Who Gets to Use the Word Liberty?

LECTURE LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. Explain how the imperial crisis widened political participation while preserving major inequalities.

2. Compare the meanings of liberty advanced by patriots, loyalists, neutrals, artisans, tenants, women, enslaved people, and Indigenous nations.

3. Analyze how subordinated groups appropriated revolutionary language for purposes patriot leaders did not control.

4. Evaluate the relationship between universal political language and restricted political membership.

5. Reject a simple patriot-versus-loyalist binary in favor of a spectrum of allegiance, neutrality, and local interest.

Introductory Framing

The imperial crisis made liberty one of the most powerful words in British America, but it did not give the word a single meaning. Patriot leaders invoked the rights of Englishmen, consent, property, and resistance to arbitrary power. Loyalists could invoke liberty as protection from crowd coercion. Tenants used it against landlords, settlers against proprietors, artisans against gentlemen, women through household politics, and enslaved people against masters. The language was contagious because it was general enough to travel beyond the circumstances in which elites first deployed it.

This lecture should not treat women, enslaved people, loyalists, and tenants as supplementary diversity topics. They reveal the central historical problem: political language cannot be perfectly controlled by the people who popularize it. Once liberty became a standard by which authority was judged, groups excluded from formal power could expose contradictions between patriot principle and colonial practice.

Historiography has moved from elite ideology toward a wider and more contested Revolution. Bernard Bailyn demonstrated the coherence of opposition thought; Gordon Wood emphasized republican transformation; Gary Nash, Alfred Young, and Woody Holton recovered popular and material conflicts; Maya Jasanoff and Travis Glasson complicated allegiance; Vincent Carretta and Manisha Sinha placed Black writers and antislavery action within the revolutionary era; Kathleen DuVal and Alan Taylor restored continental and Indigenous perspectives. The most productive synthesis preserves the power of ideas while asking who could use them, against whom, and with what consequences.

Liberty Was a Political Grammar, Not a Fixed Program

Rights of Englishmen and Universal Language

Early colonial resistance usually appealed to the British constitution rather than to independence. Colonists claimed rights inherited as English subjects: consent to taxation, trial by jury, security of property, and protection from arbitrary power. This language could be conservative because it defended established provincial practices. It could also become radical when speakers moved from historical rights to natural rights possessed by all human beings.

The transition was neither linear nor complete. A patriot might condemn parliamentary taxation as slavery while enslaving laborers. A merchant might defend property rights while supporting destruction of East India Company tea. A tenant might hear attacks on arbitrary power and apply them to a landlord. Revolutionary language worked as a grammar: it supplied terms and relationships through which different groups articulated grievances, but it did not prescribe one social settlement.

Ideology and Experience

Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins remains indispensable because it showed that colonists' fears of corruption and conspiracy were not rhetorical camouflage. Opposition writers taught them to interpret standing armies, placemen, taxes, and executive patronage as connected threats to liberty. Social historians rightly criticized accounts that allowed printed ideas to eclipse material conflict. The best approach is not to choose ideology or interest. People used inherited language to understand experiences of taxation, debt, tenancy, military occupation, racial slavery, and market change.

Alan Taylor's continental synthesis is valuable because it makes liberty geographically uneven. In seaports it could mean constitutional resistance and consumer discipline. In the backcountry it might mean access to land or protection from corrupt courts. For Native nations, colonial liberty frequently meant settler expansion. The same language could liberate one group while threatening another.

Analytical Significance

Patriots, Loyalists, and the People in Between

Allegiance Was Contingent

The binary division between patriots and loyalists became sharper after war began, but earlier allegiances were fluid. Many people opposed particular parliamentary measures while rejecting independence. Others feared imperial reform but feared popular committees more. Religious belief, ethnicity, family ties, trade, local rivalries, military occupation, and calculations of safety influenced political choice. Position could change as the conflict changed.

Maya Jasanoff's Liberty's Exiles follows loyalists displaced by the Revolution and reveals their attachment to different versions of British liberty. Kathleen DuVal demonstrates that many people outside the thirteen rebelling colonies pursued independence from local enemies rather than independence from Britain. Travis Glasson's 2025 study Nobody Men places neutrality at the center. His work is a timely warning against repeating precise patriotic percentages as if allegiance were stable, measurable, and mutually exclusive.

Liberty from the Crowd

Loyalists and moderates could understand liberty as security of conscience, speech, property, and personal safety against patriot enforcement. Committees publicized names, demanded recantations, regulated trade, and pressured inhabitants to sign associations. From the patriot perspective, such discipline defended a community under attack. From the perspective of a dissenter, it could resemble the arbitrary power patriots condemned.

The colonies that did not rebel clarify the point. Nova Scotia, Quebec, Jamaica, Barbados, and other British possessions experienced imperial rule but possessed different demographic, military, economic, and political structures. A large enslaved majority in the Caribbean made white colonists dependent on British troops. Quebec's Catholic population received protections under the Quebec Act. Nova Scotia's naval presence and recent settlement patterns limited insurgent organization. Tax grievances did not automatically produce revolution.

