A Revolution in Government

How the Enlightenment Created Freedom

American colonists in 1765—not including the half-million men, women, and children shackled in slavery—were already the freest people in the world. Not even the European elite could claim more liberty. It was with utter astonishment, then, that the Old World looked on as, over the course of a decade, the colonies would rebel and ultimately sever ties with the British crown. (Israel, Democratic Enlightenment, 443; Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 3)

It began, appropriately enough, with revolt over what the colonists admitted was a tax so small that, as John Dickinson wrote in his influential Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, “some persons . . . may be inclined to acquiesce under it.” But this was the whole of the problem. The Stamp Act was a threat, not because of the sums it seized, but because of the principle it established: that Parliament may confiscate the property of the colonists without their consent.

Nothing is wanted at home but a PRECEDENT, the force of which shall be established by the tacit submission of the colonies . . . If the Parliament succeeds in this attempt, other statues will impose other duties . . . and thus the Parliament will levy upon us such sums of money as they choose to take, without any other LIMITATION than their PLEASURE. (Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, Letter X)

“In short,” Dickinson put it elsewhere, “if they have a right to levy a tax of one penny upon us, they have a right to levy a million upon us.” (Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, Letter II) There was to be no taxation, the colonists declared, without representation.

Over the course of the next decade, from the Townshend Duties to the Boston Massacre to the Tea Party to the Coercive Acts to the Continental Congress, the colonists did not simply issue grievances. They appealed to principle. They were not blind rebels, but revolutionary idealists. They sought to rid themselves of a negative—but their driving motive was the achievement of a positive. And the positive ideal they aimed at went far beyond a demand for representation in Parliament. The colonists, in Dickinson’s words, sought nothing less than a government dedicated to “liberty and happiness.” (Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, Letter VI)

Liberty was no empty abstraction. It had a definite meaning, which the colonists had learned from Enlightenment thinkers—above all from John Locke: liberty meant the protection of the individual’s natural rights from force and compulsion. (Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 56-58, 77; Becker, The Declaration of Independence, 75-79) To secure their liberty the colonists would do the unthinkable: overthrow a government and wage war against the mightiest nation on earth.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

The Declaration of Independence is the greatest literary document of the Enlightenment and the greatest political document in human history. And yet none of the Founding Fathers anticipated its enduring importance. John Adams believed that the defining moment of the second Continental Congress had come in May of 1776, when the states were ordered to create new constitutions that established them as sovereign governments. This, in his view, constituted “the last step, a complete separation from [Britain], a total absolute Independence, not only of her Parliament but of her Crown.” (Rasmussen, Fears of a Setting Sun, 145) Jefferson himself was largely occupied in the weeks leading up to his work on the Declaration with drafting a new constitution for Virginia. And yet what Jefferson produced as a clarion call for freedom that would do more to shape the new country than any document save, perhaps, the U.S. Constitution. “All honor to Jefferson,” Abraham Lincoln would declare a century later, who had the “capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, and so to embalm it there, that today and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.” (Lincoln, Letter to H. L. Peirce and Others, April 6, 1859)

Jefferson was shy and quiet, but his pen was mighty. Only thirty-three years old when he sat down to draft the Declaration, he had already established himself as a powerful voice for independence with his Summary View of the Rights of British America. But the challenge of writing the Declaration was awesome. This was not to be a theoretical treatise nor a lawyerly argument nor a laundry list of grievances nor an orotund call to arms, but all of these at once. It was to announce something altogether new and yet appeal to “the common sense of the subject,” as Jefferson would later put it, in “terms so firm, as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we [were] compelled to take.”(Jefferson, Letter to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825)

The argument of the Declaration was straightforward but philosophically rich. It begins with a statement of principles: that human beings are created equal, endowed with individual rights; that the purpose of government is to protect these rights; and that when a government does not fulfill its purpose, the people have the right to abolish it and establish a new government. The bulk of the Declaration is devoted to proving that the British government is indeed a threat to American rights, seeking “to reduce them under absolute Despotism.” With the facts established, the Declaration reaches its stirring conclusion: “That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States.”

The United States of America was the nation of the Enlightenment. The Founders took the ideas and ideals being formulated in the Old World and put them into practice in the New. Confident in the power of reason, curious about the world of nature, contemptuous of oppressive authority, committed to production and prosperity, deeply devoted to human betterment, they were not content to dream of a future of unlimited progress—they were willing to fight and, if need be, die, in order to bring it into reality. (Commanger, The Empire of Reason, 16)

They succeeded. To the extent that the Enlightenment ushered in the modern age, it was largely through America’s achievements and America’s example. What was a fad in the Old World became imprinted on the American soul and was slowly exported around the globe. In the United States, a new way of life was forged: an essentially secular life, aimed at individual happiness, and driven by the productive achievements of self-made men and women who lionized builders instead of aristocrats—inventors and entrepreneurs rather than of clerics and kings. The Enlightenment championed human flourishing—the United States liberated men to flourish.

