History Of American Liberty - Essay Example

 History Of American Liberty When viewed from a distance American history has been the story of a slow, progressive expansion of freedom and opportunity for all citizens. The words that Thomas Jefferson penned in the Declaration of Independence at the moment that the old established colonies became a new established nation – that all men are created equal and have rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – have largely guided the nation’s development and have slowly been realized to an ever greater degree. However, the story has been one of uneven and incomplete progress. In no period of history has the expansion of freedom come all at once or without cost. Often the cost of freedom extended to one group of people has been paid by some other group within society. This is clear when considering the period of the nation’s early development, from roughly 1600 to the mid-1800s. The story of freedom’s expansion during this period was messy and conflict-ridden. In this brief paper, several of the most important conflicts between various groups for the right to claim expanding freedom will be reviewed and analyzed in order to comment on the nature of American freedom in the colonial and antebellum periods. The earliest settlers in the new colonies came to practice a way of life that was denied to them in their homeland. They wanted to experience religious freedom and the variety of political freedoms that were necessary in order to achieve their dream of living in community with each other without worry of persecution (Foner 47-50). This guiding principle, however, had inner conflicts such as the need to suppress certain kinds of dissent within their own communities, a system of life that was paternalistic in its treatment of women and even more importantly a need to survive the harsh life in the new environments they found themselves in (Foner 51-56). In attending to all of these needs, the colonialists met the native populations who were already here when they arrived with curiosity at first and later with a kind of malevolent manipulation. Their own need for land and safety drove them to treat the Native Americans as enemies and they began a process of slowly pushing the Native Americans out as they expanded their own territories westward (Foner 78-80). This process went on throughout the period, culminating in the Jacksonian era with an official government policy of “Indian removal” (Foner 151-155, 370-371). The drive to increase religious freedom and promote the establishment of economic independence therefore led to a horrible discrimination against another already established group in the new territory that would eventually make up the nation. The rights of Native Americans to their own independence autonomy were continually infringed upon even as the new colonists sought to increase their own freedoms. The tragic story of the treatment of native populations is equaled, perhaps, only by the story of the treatment of the black slave populations (Foner 130-132, 220-223, 400-408). When the Constitution was written, the question of the status of slaves was raised and dealt with through a “compromise” that treated each slave as three-fifths of a human being (Foner 253). This was done in order to allow the Southern planter society to achieve roughly equal representational proportions with the Northern industrial society. The issue of the extension of voting parity so that all free white men in the society would have roughly the same legal status within the political system was an important step toward a free and equal society, but it came at the cost of treating slaves as less than human (Foner 400-408). In both the legal realm and the cultural approach to slaves, the conflicts of expanding the rights of one group on the backs of another established a terrible legacy that continued through the Civil War which was fought eventually to right some of these wrongs, and into the Reconstruction period that brought the nation out of the war. Although eventually blacks were freed and their legal status as citizens granted, the cultural attitudes that permitted the stripping of their freedoms in the first place were longer lasting and proved difficult to alter (Foner 514-523). Another group which often paid for the expansion of freedoms by one group with the contraction of their own was women. The treatment of women was a complicated issue, because it involved religious justification through attitudes that seemed to promote and protect women but actually had the effect of keeping them under lock and key in the home (Foner 145-147, 228-233). Additionally, it involved economic necessities as the industrial revolution brought about changes in the family that caused new divisions of labor within the home, so that men experienced new economic freedoms and expectations in the public realm while women were relegated to domestic duties (Foner 212-219, 319-329). The notion that women ought to have the same rights to vote, for example, that men did came later in American history, as the early period of the nation’s founding saw women being treated essentially as part and parcel of the interests of the men in their lives (Foner 445-447). While middle class women did experience new freedoms such as the right to protest within certain religious revivalist movements as well as the Abolition movement (Foner 424-433), the question of whether Jefferson’s words regarding men’s equality also included women was a question that was not raised in a feminine voice until the later 1800s. The story of America’s messy struggle with freedoms during it early history also includes conflicts involving immigrants, who were discriminated against upon arrival and often forced by economic necessity to move west into the new wilds to seek their well-being (Foner 353-357). Their story, like the stories of other groups, shows that the competing interests of various factions within society for expanded freedoms was a story of freedom’s conflict as well as freedom’s progress. In conclusion, the extension of freedoms during the nation’s early history was certainly not with conflict or contradiction. While Jefferson’s words did act as a distant guide, whether it be the case of Native American populations suffering at the hands of the Puritans who came to the new world to practice their religion freely, or the slave populations having their freedom and dignity stripped by whites who were establishing an economic well-being and political ideology consistent with their interpretations of independence, the road to realization for those words was paved with many group’s sacrifice. Reference Foner, Eric. Give Me Liberty, An American History, Volume 1, 2nd Seagull Edition. New York: WW Norton, 2004. Read More