Analytical Significance

Liberty against Colonial Elites

Artisans and Gentlemen

Urban resistance depended on artisans, sailors, laborers, apprentices, and small shopkeepers, but elite patriots often wanted to mobilize popular force without surrendering leadership. Crowd actions against stamp officers and importers increased the political visibility of people excluded from provincial assemblies. Artisans could claim that public virtue and sacrifice, not inherited gentility, entitled them to speak for the community.

Alfred Young's work on George Robert Twelves Hewes illustrates how ordinary participants later remembered the Revolution as a transformation in personal dignity. Gary Nash and Benjamin Carp show that this political awakening emerged from urban social structures rather than from ideology alone. Yet popular mobilization did not erase hierarchy. Elite merchants and lawyers remained central organizers, and many artisans defended property and racial privilege even as they challenged deference.

Tenants, Proprietors, and Regulators

In the Hudson Valley, tenants resisted large manorial landlords. In the area that became Vermont, settlers challenged New York proprietors. Regulators in the Carolinas protested fees, taxes, court practices, underrepresentation, and elite corruption, though the movements in South and North Carolina differed in leadership and outcome. These conflicts did not simply imitate resistance to Parliament; many predated it. The imperial crisis gave them a broader vocabulary and sometimes weakened authorities that had contained them.

The North Carolina Regulator movement ended in military defeat at Alamance in 1771, where colonial militia suppressed backcountry protesters. Several leaders who later opposed Britain had defended provincial authority against the Regulators. This episode prevents a simple equation of patriotism with democracy. Colonial elites could condemn metropolitan power while using coercion against local challengers.

Analytical Significance

Women and the Expansion of Political Action

Household Labor and Consumer Discipline

Women lacked formal representation, yet nonimportation could not function without their labor and cooperation. Decisions about tea, textiles, mourning dress, household production, and social consumption became politically charged. Public spinning gatherings and homespun symbolism made women visible as participants in resistance while preserving the language of domestic responsibility.

Mary Beth Norton and Carol Berkin helped establish women as central actors in the revolutionary era. Lorri Glover's biography of Eliza Lucas Pinckney further complicates any single category of women's experience. Pinckney was a skilled plantation manager and political observer whose authority rested within a slave society. Women's participation widened political practice, but it did not automatically challenge racial slavery or patriarchal law.

Participation without Citizenship

The boycott created forms of public action that did not require voting. Women could produce substitutes, sign or support agreements, organize relief, transmit information, and police household behavior. Their participation exposed the artificiality of defining politics solely through officeholding. Yet patriot rhetoric often praised women precisely for self-sacrifice within traditional gender roles.

The consequence was ambiguous. Revolutionary mobilization demonstrated women's political competence, but the new states did not generally establish equal political rights. Rosemarie Zagarri's later concept of revolutionary backlash is useful for understanding how an era of expanded discussion could be followed by renewed restrictions. The prewar boycott was therefore an opening in political practice, not a completed emancipation.

Analytical Significance

Black Freedom, Indigenous Sovereignty, and the Patriot Contradiction

Enslaved People Hear Liberty

In Charleston in 1765, enslaved people reportedly staged their own procession after observing the Sons of Liberty. Henry Laurens insisted that they misunderstood the slogan. His reaction reveals the deeper problem: slaveholders wanted liberty to describe a constitutional relationship among British subjects, while enslaved people could apply it to physical bondage. Boston-area petitions in the 1770s similarly joined natural rights, Christian language, and demands for freedom.

Phillis Wheatley made the contradiction explicit. Her education and literary success were exceptional, but her antislavery argument was not simply borrowed from white patriots. She joined biblical deliverance, natural rights, and personal experience. Vincent Carretta's scholarship recovers her as an active author who pursued publication and freedom rather than as a passive prodigy.

David Waldstreicher's 2023 reassessment strengthens this interpretation by treating Wheatley not merely as an exceptional witness but as a deliberate participant in revolutionary print culture. Reading her poems, correspondence, publication choices, and transatlantic reception together, he shows how she transformed classical, Christian, and revolutionary materials into politically charged arguments about freedom that many white readers failed—or chose not—to recognize.

Primary Evidence: Phillis Wheatley to Samson Occom

Wheatley did more than accuse individual masters of hypocrisy. She universalized the love of freedom and claimed interpretive authority over revolutionary language. The reference to modern Egyptians converted the Exodus into an indictment of American slavery. Her argument shows why the contagion metaphor is apt: a principle proclaimed against Parliament could become a claim against masters.

War intensified these possibilities. Lord Dunmore's proclamation of November 1775 offered freedom to enslaved men belonging to rebels who joined British forces. The offer was limited, military, and self-interested; it did not abolish slavery or apply to loyalist-owned people. Nevertheless, it made the connection between imperial allegiance and emancipation concrete. Thousands of enslaved people later pursued freedom through British lines, while others served patriot forces or used wartime disruption to escape.