The Pursuit of Happiness

The root of it all was the Enlightenment’s focus on happiness. “O Happiness!” declared Alexander Pope, “our Being’s End and Aim!” (Pope, “An Essay on Man,” Epistle IV) All endeavors, for Enlightenment thinkers, had to be justified by their contribution to human happiness: science, art, government—even philosophy itself. (Hazard, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 15-23)

What mattered, more specifically, was man’s earthly happiness. Medievals had wailed about the wretchedness of life on earth. “We be all born yelling and crying,” wrote Pope Innocent III, “to the end we may express our misery.” (Robertson, The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 3) This was not the Enlightenment view. As Diderot has Nature say to man in his Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage, “In vain, O slave of superstition, do you seek your happiness beyond the limits of the world in which I have placed you. Have the courage to free yourself from the yoke of religion, my haughty rival, which does not recognize my prerogatives. Cast out the Gods who have usurped my power, and return to my laws.” (Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, 135) Even if there was a God, it was senseless and irrational to believe that he demanded misery on earth as the price for happiness after death. (Hazard, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 23) The Enlightenment, concludes British historian Roy Porter, was a time when people stopped asking “How can I be saved?” and started asking “How can I be happy?” (Porter, The Creation of the Modern World, 22)

What was this happiness that men do and ought to seek? Locke supplied the deepest answer, equating happiness with the greatest amount of pleasure and the last amount of pain. (Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II.xxi.42) This emphatically included physical pleasure, from sensual pleasures like food and sex to the comfort and security made possible by earning what Benjamin Franklin called “a sufficiency of the necessaries and conveniences of life.” (Franklin, Proposals and Queries for the Consideration of the Junto) As important, however, were the spiritual pleasures that made up earthly happiness—pleasures such as art, learning, and social intercourse.

To achieve happiness, an individual had to work for it, most fundamentally by using his reason. “The enlightened man,” explains D’Holbach, “is man in his maturity, in his perfection; who is capable of pursuing his own happiness; because he has learned to examine, to think for himself, and not to take that for truth upon the authority of others, which experience has taught him examination will frequently prove erroneous.” (Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment vol. 3, 407) In cultivating his reason, the individual secured the most important ingredient of happiness: virtue.

“Happiness . . . can never be found without virtue,” said John Adams. (Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, Chapter 4) “[I]ndividual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue,” Jefferson concurred. (Jefferson, Letter to José Corrêa da Serra, April 19, 1814) Washington, in his First Inaugural Address, proclaimed that “there is no truth more thoroughly established than that there exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness; between duty and advantage.” (Washington, First Inaugural Speech) “One’s true Happiness,” concludes Franklin, “depends more upon one’s own judgment of one’s self, on a consciousness of rectitude in action and intention, and in the approbation of those few who judge impartially, than upon the applause of the unthinking undiscerning multitude, who are apt to cry Hosanna today, and tomorrow, Crucify him.” (Franklin, Letter to Jane Mecom, March 1, 1766)

The Enlightenment’s conception of virtue, though it included Christian elements, was essentially pagan. Moral instruction was to be found in the works of Epictetus, Cicero, Tacitus, and Livy more than the Bible. The virtues one should strive to cultivate were not faith, hope, and charity, but prudence, temperance, honesty, fortitude, justice, and industriousness.

Because happiness came from a person’s own thought, effort, and virtue, it was necessarily an individual achievement. It could only be earned and enjoyed by the individual, and it was individual happiness that was sacrosanct. To be sure, in valuing individual happiness Enlightenment thinkers valued public happiness. But as the Enlightenment philosopher Christian Wolff observed, “The happiness of the state is the total of the individual happiness of all its members. There is no other.” (Robertson, The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 7)

While later thinkers would sever private and public happiness and claim that the happiness of the whole justified the sacrifice of the individual to the group, the trend during the Enlightenment was to see a harmony between the individual’s pursuit of his interests and the well-being of society. As Voltaire explained:

It is as impossible for a society to be formed and be durable without self-interest as it would be to produce children without carnal desire or to think of eating without appetite, etc. It is love of self that encourages love of others, it is through our mutual needs that we are useful to the human race. That is the foundation of all commerce, the eternal link between men. Without it not a single art would have been invented, no society of ten people formed. It is this self-love, that every animal has received from nature, which warns us to respect that of others. (Voltaire, Letters on England, 128)

But how to link the happiness of the individual and the happiness of the group? This was the great question faced by Enlightenment political thinkers. “Upon this point all speculative politicians will agree,” wrote John Adams, “that the happiness of society is the end of government, as all Divines and moral Philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man. From this principle it will follow, that the form of government, which communicates ease, comfort, security, or in one word happiness to the greatest number of persons, and in the greatest degree, is the best.” (Adams, Thoughts on Government) But what is that form of government?

