights of freedmen. It would take decades to claw them back.
Liberty is never easy. You have to know what it is, believe that it is essential, and watch over and defend it. May these documents, and the men and women who wrote and endorsed them—settlers, villagers, jurors, farmers, advisors, speechwriters, politicians, statesmen—be an example for us.