Book Review

All New Hampshire cars and trucks bear license plates proclaiming "Live Free or Die." The motto derives from the revolutionary era when it meant something a little different than it does today. Most New Hampshirans now proudly announce they "live free" of any state income or sales tax (at some cost to social services or equal access to a decent public education); they intend to do so or die in trying. Many of the Militia of Montana's members believe in the freedom to drive without license plates and recognize no elected office higher than that of local dogcatcher.	1
In The Story of American Freedom, Eric Foner provides a whirlwind tour through two centuries of the idea of freedom and the attempts to operationalize changing views of what freedom should mean in the American democracy. Foner's goal is to communicate with a wide audience about the shifting and contentious debates over the meaning of freedom and how the boundaries of freedom in a diverse nation have been repeatedly redrawn. No generation, he makes clear, has ever lived in this country without experiencing disagreements and struggles over the definition, the meaning, and the content of freedom. "Freedom," he writes, "has always been a terrain of conflict, subject to multiple and competing interpretations."	2
Foner is at his best in narrating the recurrent redrawing of freedom's boundaries. By its nature, the topic of freedom is so vast that the book becomes a lively survey rather than a scholarly breaking of new ground. Therefore, the book has much more to offer the intelligent reader than the professional historian. Engagingly written, the book provides a valuable opportunity for those in the wider reading audience to ponder the varieties of freedom, with a huge range of entitlements, that have preoccupied every generation: political freedom, economic freedom, religious freedom, sexual freedom, women's freedom within marriage, the freedom of labor to organize, and a host of other freedoms. Foner struggles bravely to keep control of all these aspects of freedom while moving chronologically forward from the American Revolution to the present day.	3
With so much to do, Foner can be pardoned for scanting many issues of freedom. But to omit altogether the first century and a half of American history is regrettable. By beginning with the American Revolution, rather than with early-seventeenth-century colonizers, the book skips past a crucial part of "the story of American freedom." Those who still hold to the consensus interpretation of American history (which probably includes most of the American public) imagine that freedom began at Plymouth Rock and Jamestown, Virginia. It would be better, in a sweeping history of American freedom, for readers to see how the early colonizers made momentous decisions about formulating degrees of unfreedom as well as freedom—categories of unfreedom unknown in England. At pains to show that freedom has not simply been a linear progress toward a preordained goal, Foner misses a chance to show that, during the first third of American history, many of the peoples living in North America were forced to give up accustomed liberties in order to facilitate the progress of others toward wider conceptions of freedom. This, of course, is the central paradox of American freedom explored brilliantly by Edmund Morgan two decades ago—one not yet generally comprehended by the public.	. . .