Individual Rights

For most of human history, government had been based on the principle of human inequality. The wise and the moral are the rightful rulers of the common people. Their wisdom may consist in their connection to the divine, as with theocracies, or it may consist in a natural inheritance, as with heredity monarchy, or a mixture of both, such as the notion of the divine right of kings that Locke had attacked in his First Treatise on Government.

The Enlightenment waged war on this idea on theoretical and practical grounds. Practically, history demonstrated that those in power are seldom wise and virtuous. All too often, absolute rulers were wicked, cruel, and tyrannical. That observation by itself, however, did nothing to move men toward freedom so long as its theoretical underpinnings went unchallenged. The thinkers of the Enlightenment challenged them.

They challenged them, in the first instance, through a radical reorientation in their approach to political theory. They began their analysis of society and government, not with the group, but with the individual. This was the function of the theory of the state of nature, introduced to Western thinkers by Thomas Hobbes and developed in a very different direction by Locke. The state of nature stripped away assumptions about man’s role in the social world and put the spotlight on his metaphysical nature. It revealed a being defined by reason, industry, and free will. Man was a thinker, producer, and self-creator. And in these respects, he was essentially equal to every other man.

Human equality was not a denial of differences, but a recognition of essential similarities. Men may differ in intelligence and ability, but these differences in degree did not amount to a difference in kind. As a result, no man was born with an inherent right to rule over others, and no man was born with a duty to serve and obey. As Jefferson would put it, “Because Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.” (Thomas Jefferson to Henri Gregoire, February 25, 1809) Human beings were born equally free.

This basic fact about human beings had important moral implications when men came together to form society. Men in a state of nature would choose to form societies, not because they were unable to govern their own lives, but because of the enormous benefits that come from dealing with other men: above all, the benefits of knowledge and trade. But alongside these benefits came risks: murder, rape, theft, and every other form of aggression. To protect the industrious and rational from the contentious and quarrelsome, men needed rules—moral rules—to structure and govern society and so allow each individual to gain the benefits of living in society while avoiding the threats.

This was the function natural rights: rights were moral principles that men used to form and reform social systems—their institutions, their mechanisms, their laws. Rights defined the individual’s sphere of freedom, where he could act independently without encroaching on the legitimate prerogatives of his neighbor. They were the bridge that linked the individual’s pursuit of happiness with the goal of a happy society. The happiness of society was not to be achieved by utilitarian central planners sacrificing the few to the many. It was to be achieved by subordinating might to right so that each individual could take the actions needed to flourish. If an individual had to think and produce in order to flourish, then a moral society was one that secured his right to think and produce. If it was physical coercion that crippled the individual’s ability to think and produce, then physical coercion would be the threat barred from civilized society. “No man has a natural right,” Jefferson declared, “to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him.” (Jefferson, Letter to Francis W. Gilmer, June 7, 1816)

Today, both “equality” and “rights” are used in ways very different from how the Enlightenment understood them. Often equality is held to mean equal outcomes, and government is charged with equalizing outcomes by seizing and redistributing the wealth of individuals. When the Enlightenment thinkers and American founders spoke of equality, it was not equal outcomes they were defending, but man’s natural equality as a free and independent individual, and the equal rights this natural equality entails. As Dickinson explained:

Nature has made us all of the same species, all equal, all free and independent of each other; and was willing that those, on whom she has bestowed the same faculties, should have all the same rights. It is therefore beyond doubt that in this primitive state of nature, no man has of himself an original right of commanding others, or any title to sovereignty. (West, The Political Theory of the American Founding, 89)

Would this lead to unequal outcomes? Absolutely it would. Locke explicitly defends the unequal results that emerge from equal rights (Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, V.50), as did many of America’s founders. “Although, among men, all are subject by nature to equal laws of morality, and in society have a right to equal laws for their government,” wrote John Adams, “yet no two men are perfectly equal in person, property, understanding, activity, and virtue, or ever can be made so by any power less than that which created them.” (West, The Political Theory of the American Founding, 74) James Wilson concurred, arguing that “an equality in rights” guarantees both “the weak and artless” the right to “their small acquisitions,” and “the strong and artful” the right to “their large ones.” (Thompson, America’s Revolutionary Mind, 118-119) A less well known member of the founding generation, Nathaniel Chapman, developed the point in greater detail when he wrote that:

If we make equality of property necessary in a society, we must employ force against both the industrious and the indolent. On the one hand, the industrious must be restrained from every exertion which may exceed the power or inclination of common capacities; on the other hand, the indolent must be forcibly stimulated to common exertions. This would be acting the fable of Procrustes, who, by stretching, or lopping to his iron bedstead, would reduce every man to his own standard length. (West, The Political Theory of the American Founding, 60-61)

