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.