A Nation Like No Other (5 page)

Other thinkers developed a parallel belief in the inviolate dignity of man. Citing Judeo-Christian texts, medieval scholars identified the inherent dignity of man as a gift from God. Because the universality of God's gift required the same responsibility of everyone, this reasoning implied all men were equal in God's eyes—a revolutionary doctrine that inspired challenges to the authority of Church prelates and state officials alike.

Drawing on these currents, the English philosopher John Locke devised theories that would strongly influence America's Founders. Locke
argued against the ideas of fellow Englishman Thomas Hobbes, who insisted it was man's natural instinct to reject the dignity of his fellow man. This instinct, Hobbes argued, reduced life to a brutish, anarchic “state of nature” that can only be avoided by ceding individual rights to an immensely powerful central authority—a so-called “Leviathan.” For Locke, however, individuals in the “state of nature” were sovereign and equal under God, and therefore dignified. Locke observes:

Locke believed man's inherent reason forestalled the onset of a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” yet he acknowledged that reason, by leaving man free to do good or ill, made an individual's “life, liberty, and property” insecure. To correct for that insecurity, individuals can willingly band together to create a society that secures rights for mutual benefit.

According to Locke's doctrine of consent, the transfer of power from individuals to a state or society is conditional and incomplete. Man's natural freedom, and his right to life and liberty, are God-given and cannot be ceded even willingly because they are not his to give—in other words, these rights are “unalienable.” Locke argued,

Crucially, Locke maintained that the social contract, as it was formed willingly, can be dissolved freely when the government no longer abides by its terms.

French philosophes such as Montesquieu, Diderot, and Voltaire further refined the notion of personal sovereignty and popular sovereignty, as did the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. The Founders distilled all these disparate influences into a “liberal philosophy” that emphasized the personal sovereignty and dignity of the individual. As Bailyn explains, “Borrowing from more original thinkers, they were often, in their own time and after, dismissed as mere popularizers. Their key concepts—natural rights, the contractual basis of society and government, the uniqueness of England's liberty preserving ‘mixed' constitution—were commonplace of liberal thought at the time.”
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Though commonplace at the time, these ideas were expressed in the Declaration of Independence with such clarity and conviction that the
document would give birth not only to a country, but to an ethos that, to this very day, resonates throughout the world.

Though they regarded themselves as British, the Founders were conscious of their special status in the New World. They were the progeny of refugees, immigrants, utopians, and frontiersmen, living free from many of the ancient artifices and institutions of Europe, with the opportunity to import social structures or invent their own. For them, the intuitive claims of history could be reasoned and tested against rival notions before being accepted. America in effect became a great laboratory for experimentation.

The initial colonists' successes and failures gave rise to an American way of thinking about how to confront challenges, adapt, survive, and thrive. Alongside its European philosophical influences, the Declaration of Independence also reflected the colonists' unique struggles and the resulting worldview that affirmed self-reliance and individual responsibility in the face of utterly new circumstances.

The first English settlement in the American colonies was an abject failure, providing a valuable lesson for future efforts. The settlement at Roanoke under Sir Walter Raleigh in the 1580s had confused aims, feuding leaders, and unprepared participants. Furthermore, as historian Paul Johnson notes, Roanoke “had no religious dimension ... [no] God-fearing, prayerful men”
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—a crucial quality that infused other, successful settlements with a common purpose. Amidst debilitating infighting, the expedition's fleet simply sailed off without the colonists. War with Spain and the invasion of the Spanish Armada prevented their re-supply, and the colonists vanished before a return expedition arrived.

The Founding Fathers took inspiration from the hard-won success of the two subsequent English colonies in the New World, at Jamestown and Plymouth Plantation. Although the two colonies had different aims, comprising capitalist adventurers and Christian idealists, respectively, both groups were convinced that England, like Biblical Israel, was
endowed with a special destiny by God—and as new Israelites, the settlers sought out their own land of milk and honey. Moreover, both settlements overcame initial misdirection from London and developed similar traditions and values emphasizing industriousness, self-reliance, and Godliness. These traits grew into a new, American worldview that found expression in America's founding documents.

The Virginia Company of London founded the colony of Jamestown on the James River in Virginia in 1607. The initial financing was entirely from private investors, with settlers promised freehold land in return for seven years of communal labor for the colony. When the first settlers landed, they quickly built a church, signaling their common purpose.