Just as the contemporary debate has replaced “equality of rights” with “equality of condition,” so it has replaced rights as freedoms of action with rights as entitlements to objects. Today, people are held to have a “right” to money, food, healthcare, a job, and any number of other resources seen as essential to their life, comfort, or dignity. But for eighteenth century minds, our rights, as James Wilson put it, “result from the natural state of man; from that situation, in which he would find himself, if no civil government was instituted.” (Wilson, The Collected Works of Wilson vol 2, Lectures on Law, Part II, Chapter XII) A man cannot have a right to the wealth or services of other men, since these are not granted to him by nature. As a self-owner, he has a right only to use his natural capacities and to enjoy the fruits of his choices and actions. Most fundamentally, this meant a right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

The right to life is the right to self-preservation—to take the actions necessary to secure one’s life, including to defend it against threats. The right to liberty is the right to think, choose, speak, and act unmolested by coercion or compulsion—to deal with others voluntarily or not at all. The right to property is the right to earn, keep, use, and dispose of material resources—it is, wrote Jefferson, “the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it.” (Jefferson, Addition to Note for Destutt de Tracy’s Treatise on Political Economy) The pursuit of happiness is the right to seek out the values that make life rich, fulfilling, and meaningful—to aim at one’s rational, long-term self-interest.

These rights are not created by government but inherent in man. But in a state of nature, our rights are insecure. To remedy this problem, writes Wilson, “wise and good government . . . enlarges as well as secures the exercise of the natural liberty of man” by becoming the protector of his rights. “Government, in my humble opinion, should be formed to secure and to enlarge the exercise of the natural rights of its members; and every government, which has not this in view, as its principal object, is not a government of the legitimate kind.” (Wilson, The Collected Works of Wilson vol 2, Lectures on Law, Part II, Chapter XII) Or, as Thomas Reese put it, “the security of life, liberty, and property is the precise and specific end of the social compact.” (West, The Political Theory of the American Founding, 140-141)

What the Enlightenment championed, then, was not “small government” (and certainly not “big government”) but limited government. A government must be strong enough to protect the individual’s natural rights from domestic and foreign threats—but it must be constrained so as not to violate them. As James Madison put in Federalist 51, “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” (Madison, Federalist 51)

This was the purpose of a constitution. The notion of written constitutions was an innovation pioneered by America’s founders. A constitution, in their view, set out to answer two questions: (1) what is the form of government, and (2) what are the powers of government? (Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 182-183) For the founders, the ideal form is a constitutional republic—and the powers of government are those necessary to carry out its function of protecting individual rights. “In Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by Power,” Madison observed. “America has set the example of Charters of power, granted by Liberty.” (Madison, Letter to Jacob Engelbrecht, July 4, 1827)

Some scholars, observing the republicanism of the founders, have argued that they never intended to create a government aimed at protecting individual rights. Harkening back to ancient republicanism, these scholars insist that the founders sought to sacrifice the interests of the individual to the public good. This, declares historian Gordon Wood, “formed the essence of republicanism and comprehended for Americans the idealistic goal of their Revolution. . . . No phrase except ‘liberty’ was invoked more often by the Revolutionaries than ‘the public good.’” (Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 53) As for “liberty,” Wood insists that “true liberty” for the founders meant the “liberty” to sacrifice yourself to the public good. “The common interest was not, as we might think of it today, simply the sum or consensus of the particular interests that made up the community. It was rather an entity in itself, prior to and distinct from the various private interests of groups and individuals. . . . Ideally, republicanism obliterated the individual.” (Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 58-61)

Enlightenment thinkers, including the founders, most certainly did speak of the public good. But the notion that they were radical collectivists seeking to eviscerate the individual is utterly baseless and runs counter to virtually the whole of their writing during the revolutionary period and after. Just as Locke had made it clear that the public good meant the good of each and every individual, so did the founders. (Smith, The System of Liberty, 26-39) Madison sought to prefix to the Constitution the proclamation “That government is instituted, and ought to be exercised for the benefit of the people; which consists in the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the right of acquiring and using property, and generally of pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” (Madison, Amendments to the Constitution, June 8, 1789) In other words, the public good consists in the protection of the natural rights of each citizen.

Whatever the Enlightenment inherited from the past, it represented a radical departure. The world had preached self-sacrifice for thousands of years. What made the Enlightenment new and shocking was not that it invoked the public good, but precisely that it celebrated the individual’s quest for his own happiness. In Jefferson’s words, “All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view, the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god.” (Jefferson, Letter to Roger Weightman, June 24, 1826) When conservatives of the time criticized the American founding, this is what they criticized.

