Freedom: Quaker and Backcountry

While Puritan and Cavalier notions of liberty are quite foreign to us, Quaker and back country concepts are familiar.  They live on today in the concepts of freedom espoused by the ACLU and the NRA, respectively.

 Quakers

Quakers introduced a radical new idea to the concept of law and order – that people need not all adhere to a common creed or fit into a common hierarchy.  Order simply meant people refraining from intruding on each other’s peace.  Quakers flogged and branded like anyone else in the 17^th Century, but they generally opposed capital punishment, limiting it to cases of treason and murder.*  Sheriffs were semi-elective -- a vote was held among multiple candidates, and the governor choose between the top two vote-getters.  Quakers also had justices of the peace and peace keepers who arbitrated civil disputes.  The Quaker approach to law enforcement must have seemed dangerously permissive to their contemporaries, yet crime rates remained relatively low (though not so low as among the Puritans).  The reason for their low crime rates should be obvious.  They were Quakers (and Amish and Mennonites).  A society of pacifists can control crime by gentler means than other societies.  Local government took place mostly at the county level, by elective commissions and other officials.  Elections were frequent, as often as five times a year, but less demanding than a New England town meeting.  Perhaps as a result, voter turnout was usually lower than in Virginia, but higher than in New England. 

Fitting midway between their concept of local government and their concept of liberty was the matter of how politics were conducted.  Quaker notions of the conscience and the Inner Light meant a recognition of a right of dissent.  Long-standing differences of opinion between large portions of the community regarded as normal, rather than as a source of dangerous disruption.  Political parties began forming in Pennsylvania in the early 18^th Century, about the same time they began forming in England, and well before they began to develop in any of the other colonies.   While local government in New England operated by consensus with strong pressure to conform, and in Virginia it was little more than a spoils system, in Pennsylvania , the whole concept of organized and civilized disagreement that makes democracy possible was being born.

Quaker concepts of freedom were rooted in the Golden Rule – respect in others the freedom you would have others respect in you.  Quakers did not see freedom as a zero sum game.  The saw it as the common right of all, and believed that the loss of freedom by one person(s) diminished the freedom of all.  More remarkably, the Quakers lived up to this ideal.  Power corrupts, and Fischer points out that all too often, people who are fierce in defense of their own freedom when out of power have second thoughts about other people’s freedom when in power.  The Quakers in power extended to everyone else the same freedom they claimed for themselves.  Quakers were also the earliest opponents of slavery.  If it was not their wish to be enslaved, then it could not be right to enslave others.  Fischer believes that there was no material reason slavery could not have flourished in the Delaware Valley; it was kept out because of the strong commitment of the Quakers and Pietists to reject it.  Fischer calls this ideal reciprocal liberty.

Reciprocal liberty had other implications as well.  Limited government was part of reciprocal liberty.  Implicit in it, Fischer says, was a clear distinction between the state and the larger society.  Such a distinction would have been quite foreign to the Puritans.  Also implied were that there were some things that were simply not government’s business (another concept quite foreign to the Puritans).  In particular, government had no business legislating in matters of conscience.  But at the same time, the existence government was essential to reciprocal liberty.  Its role was to keep people from infringing on each other.

Not all these ideas were unique to the Quakers.  They were part of the stirring of the new ideology of classical liberalism that arose in the late 17th Century among the Whigs and their struggle to curb the power of the king.  William Penn, besides Quaker ideals of reciprocal liberty, endorsed the secular liberties of the Whigs.  He guaranteed all colonists the secular rights to their lives, liberty and estate; representative government; and trial by jury.  The right to trial by jury included the right to a speedy trial, to the same right of witness and counsel as the prosecution, and for the jury not to be punished for its verdict.  No coincidentally, these are the same rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution to this day.

Which leads to an important point.  The ideals that created the American Revolution were ones developed in the late 17^th Century by John Locke and other English Whigs.  These ideas were not unique to the Quakers; indeed, it was Jefferson, descendant of the Cavaliers who set them forth in the Declaration of Independence and Madison, another such descendant, who enshrined them in the Bill of Rights. 

Back Country

Back Country ideals of liberty are also familiar to us.  They can be found in any pronouncement by the NRA or the gun lobby in general.  The back country was settled by people long excluded from political power, either in contemporary England, or in the colonies in their early days.  As a result back countrymen came to look upon any formal government as something hostile, alien, and inherently oppressive.  This went far beyond Quaker (or Cavalier) notions of limited government to an ideal (at least in theory) of no formal government.  Fischer calls this natural liberty, perhaps because back countrymen so often seemed to aspire to an anarchical “state of nature” that the other cultures dreaded.

