Answering Olson Again

Round 3 with Mark Olson over the meaning of the liberty in the Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately, I don't think there's anything really being added to the argument at this point in his new post on the subject. He begins:

As I had enjoyed, and I think learned much, from Mr Fischer's book Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America ... I bought a few more of Mr Fischer's extant works. Specifically on this question, the book Liberty and Freedom which I have only read a few dozen or more pages. This book is an exploration of the diverse meanings and symbols which American's have attached to the two words Liberty and Freedom during our Nation's brief history. He starts out with an interesting exchange, in 1843 it seems a scholar named Mullen Chamberlain was looking into origins of the American Revolution. This scholar found a survivor, one Levi Preston, who fought at the battle(s) of Lexington and Concord. He asked Mr Preston why he fought. Did he oppose the Stamp act? Answer, "No." He never saw any stamps and he understood that none were ever sold. The tea tax perhaps? Nope. He never drank tea. Did he read, Harrington, Sidney, and Locke and know about the "eternal principles of Liberty"? No again. The only books he read, was the Bible, The Catechism,Watts' Psalms, hymns, and the almanacs. So why did he fight? Because, "we always had been free, and we meant to be free always. They didn't mean we should". The 68 cent question is, what did Mr Preston mean by "free"?

But that question is completely irrelevant to this discussion. The point is what the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence meant, meaning primarily what Jefferson, Adams and Franklin meant. Of course the rank and file hadn't read John Locke and knew little of the Enlightenment philosophy upon which the Declaration is based. Who in their right mind would expect anything else? But Mr. Preston didn't write those words.

Again I have to say that I'm just baffled by Olson's reasoning here. His intent is to divine the meaning of one man's words, but he keeps looking at what other people meant by those words, often in a completely different context, and ignoring that man's clearly expressed explanation of what he meant by them. This simply makes no sense at all. No one questions the fact that one can illuminate meaning with cultural context. Indeed, this is a key tool used by historians (not to mention legal scholars). But where you have primary evidence, you cannot ignore it in favor of secondary or tertiary evidence, and you certainly can't ignore it in favor of entirely irrelevant evidence.

Did Mr Jefferson and his committee, draw only from their philosophy when they discussed and in the document in question wrote the term, "Liberty" or did they also draw upon the "values of the heart" that were in place in the folkways from which they belonged?

For crying out loud, what scholar would seriously use a phrase like "values of the heart" in this manner? This is an amorphous, emotionally loaded catchphrase that is completely out of place in any sort of historical scholarship. If he wishes to argue that Jefferson was influenced by his culture, the response would simply be "duh". But as the example of Mr. Preston above demonstrates, the way words are used by an uneducated soldier is likely to be entirely different than the way they are used by a man like Jefferson. But Olson insists on completely ignoring the philosophical background of Locke's enlightenment philosophy - the very philosophy that Jefferson says explicitly is the source of his ideas - and to focus instead on definitions offered by people with none of that background. If this was turned in as a paper in a history class, I can't imagine it getting anything but a failing grade.

On the hypocrisy "gambit" for explaining Mr Jefferson's slavery (and possibly) other habits as why he might have written (later I think) against slavery but own slaves ... I think I explained another alternative view on that in the comment to that post. Mr Kuznicki had pointed out in an earlier post that when we see inconsistencies or oddities in their remarks, it is the job of the historian to find out how the meaning (and context) of those words might have differed then and why what was said was not hypocrisy or "odd" but explainable in the context in which that individual lived. It seems to me that the surrounding hegemonic/heirarchical ideas of Liberty might have influenced Mr Jefferson just as the writings of Mr Locke did.

No, Jefferson wrote against slavery at the time of the Declaration, not later. As I said, he initially wrote an anti-slavery paragraph in the Declaration, but it was removed out of political expediency. And that is what Olson seems to forget, that in addition to being the brilliant men that they were, these men were also politicians involved in crafting difficult alliances. That means that principle sometimes had to bow to political expediency. Men are fallible and they often act in conflict with their stated beliefs. That doesn't change the validity of the beliefs, or the definition of their principles, it only means they didn't always follow them.

He claims that our modern ideas of Liberty are in line with Jeffersons (from his writings) and not the Quaker then either New England or Virginia. Well, what he doesn't do then, and neither have I, is to undergo a study of the concept of Liberty ... by region ... and how our modern concept came to be what it is. Do we owe our ideas of Liberty from Jefferson or a merging of folkways and "habits of heart"? Was the Civil War, which certainly did violence to the Virginian folkway, a necessity from a philosophical standpoint or a clash of folkways? I dunno, and I suspect neither does Mr Brayton.

This is just a muddle of mush, with no substance to it. What on earth does a "clash of folkways" even mean in this context? I would argue that the Civil War was indeed made inevitable by the founding of this country. It put the basic principles of the Declaration, which are astonishingly powerful and compelling, on a collision course with vested financial interests. But again, we don't need a study of the concept of liberty by region to know what Jefferson meant by liberty - he tells us what he meant, clearly, repeatedly and explicitly.

On pp 841-844, Mr Fischer discusses some of the Adams/Federalist ideas which sprung from New England ideas of collective liberty and trying to enact these on a national scale. These included: an active role for government, increased taxation, a strong navy, an expanded judiciary with broad common law jurisdiction, narrow restriction of immigration, a more active regulation of commerce, an active attempt to suppress dissent, and a moralistic tone to government which was deeply resented by others of different persuasions. The acts are the Alien and Sedition act (which Mr Brayton mentions), the Naturalization act, the Navy and Army acts, the Bankruptcy Act, the Judiciary Act and many new taxes, included a direct tax, one on salt (and a stamp tax). The rejecting of this idea or ordered liberty is consistent with community liberty ideas of New England and therefore not necessarily hypocrisy on Mr Adams part, just a different idea that he and his New England Federalists had "in their hearts".

Except that Adams wrote provisions into the Massachusetts constitution that clearly expressed an individual view of liberty, not a collective one. You cannot square an "active attempt to suppress dissent" with Adams' repeated insistence on a universal right to freedom of conscience. The constitution he wrote for Massachusetts, which surely represented his views on liberty, guaranteed freedom of speech and freedom of the press and cannot possibly be consistent with the Sedition act. One either must presume that he was lying about his principles, or that he was simply opting for short term political expediency in supporting the sedition act. The latter is a lot more plausible. And he regretted his own weakness, by the way. He was ashamed of what he had done as President in that regard, which obviously suggests that he recognized that his actions did not match his principles - and that disproves the notion that the Sedition act was consistent with some strange definition of those principles that he clearly did not share.