To the Church of England divine John Boucher, American colonists most certainly had been born with saddles on their backs. In rebelling against the British yoke, the colonists had violated Christ’s command to obey earthly authorities. “[O]bedience to government is every man’s duty because it is every man’s interest; but it is particularly incumbent on Christians, because . . . it is enjoined by the positive commands of God.” Boucher was particularly offended by the American notion that “that the whole human race is born equal; and that no man is naturally inferior, or in any respect subjected to another, and that he can be made subject to another only by his own consent.” Ignoring the essential similarity between men—rationality and free will—he railed that “Man differs from man in everything that can be supposed to lead to supremacy and subjection.” Equality was a myth and consent was lie. Men are born subject to authority and have no right to rebel against that authority. “So far from deriving their authority from any supposed consent or suffrage of men,” kings and princes “receive their commission from Heaven; they receive it from God, the source and original of all power.” The individual’s God-given duty is “to be quiet, and to sit still.” (Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 314-317)

The eighteenth century critics understood what too many moderns don’t: that the founders championed a limited government devoted solely to protect of individual rights. What is true—what is crucially important to bear in mind—is that this vision was an ideal, and that in important respects, the Founding Fathers did not live up to their own doctrines. By far the worst failure was the enduring institution of slavery.

Slavery

From the end of the fifteenth century to the start of nineteenth, nearly nine million Africans were enslaved and brought over to the Americas. Most were destined for the Caribbean, but about five percent ended up in North America, where they were forced to work mainly on Southern plantations. Even in New England, however, it was not uncommon for elites to own slaves to work in their households or their businesses. (Kors (ed.), The Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment vol 4, 86-87) In New York in the 1750s, as many as one tenth of all households owned slaves. (Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 135)

Prior to the Enlightenment, virtually no one questioned the morality of slavery. This seems utterly incomprehensible to us today, but that is precisely because we live in a post-Enlightenment civilization. “In a hierarchical world,” one scholar notes, “where various degrees of restraint on liberties seemed natural, slavery aroused no special opprobrium, no particular abhorrence.” (Kors (ed.), The Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment vol 4, 88)

Christianity certainly was no countervailing force. Though Christians upheld the spiritual equality of individuals, that did not translate into support for earthly equality. In this fallen world, man’s sinful nature could only be brought under control by a social hierarchy where each individual was answerable to the ranks above him. The slave answered to his master, his master answered to his ruler, and the ruler answered to God. If in some spiritual sense a slave was equal to his master, on earth he was morally obliged to bow his head and obey. As the eminent British Protestant Morgan Godwyn explained in 1680:

It [Christianity] established the authority of masters over their servants and slaves . . . exacting the strictest fidelity . . . requiring service with singleness of heart, as unto the Lord. . . . And so far it is from encouraging resistance, that it allows them not the liberty of gainsaying, or making undutiful replies to their masters. And referring them to future recompense in Heaven, for their faithful service done to them upon Earth. (Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 204-205)

But didn’t slavery make a mockery of the Golden Rule? Not in the least. “[B]oth Catholics and Protestants,” historian David Brion Davis observes, “were able to reconcile slavery with the Golden Rule by piously affirming that masters should treat their bondsmen as they themselves would be treated, should they have the misfortune of becoming slaves.” (Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 308)

So long as the notion of Original Sin shaped men’s outlook, nothing in Christianity demanded questioning slavery. On the contrary, to hold human institutions to an ideal of moral perfection was as prideful as aiming to achieve one’s own moral perfection. Men may be equal in heaven, but here on earth inequality must reign. (Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 294)

The Enlightenment changed everything. In championing human equality, individual rights, and the sanctity of individual happiness, the Enlightenment advanced principles that revealed slavery as an intolerable moral evil. And many Enlightenment figures grasped this point. Locke held that slavery could be justified only for criminals who would otherwise be put to death. Later Enlightenment thinkers rejected even this carveout. Voltaire damned slavery, Condorcet damned slavery, Diderot damned slavery. The Encyclopédie was merciless:

Thus there is not a single one of these hapless souls—who, we maintain, are but slaves—who does not have the right to be declared free, since he has never lost his freedom; since it was impossible for him to lose it; and since neither his ruler nor his father nor anyone else had the right to dispose of his freedom; consequently, the sale of his person is null and void in and of itself: this Negro does not divest himself, indeed cannot under any condition divest himself of his natural rights; he carries them everywhere with him, and he has the right to demand that others allow him to enjoy those rights. Therefore, it is a clear case of inhumanity on the part of the judges in those free countries to which the slave is shipped, not to free the slave instantly by legal declaration, since he is their brother, having a soul like theirs. (Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 416)