Of course, the back country was never able to exclude formal government altogether.  But they generally sought to limit its influence.  Sheriffs, courts, and other official means of keeping order coexisted with vigilante violence and order maintained by private revenge.  Fischer cites the case of a judge who punished hog stealing with hanging, and the rape of a five-year-old girl with a one shilling fine.  What is does not add is that this did not necessarily mean the judge took child rape lightly.  He may just have wanted to allow the girl’s family the satisfaction of inflicting the punishment themselves.  "Order" in the back country meant retaliation in kind for any wrong done.  And if formal government was regarded with deep distrust, they were not without leadership.  Leaders were strong, charismatic individuals with a knack for getting things done, people like Andrew Jackson, who when a fire broke out in a stable, organized the townsmen to fight it, decked anyone who opposed him, and saved the town from burning down.  And he did it through is own forceful personality, not any trappings of formal office.  That was the sort of leader the backcountry respected.

Particularly strong in the back country concept of freedom was not only the ideal that all government was inherently dangerous to liberty, but that armed rebellion was the proper response the moment it stepped out of line.  Fischer gives the example of Patrick Henry, a back countryman to the core.  Patrick Henry was not just one of the most impassioned leaders of the American Revolution.  Before any stirrings of rebellion began, as a lawyer he argued to a back country jury that the king, by disallowing some obscure act, had degenerated into a tyrant and forfeited all rights to their obedience.  Cavalier gentlemen were shocked, but the back country jury responded favorably.  He famously shocked low country gentlemen as well at the time of the Stamp Act, appearing to call for rebellion well before most people were even considering such a thing. At the same time, he did not hesitate to call anyone who opposed the Virginia Resolves and enemy of the colony.  Natural liberty, Fischer comments, was not reciprocal.  Respect for the rights of others was not a part of liberty in the back country.

I must confess to finding this the most puzzling part of "natural liberty," either as Fischer sets forth in his book, or in the NRA and gun lobby today.  I can more or less understand that people who see freedom as a thing for every man to vindicate with his gun not being concerned with the rights of others.  Presumably my neighbor has a gun of his own and is just as capable of vindicating his liberty as I am.  This is the NRA view of freedom as an armed standoff, with no one daring to infringe on the rights of others for fear of armed retaliation.  What I cannot understand is people who regard the proper response to the slightest provocation by the state as armed resistance simultaneously being willing to use the state to suppress people who disagree with them.  This tendency has continued from Patrick Henry's calling opponents enemies of the colony to present day NRA calls to deport Piers Morgan for disagreeing with them over guns.  Such an outlook, taken to its logical conclusion, would lead to endless civil war, as the "ins" use the power of the state to suppress the "outs" while the "outs" vindicate their rights with firearms.

In another work, Fischer comments that "Don't Tread on Me," with its emphasis on the first person singular, is very much a back country concept of freedom.  Extending it a little further, the Puritan equivalent might be "Don't Treat on Us," the Quakers might say, "Don't Treat on Others," and the Cavaliers, "I Do the Treading."

Fischer proceeds to take his thesis too far, reducing almost everything that happens in US history to the interplay of the four cultures, which is certainly a great oversimplification.  But it is a useful analysis nonetheless; one that I intend to make future use of.

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*One thing I learned in law school was that today’s concept of first degree and second degree murder was invented by the Quakers as a way of reducing the number of executions.

Freedom: Puritan and Cavalier

The subjects of how these four societies maintained law and order, their forms of local government, and their concepts of liberty, are closely interconnected.  They may also be significant in forming our concepts of liberty to this day.  It should be noted, all four cultures valued freedom highly.  Indeed, all may be said in some degree to have  migrated in search of freedom that they felt denied at home.  But they had very different concepts of freedom – some familiar to us, and some quite foreign.  Because this is a complex subject, I will split this post in two.

New England

Puritan New England had very low crime rates.  Furthermore, crimes of violence were especially rare, with property crimes more common and trivial offenses against “order” the most common of all.  How was this achieved?  Most today people would say, because of the Puritans’ severity with law breakers.  The harshness of their punishments – the pillory, the stocks, flogging and branding and so forth – are famous to this day.  But such severity is unlikely to be the explanation.  Barbaric as such punishments may seem to us, they were universal in 17^th Century Europe.  Virginia, contemporary England, and continental Europe all did much the same.  Even the gentle Quakers flogged and branded.  Indeed, in at least one respect, the Puritans were less severe than most of their contemporaries – they had fewer capital crimes.*  In another way, they were very strict.  Colonial New England might be considered an early example of the zero tolerance approach.  Just about everyone was prosecuted at some time for some minor offense such as breaking the Sabbath, idleness, lying, swearing, and the all-encompassing “exceeding the bounds of moderation.”  One colonist was prosecuted for presenting a petition on an insufficient size and grade of paper!  The penalties for these offenses were usually not too harsh – rarely more than a few shillings' fine – but warning was ever present.

So if severity of punishment does not explain the Puritans’ success in keeping crime down, what does?  For one thing, as discussed earlier, they lived in small, close-knit villages where everyone could keep an eye on everyone else and bring pressure to bear on deviants.  For another, the Puritans were selective in who they admitted, screening out people who did not share their basic outlook and values.  Their form of local government also played a role -- the famous New England town meeting.   Although Fischer emphasized that the concept originated in England, town meetings in England meant vastly different things in different towns.  In New England, town meetings were standardized.  The townsmen met, elected their officials, and enacted town ordinances.  (They also elected their representatives to the colonial legislature and instructed them on how to vote).  Every effort was made to achieve consensus.  Hence decisions were made by discussion, persuasion and adjustment of differences, together with strong pressure to conform.  The result was to greatly strengthen the moral authority of the law.  Who can object, after all, to being bound by rules enacted by one’s fellow townsmen, including oneself?  Law enforcement was the job of the village constable, also elected by the consensus of his fellow townsmen, which, again, greatly enhanced his moral authority.  The whole concept of a hostile or defiant attitude toward authority was foreign to New England because the people were the authority.  What they were hostile toward was any outside meddling.