Indigenous Liberty and Settler Freedom

Native nations confronted a different contradiction. Colonial claims to liberty often included freedom to settle western land. From an Indigenous perspective, that freedom meant invasion. The Royal Proclamation and later British alliances could make the Crown appear a possible restraint on settler expansion, even though British policy was inconsistent and frequently violent.

Kathleen DuVal and Alan Taylor emphasize that the Revolution did not present every people with the same choice. Native nations evaluated British, patriot, Spanish, and local threats according to their own sovereignty. The patriot nation that emerged from the conflict expanded claims to the continent, making Indigenous dispossession part of the Revolution's history rather than a later deviation from it.

Analytical Significance

Closing Synthesis

The contagion of liberty was not a smooth expansion of one American ideal. It was a multiplication of claims. Patriots used liberty against Parliament; loyalists used it against committees; artisans used it against deference; tenants and Regulators used it against local elites; women acted through household and market politics; enslaved people used it against masters; Native nations defended sovereignty against settler expansion. These claims overlapped, but they also collided.

The historiographical challenge is to preserve the genuine intellectual force of revolutionary language without allowing elite declarations to stand for the experience of everyone. Bailyn and Wood explain why ideas mattered. Nash, Young, and Holton show the social conflicts those ideas entered. Jasanoff and Glasson complicate allegiance. Carretta, Sinha, DuVal, and Taylor reveal how Black and Indigenous struggles altered the meaning of the era. No single interpretation replaces the others; together they show a Revolution whose political vocabulary exceeded its institutional settlement.

For classroom purposes, the durable conclusion is that universal language and political inclusion are not the same thing. A society can proclaim a principle broadly while distributing the power to invoke it unevenly. The open question is whether revolutionary language should be judged chiefly by the exclusions of those who first proclaimed it, by the institutions they created, or by the later claims that excluded people were able to make in its name.

Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation

Classic Ideological Interpretation

Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged ed. (1992; originally 1967). Publisher/source

Demonstrates the coherence of colonial opposition thought and the importance of fears concerning corruption, conspiracy, and arbitrary power. It remains the necessary starting point even when supplemented by social and continental history.

Popular Revolution

Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (2005). Publisher/source

Centers artisans, enslaved people, women, Native peoples, and other actors often marginalized in founder-centered accounts. Particularly useful for the lecture's emphasis on contested ownership of revolutionary language.

Material and Social Conflict

Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (1999). Publisher/source

Argues that elite Virginians acted within pressures created by Native resistance, debt, enslaved people, and ordinary farmers. It offers a strong challenge to purely ideological explanations, though some claims remain debated.

Loyalists and Empire

Maya Jasanoff, Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (2011). Publisher/source

Follows loyalist refugees throughout the British Empire and shows that loyalism could carry its own understanding of liberty, reform, and imperial belonging.

Black Intellectual History

Vincent Carretta, Phillis Wheatley Peters: Biography of a Genius in Bondage, rev. ed. (2023; originally 2011). Publisher/source

The revised documentary biography incorporates significant discoveries about Wheatley's education, affiliations, publications, family life, and proposed second volume while retaining close attention to the surviving evidence.

Recent Wheatley Reassessment

David Waldstreicher, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys through American Slavery and Independence (2023). Publisher/source

Reconstructs Wheatley as a strategic intellectual actor in Revolutionary-era print culture and places her poetry at the center of the political and racial history of the Revolution.

Primary Source Edition

Phillis Wheatley, ‘Letter to Samson Occom’ (1774), in Julia Jorati, ed., Slavery in Early Modern Philosophy 1765–1800: Essential Readings (2026), 60–61. Publisher/source

A recent scholarly edition that highlights Wheatley's insistence that civil and religious liberty are inseparable and clarifies the letter's intervention in contemporary defenses of enslavement.

Continental Interpretation

Kathleen DuVal, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (2015). Publisher/source

Reorients the Revolution through the Gulf Coast and interior, where Indigenous nations, enslaved people, loyalists, and imperial rivals pursued different kinds of independence.

Broad Synthesis

Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 (2016). Publisher/source

A wide-ranging synthesis that integrates the thirteen colonies into continental warfare, slavery, Native politics, loyalism, and state formation. Especially useful for connecting liberty to expansion and coercion.

Recent Scholarship

Travis Glasson, Nobody Men: Neutrality, Loyalties, and Family in the American Revolution (2025). Publisher/source

Uses the Cruger family to recover people who tried to avoid a binary patriot-loyalist choice. It updates the historiography by treating neutrality as an active, difficult, and historically consequential position.

Gender and Revolution

Lorri Glover, Eliza Lucas Pinckney: An Independent Woman in the Age of Revolution (2020). Publisher/source

A biography that demonstrates women's managerial, intellectual, and political agency while keeping plantation slavery central. It provides a useful counterpoint to accounts focused only on boycott participation.