To be sure, there were Christian sects who came to oppose slavery—first and foremost the Quakers, but eventually a growing number of Protestants and Catholics. Even here, though, it was the Enlightenment that proved decisive. Two of the Quakers responsible for the sect’s anti-slavery turn, John Hepburn and Elihu Coleman, were both deeply influenced by the burgeoning Enlightenment. (Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 316-317) More generally, it was the Enlightenment’s moderating influence on Christianity that made possible an anti-slavery Christian wing: under the sway of the Enlightenment, Christians became more rational, more secular, more humanistic, less consistently Christian. Above all, many came to dismiss or at least diminish the importance of the doctrine of Original Sin, eviscerating many of the rationalizations for human subjugation that had held sway over the West for a millennium. (Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 348-350, 363)

The American Revolution injected Enlightenment ideals into America’s national consciousness. By embracing the principle of individual rights, America’s revolutionaries—intentionally or not—were setting their country on a path to emancipation. “[H]ow is it,” asked a critic of the Revolution, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” (Thompson, America’s Revolutionary Mind, 135-136) The breach between the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and the reality of chattel slavery in the colonies was clear, and though the contradiction could be and was evaded, it would ultimately need to be resolved.

At one level, the founding generation did not evade the issue. The major founders, even the slaveholders among them, acknowledged the moral evil of slavery. Privately, many anguished over the split between their devotion to the ideals of liberty and the ugly reality that they held human beings in bondage.

But if the founders did not evade the moral evil of slavery in their thoughts and words, their outward actions varied widely. Politically, of course, they crafted a Constitution that, while deliberately avoiding an explicit mention of slavery, seemed to protect it (though some abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, would later argue that the Constitution implicitly nullified the institution). At a personal level, they carved different paths. Some—George Washington, most famously—freed their slaves upon their deaths. Others worked for the abolition of the slave trade. Benjamin Franklin, who had owned slaves earlier in his life, became president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery and authored a petition calling on the national government to end slavery. James Madison promoted what can generously be called a misguided effort to relocate former slaves to Liberia. Too often, the founders justified inaction with the hope that slavery would eventually whither away.

It is, on the whole, a mixed record, deserving neither to be sanitized nor demonized. What cannot be denied, however, is that, to the extent we condemn the founders, we do so on the basis of ideals that they defined and risked their lives to implement. If they are to be blamed for failing to protect the freedom of enslaved Americans, they are to be credited for establishing the principle of American freedom which was eventually extended to all. The Declaration of Independence is, in the end, the most important abolitionist document in human history. This was something the defenders of slavery well understood: it is no accident that John C. Calhoun called the Declaration’s doctrine “that all men are born free and equal . . . the most dangerous of all political errors.” (Calhoun, “Speech on the Oregon Bill”) It was also something many enslaved Americans understood, invoking the Declaration and its principles in defense of their freedom. “Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty?” Frederick Douglass asked in his 1852 oration, “What To the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” “[T]hat he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it.” (Douglass, “What To the Slave is the Fourth of July?”)

The Enlightenment, then, even if it did not establish total freedom for all of humanity, laid the groundwork for liberty. With the creation of the United States, more people than ever were more free than ever.

Religion vs. America

What made it possible? Many today answer definitively: religion. America, they say, is a Christian nation, rights are a gift from God, and only the Bible can provide the moral foundation needed to sustain a free society.

But this is shameful special pleading. The Bible does not mention individual rights and, as the enemies of the American Revolution pointed out, Jesus counseled submission to earthly rulers, not proud rebellion. For a thousand years, Christianity held power over the West and it did not liberate the individual but upheld an oppressive social hierarchy that put dissenters to the flames. All of this was consistent with Christianity’s essential doctrines: man is fallen, this life is insignificant, earthly enjoyment is immoral, man’s highest moral duty is to sacrifice himself for God and his neighbor. It was only after the Enlightenment had defanged Christianity that it was possible to imagine free societies, let alone create them.

It is true, of course, that the champions of natural rights used religious language and religious arguments. Locke, for instance, offered two grounds for his political theory: on the one hand, he envisioned man as a self-owner—but on the other, he claimed that man is created by God and therefore owned by God: “they are his Property, whose Workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one anothers Pleasure.” (Locke, Second Treatise of Government, §6) The Declaration of Independence, meanwhile, spoke of men as “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.” Similar formulations can be found throughout the Founders’ writings. Hamilton, for instance, wrote in 1775 that: “The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for, among old parchments, or musty records. They are written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself.” (Hamilton, The Farmer Refuted)

What’s important, however, is not that some Enlightenment thinkers believed there was a religious basis for rights, but that they provided the world with a secular one. Natural rights reflect man’s nature as a rational being born free and equal whose flourishing has certain social requirements—the protection of the individual’s life, liberty, and estate from the destructive power of physical force. If that argument is true, it makes no difference whether human nature is the product of a creator or natural selection.