Such a regime was possible only for a people whose concept of liberty was very different from our own.  Fischer describes it as “ordered liberty.”  It was the view that liberty was not the absence of constraints on the individual, but membership in a self-governing community that decided for itself what restraints to impose.   The New England authorities established many restraints on the individual.  They forbade people in frontier communities from moving without permission of the authorities.  They mandated Sabbath observance and church attendance.  One community forbade any bachelor from marrying until he killed six blackbirds and a crow.  Another forbade any farmer from slopping his pigs until two others confirmed what he was giving was unfit for human consumption.  Liberty, in short, belonged to the community, not the individual.  Individuals merely had “liberties,” something between our concept of rights and privileges.   These were not inalienable rights, but privileges the community granted and could withdraw at will.  In short, the Puritan concept of liberty has fallen by the wayside and is quite alien to our own.

Virginia

Rates of violence were higher in Virginia than in New England, but violence, like so much else, was rigidly hierarchical.  Violence by social superiors against inferiors was common.  Violence among social equals was intermediate.  But violence by social inferiors against social superiors was rare and subject to terrible retaliation.  The head of law enforcement in Virginia was the sheriff.  In New England, law enforcement was in the hands of the village constable, while the office of sheriff was abolished as what Fischer calls a “hated symbol of royal prerogative and aristocratic privilege.”  Alas, he does not explain what a sheriff was, or what made him such a symbol, other than that the sheriff was necessarily a country gentlemen.  The same shortcoming applies to his description of many other offices as well.  The vestry was the administration of the parish, which managed church matters, as well as “much other secular business," such as administering the poor law.  Alas, once again, Fischer does not describe what else the vestry did, except to say it was less active in the life of the community than the town meeting and presumably subjected individuals to fewer constraints.   The other main form of local government was the court, and especially the county justice of the peace.  Unlike in New England, where these officials were elected by the town meeting, in Virginia they were appointed by the colonial legislature (the famous House of Burgesses).  In theory, the legislature could appoint whoever it pleased to office.  In practice, the local country gentry would decide who should hold which office and the legislature almost always respected their wishes.  The only elective offices were to the colonial legislature.  Elections took place about once every seven years.  But Fischer finds another interesting comparison between the colonies.  In New England, where the town meeting met once a year to elect officials and as many times between as necessary to manage the town business, turnout was low, except in times of crisis.  In Virginia, where elections were rare and special events, turnout was much higher.  Apparently people are more willing to participate when participation is not too demanding.

The Cavaliers cherished their freedom, but had little respect for the freedom of others (especially their servants and slaves).  Fisher calls their attitude one of “hegemonic liberty,” equating freedom with domination of others.  Although he does not put it that way, Cavaliers assumed that it was the inevitable nature of society for people at the top to oppress people at the bottom.  Liberty was being as high up in the social order as possible.  This is related to, but different from, the Puritan view of “liberties” granted as special exemptions from restraint.  Puritans, too, believed that a gentleman had more liberties than a person of lower order, much less a servant or slave.  But at the same time, Puritans also recognized other “liberties” as common to all, and some (fishing rights, for instance) that were granted by community, rather than by rank.  To Virginians, liberty was mostly a matter of who dominates whom.  This makes liberty a zero sum game – one person’s gain in liberty is necessarily someone else’s loss.  Suddenly I began to understand why southerners felt so threatened when anyone sought to undermine slavery.  If one’s view is enslave or be enslaved, then any threat to one’s ability to enslave is necessarily a threat of enslavement.  It explains the maddening view so often expressed by apologists for slavery – that it elevates all white people to an aristocracy.  If one views freedom in hegemonic terms then, yes, I suppose race slavery could be the most effective way to extend hegemonic liberty to the greatest number of people.   It also goes a long way to explaining why marriages were so often power struggles – marriage, too, could not be a partnership, but only a question of who dominates.

It is also true that the Cavaliers moved beyond this view.  After all, Jefferson, who wrote so eloquently about universal natural rights in the Declaration of Independence came from this culture.  It is an outlook that goes clearly against the one the United States adopted as its ideology in 1776 and since.  But traces remained, especially in race relations, which were conceived of as a zero sum game long after the zero sum view had been abandoned everywhere else.  It is an outlook that remains tempting to this day because it is a more natural outlook than the one that no one need dominate anyone, but that we should all be free together.

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*Of course, just because the death penalty is on the books for an offense does not necessarily mean that it is enforced.  But Fischer also compares the actual numbers of executions in Massachusetts to Virginia.  Virginia had a much higher rate.