The harsh environment and dwindling supplies took a heavy toll on the settlers, who became increasingly listless and undisciplined. Unprepared for the physical hardships and demotivated by the requirement for communal labor, many of them moved elsewhere. The deteriorating situation was first reversed when John Smith, who had been elected by popular vote to head the Jamestown Council, announced new work rules. Smith decreed:

Smith's order, alluding to the Biblical passage 2 Thessalonians 3:10, repudiated the colony's initial feudal structure under which “high-born” colonists had refused to perform much manual labor. It was a profoundly democratic directive and a dramatic breakthrough for equality, as each man was expected to contribute or perish.

But John Smith was injured and had to return to England in 1609, after only eighteen months in Virginia. Once he departed, conflict with the local Indians combined with demotivating work rules led to a
“starving time” during the winter of 1609–1610 that took the lives of all but sixty of the 500 colonists.

The colony was revived when a new “high marshal,” Sir Thomas Dale, arrived in 1611 and encouraged individual initiative by establishing private property rights to individual plots of land. Several years later another settler, John Rolfe, pioneered tobacco cultivation, setting the colony on the road to prosperity. In 1619, Jamestown adopted governance on republican principles with a representative and responsible “House of Burgesses” that met in the Jamestown church. Emphasizing the rule of law and a self-governing ethic, the colony affirmed unique principles of liberal governance that dramatically differentiated it from Europe.

As the Jamestown settlers struggled against the elements, the Pilgrims—a congregation of dissenters and separatists from the Church of England—received a charter to establish their own foothold in America. In 1620, the Pilgrim fathers penned an early draft of the American Creed while en route to the New World on the
Mayflower
. Having veered off-course from their destination in Virginia, some of the would-be colonists asserted the change-of-course had voided the king's charter, necessitating a new contract. In the Mayflower Compact, the Pilgrims mutually agreed to a social contract binding themselves together under God. Plymouth Colony's governor, William Bradford, preserved the pledge:

Wholly independent of the Jamestown colony, the Pilgrims established their settlement in Plymouth, Massachusetts, on democratic and egalitarian principles and the rule of law. Their framework set a precedent for future frontier agreements and was a radical departure from the European model, as no institutions but God and king preceded their compact.

The Plymouth Pilgrims had much in common with the settlers in Virginia, but they departed from the Jamestown model in a crucial respect: their efforts would be dedicated to glorifying God. To the Plymouth settlers, the colony would represent an uncorrupted ideal, serving as an example to the decadent, fallen, and unreformed. Their compact and ensuing laws were modeled not on the principles of English liberties, but on the covenant between God and the Israelites.

The radical principles of governance based on consent and equality boded well for the colony. But as in Jamestown, the Pilgrims learned the hard way that without the proper incentives for work even a project comprised of godly men was doomed. Amidst poor harvests and spreading unrest, William Bradford scrapped the communal living and work rules, which had been imposed by the Virginia Company in London, and granted private freehold title to land directly to family units. The colonists' natural industriousness and ingenuity quickly re-emerged.

The leader of the follow-on Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, also saw his project as a fundamentally redemptive one, an opportunity to start the world anew in the unspoiled wilderness. Plymouth Plantation, like Jamestown, enjoyed de facto self-government through distance and circumstance,
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but the colony's founders managed to get a charter approved in 1629 that required no oversight meetings in London, giving the Massachusetts Bay Colony great legal flexibility. The self-governing principle, along republican and religious lines, clearly imbued the Bay Colony, which Winthrop, drawing from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount,
proclaimed to be “as a City upon a Hill,” adding “The eyes of all people are upon us.” In Winthrop's terms, America was an exemplar burdened with history's judgment. The American Creed was coming into focus as a principled exception to European models of governance.

Despite their democratic procedures, neither Plymouth Plantation nor the Bay Colony in Boston were bastions of liberty. Pilgrim leaders governed Plymouth like a theocratic dictatorship, and the Bay Colony banished Quakers and other religious dissenters.

One dissenter expelled from the Bay Colony was the Baptist Roger Williams, who later established a separate colony in Rhode Island that affirmed the radical precept of religious liberty. Along the Williams model, more colonies based on religious tolerance emerged in British North America, such as Lord Baltimore's Catholic haven in Maryland (founded in 1634) and William Penn's Quaker-led colony in Pennsylvania (founded in 1682). All the while, the frontier beckoned liberty-seeking pioneers, offering a new social contract along less rigid lines of religious or political control. The space of the New World, as much as political and religious doctrine, made America home to liberty.

Notably, these experiments in self-government preceded the high-minded theories of Rousseau, Locke, and Hobbes. Locke, whose ideas would ring through the Declaration of Independence, was himself strongly influenced by the American colonial experience in crafting his ideas on the social contract and natural liberty.
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Remarkably, America helped to spread ideas of liberty far before its independence.