In Dominion, Tom Holland claims that even if Christianity is not required for the justification of the individual’s natural rights, Christianity gets the credit for their discovery. “The evolution of the concept of human rights . . . derived, not from ancient Greece or Rome, but . . . from the canon lawyers of the Middle Ages.” (Holland, Dominion, 401-402) This is disingenuous. It’s true that we can trace the development of the concept of natural rights back to the canonists; indeed, we can trace it all the way back to the Greek and Roman thinkers who Holland fails to note heavily influenced the canonists. But the distinctively Enlightenment concept of rights represented, not a continuation of the Christian tradition, but a radical break with it.

Medieval Christians like Gratian and Ockham did formulate a body of thought under the rubric of “natural rights,” but this was in no way a theory of individual rights sanctioning man’s freedom to pursue his own happiness. On the contrary, their concept of “rights” usually amounted to the obligation to sacrifice yourself in order to obey your Christian duties. According to the medievals, Christianity taught that “The use of all things ought to be common to all.” And so, the Italian canon lawyer Huguccio wrote in the twelfth century, “When it is said that by natural [right] all things are common,” it means that “they are to be shared with the poor in time of need,” and so “we should keep only what is necessary and distribute what is left to the needy.” Looked at another way, a near contemporary wrote, “One who suffers the need of hunger seems to use his [natural] right rather than to plan a theft” when he seizes the property of the rich. (Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights, 70-75) This is a far cry from Locke’s inalienable right to property rooted in man’s productive labor.

Even when rights are treated by the medievals as something closer to “a zone of human autonomy,” as scholar Brian Tierney puts it, what this amounted to was not a recognition of individual sovereignty. It was, instead, better understood as a privilege or entitlement with respect to one’s role in the social hierarchy. The pope had certain rights with respect to the emperor, the emperor had certain rights with respect to the pope, and the people had certain rights given their station as well. But these were no more “individual rights” in the Enlightenment sense than were the protections owed by feudal masters to their serfs. In the end, the medieval perspective on rights was one that Enlightenment thinkers had to overcome—not build upon. (Ben Bayer, “The Revolutionary, Secular Concept of Individual Rights”)

If Enlightenment thinkers invoked God while advancing their essentially secular doctrine of natural rights, even more revealing is how hard they worked to separate religion and politics.

From the moment Christianity assumed political power it used that power to impose religion by force. Augustine had pioneered the moral justification for coercing heretics, arguing that the morality of coercion depends on who is coercing whom and why: “[T]here is an unjust persecution,” he wrote, “which the wicked inflict on the Church of Christ, and . . . a just persecution which the Church of Christ inflicts on the wicked.” Christ himself is the model here. Did he not, after all, blind Paul in order to convert him? “It is a wonderful thing how [Paul] who came to the gospel under the compulsion of bodily suffering labored more in the gospel than all the others who were called by words alone.” (Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West, 30-31)

Christian persecution would reach fever pitch in the aftermath of the Reformation. Calvin ordered Michael Servetus to be put on trial for denying the Trinity, and Servetus was burned alive. In Scotland, Thomas Aikenhead was hanged for his Deist beliefs. In France, the Huguenots were subject to systematic torture and terror. Well into the Enlightenment, Diderot was locked away in the Vincennes fortress for challenging religious ideas. (Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West, 96; Robertson, The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 92-104; Curran, Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely, 75-99) Religious intolerance, Turgot observed, had put “daggers into the hands of kings to butcher the people, and in the hands of the people to butcher kings.” (Pagden, The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters, 99)

It was the Enlightenment that challenged the morality and necessity of intolerance. Bayle, Lessing, Voltaire all played their role. But it was Locke who saw most deeply why church and state had to be separate—and it was Jefferson and Madison who built on his analysis and did the most to implement it.

The core of Locke’s analysis focuses on the respective purposes of state and church. “I esteem it above all things necessary,” he writes, “to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion, and to settle the bounds that lie between the one and the other.” (Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, 18) Religion, he argues, aims at man’s eternal salvation—civil government aims at his flourishing on earth. Eternal salvation concerns a man’s inner convictions and moral behavior—flourishing on earth requires a government that secures the individual’s natural rights to life, liberty, and property. Governments use force to restrain and punish those who disturb the security that civil society requires—but physical force cannot lead men to religious truth. “[T]rue and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind,” which “cannot be compelled to the belief of any thing by outward force.” (Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, 20) Given these facts, the state must take no notice of a man’s religious ideas—and churches must rely on persuasion and voluntary association, not political power, to achieve their ends.

