Beyond Freedom and Slavery: Autonomy, Virtue, and Resistance in Early American Political Discourse

François Furstenberg

Issachar is a strong ass, crouching between the sheepfolds; he saw that a resting place was good, and that the land was pleasant; so he bowed his shoulder to bear, and became a slave at forced labor.
—Genesis 49:14–15
And before I'll be a slave, I'll be buried in my grave, And go home to my lord and be free.
—"Oh Freedom," African American spiritual, c. 1830–1865
"Our old friend Samuel Adams used to say 'nations were as free as they deserved to be,'" Benjamin Rush recalled in 1812, musing on the history of the American Revolution and on the ensuing decline in public virtue, as he saw it. John Adams, his correspondent, agreed. "Sam's doctrine . . . is true," he wrote, "and has a good tendency to excite vigilance and energy in defense of freedom." It may seem odd that Benjamin Rush, John Adams, and Samuel Adams, signers of the Declaration of Independence all, could agree on this view of freedom. "Sam's doctrine," as Adams called it, the idea that nations are only as free as they deserve to be, is a far cry from the Declaration of Independence's more memorable formulation: All men created equal, endowed with inalienable rights, including life, the pursuit of happiness—and liberty. If it seems odd, that may be because scholars have been apt to associate the meaning of American freedom with the declaration. Few would deny that the declaration has profoundly influenced the course of American history, providing a universalizing, rights-based discourse to abolitionists, feminists, workers, and many others. But that discourse has always existed alongside other, less studied meanings of freedom.1	1
The declaration's meaning of freedom may help explain how slavery was abolished, but it is less helpful in explaining how slavery survived for so long. Many years ago, Samuel Johnson famously asked why "we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes." Satisfactory answers remain elusive. Historians have tended to formulate the issue—in the words of David Brion Davis—as a problem of slavery in the age of revolutions, the problem arising from the obvious and unresolvable contradiction between freedom and slavery. Another way to formulate the question is to focus on the problem of freedom in the age of revolutions and to ask: What other meanings were implied when Americans yelped for liberty? One important answer begins with "Sam's doctrine": the belief that nations (understood in the eighteenth-century sense, as peoples with shared culture or moeurs, rather than in the more modern sense of nation-states) are only as free as they deserve. Sam's doctrine opens the way toward a very different conceptualization of both freedom and slavery in early American life. Unlike the Declaration of Independence, it locates slavery and freedom on a continuum. It pushes us beyond the alleged contradictions between freedom and slavery in early American political discourse and highlights their interconnections instead.2	. . .