Liberty

The American foundational framework of ideas around which the budding conflicts would be resolved were not American. In the Declaration of Independence, for example, Thomas Jefferson borrowed quite liberally from John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, from which also are derived many ideas in the Constitution, including separation of church and state.

In this groundbreaking work, the 17th-century Enlightenment philosopher, also deemed the father of English and U.S. liberalism, proposed the notion of the social contract. In his words: “That which begins and actually constitutes any political society is nothing but the consent of any number of freemen capable of a majority to unite and incorporate into such a society. And this is that, and that only, which did or could give beginning to any lawful government in the world.”

In an age of absolute monarchy, in which a French king boasted that “L’etat c’est moi” (I am the State) and English kings still claimed power over Parliament, this was a revolutionary idea. It was extended by a 19th century thinker, John Stuart Mill, who conceived of liberty as the absence of restraint from government or others to develop one’s own unique abilities and capacities. In On Liberty, penned in 1859, he stated “the only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way.”

Seeds of Conflict

It seems proper in a time of strife to recall early signs that in the young American republic all was not right nor yet perfected.

In the 1791–1794 Whisky Rebellion, more or less independent Pennsylvania family farmers rose up against a tax on distilled spirits they produced. The levy was enacted by Congress and President Washington to pay the rich interest on the bonds floated to finance the war of independence.

There were also 14 widespread major slave revolts between 1794 and 1859 — students usually only learn of Nat Turner’s. Besides that, there were enough escapes to justify legislation on their return and to spur the “Underground Railroad” to freedom.

Beginning with Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), there was a movement to gain property rights, access to education and later voting rights for women. With typical generosity of spirit, its leaders campaigned for the abolition of slavery and temperance before championing women’s rights.

Finally, although four signers of the Constitution were Irish (mostly Anglo-Irish), when a million and a half people fled the Emerald Isle’s Great Hunger of 1845-1852, these newly arrived white Europeans began to experience discrimination and mistreatment. This would repeat itself with every successive later immigration wave from Europe, with Germans, Poles, Italians, Russian Jews and others, who quickly formed self-defense organizations and rallied around the political leadership of the only immigrants who were native English speakers, the Irish.