Locke does, however, admit of an exception. “[N]o opinions contrary to human society, or to those moral rules which are necessary to the preservation of civil society, are to be tolerated by the magistrate.” (Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, 61) For Locke, this meant that neither Catholicism nor atheism were to be protected since the Catholic’s loyalties lie with the Pope rather than the magistrate and the atheist is unable to make the binding promises and oaths “which are the bonds of human society.” (Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, 61-64)

Reflecting on Locke’s Letter, Thomas Jefferson would say, in notes to himself, “It was a great thing to go so far” as Locke did in protecting intellectual freedom, “but where he stopped short, we may go on.” (Muñoz, God and the Founders, 91) Jefferson and his friend James Madison would lead the charge in America of building a government committed to the inviolability of man’s mind and to a “wall of separation between Church and State.” (Muñoz, God and the Founders, 77)

Jefferson would outline his understanding of religious freedom in a 1777 draft of a bill for establishing religious freedom in Virginia; Madison would outline his in a short declaration that helped lead to Virginia ultimately passing Jefferson’s bill, his 1785 “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments.” Both statements hew close to Locke’s arguments, but with this difference: they no longer speak in terms of a government “tolerating” religious sects, but of an inalienable right to religious freedom that safeguards not only Protestant sects, but Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and atheists. In Madison’s formulation, “Religion is wholly exempt from [civil society’s] cognizance.” (Madison, “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments”) Government, they held, must neither hinder nor promote religion.

Jefferson and Madison were not always consistent in implementing their principles. Jefferson, for example, signed off on treaties with Native American tribes that supported payments to “propagate the Gospel among the Heathen,” and Madison reluctantly acceded to Congress’s demands by issuing four presidential proclamations of national days of prayer and thanksgiving. (Boston, Why the Religious Right is Wrong about Separation of Church and State, 79; Muñoz, God and the Founders, 42)

Such contradictions do not erase the fact that Jefferson, Madison, and the other Founders fought for and achieved something unprecedented: a government committed to the principle of, in Madison’s words, “the total separation of the Church from the State”—most notably by crafting a Constitution that deliberately and conspicuously omitted any mention of God or of Christianity. (Madison, Letter to Robert Walsh, Jr., March 2, 1819) Indeed, the Constitution’s only mention of religion came in Article 6, which asserted that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Many contemporaries balked, both at the disavowal of religious tests and the broader failure to mention God, leading to some of the most ferocious attacks on the proposed Constitution during the ratification debates. One New York paper warned that Article 6 would open up political office to anti-slavery Quakers “who will make the blacks saucy.” Others accused the authors of the Constitution of being Deists or worse. But the Constitution was ratified and all of the proposals to add Christian language to the document were rejected. (Kramnick and Moore, The Godless Constitution, 33-37)

“[T]he government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,” declared a 1797 treaty signed by John Adams. (Tripoli Treaty) As Adams wrote elsewhere, the United States is “the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature,” derived not from “the inspiration of Heaven” but “contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.” (Adams, The Works of John Adams Vol. 4, 145)

This was not to say that the Founders were irreligious. Revolutionaries like Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Jay, and Roger Sherman were traditional (post-Enlightenment) Christians. John Adams, James Madison, Gouverneur Morris, and James Wilson were heterodox in different ways, while Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine were clear-cut Deists. George Washington was notoriously tight-lipped about his own convictions, though he seems to have been a Deist who believed strongly in a providential god. He could seldom be found in church—and then never on his knees. (Muñoz, God and the Founders, 77) This was hardly an early version of the religious right, but nor was the United States founded by anti-religious crusaders.

All of the Founders, even the Deists among them, believed that a free society, though it should not be ruled by religion, cannot thrive without a moral citizenry—and that a moral citizenry requires religion. “Tis substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government,” Washington said in his farewell address. And so “let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” (Washington, Farewell Address) John Adams—the same John Adams who endorsed the proposition that America was not a Christian nation—put it more bluntly: “Without religion, this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company, I mean Hell.” (Meacham, American Gospel, 28)

Such views were understandable in a world where religion seemed to be the only source of morality—and certainly the primary source of moral instruction for the masses. They were also understandable given the sea change the Enlightenment had wrought in religion: it was not the Christianity of Augustine the Founders had in mind when they praised religion, but the mild mannered Protestantism that prevailed in the eighteenth century America—a Protestantism that generally praised reason, praised work, looked askance at the doctrine of Original Sin, and saw dignity in the individual’s earthly well-being.

But the Founding Fathers were wrong. The nation they had created was based on Enlightenment ideals, and what was needed was a morality that justified and nourished those ideals. They had forged a system based on reason, productive achievement, and the pursuit of happiness. To secure their political project, what was needed was a morality of rational self-interest—a pro-self morality that could be defended on purely secular grounds. Such a morality would justify their project by demonstrating that a political system that unleashed the pursuit of happiness was good. It would nourish the system by teaching men that their interests were to be sought, not in plunder and power, but in thought, production, voluntary cooperation, and peaceful trade. But no philosopher stepped forward during the Enlightenment to offer one.

Nevertheless, the Founding Fathers had created a nation committed to the Enlightenment’s earthly ideals—the result would be an era of human flourishing unlike any the world had ever seen.