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The aspiration to freedom—or, perhaps better, the dream of freedom—has cut a broad swath through the history of western civilization, beginning with the world of the Old Testament and the Jews’ exodus from bondage in Egypt.  The meaning of freedom throughout these many centuries and among these many different peoples remains elusive.  Too many of us, often for admirable reasons, project our modern vision of freedom back throughout all of history on the facile assumption that all other peoples have wanted what we claim for ourselves as a God-given—increasingly an innate—right. The kernel of truth in this view is no more complicated than the psychological truism that none of us wants to be bossed, and those that do are frequently motivated by feelings and instincts that I have no intention of exploring here.  To borrow a common phrase, “We do not want to go there,” and if I am slighting those who do, I leave them to their own resources.

The ubiquity of an instinctive human yearning for freedom has not taken a single, consistent form, and only in recent times has it taken a systematic political form at all.  The idea of freedom as an individual, political right to which each person is innately entitled is not universal.  It arose in a specific historical epoch in association with the great revolutions that successively swept over the western world, securing an expanding panoply of rights for those viewed as full members of the society—usually propertied white men, although even that rule had a dramatic exception in the Haitian Revolution.  Because of the theory in which the ideal of individual rights was grounded, its restriction of freedom’s benefits to a specific group was inherently unstable.  The defense of the special claims of propertied—and almost always white—men contravened the fundamental axiom of the theory, namely the equality of individuals as units of cognition and sovereignty. The invocation of specific attributes of individuals denied their theoretical interchangeability and reintroduced traditional criteria, notably the importance of particularistic characteristics such as sex or race. It also could be taken to challenge all residual justifications for hierarchy, although until the 1960s, it was generally taken to mean equal access to the preeminent slogan of the French Revolution—career open to talent—rather than equality of condition. 

Ever since the Age of Revolution, the dream of reconciling freedom and equality has tantalized idealists and utopians but has eluded realization. It has found its most loyal advocates among radicals, notably among communists and feminists, although since the nineteen sixties, demands to enforce equality have proliferated.  The expansion in demand has, as critics have been quick to point out, invariably come at the expense of freedom, or, to put it differently, the expanded freedom of some almost invariably comes at the price of restricted freedom for others.

The tension between freedom and equality emerged during the Age of Revolution, and the prescient saw the problems from the start.  To many, the existence of slavery most clearly exposed the hypocrisy of defending liberty at the expense of equality.  During the French Revolution, the Girondins, whom many regarded as dangerously radical, defended slavery by assimilating slaves to property and insisting upon the individual’s freedom to dispose of his—and occasionally her—property as he saw fit. In contrast, the Montagnards, under the leadership of Robespierre, insisted that no Frenchman could be truly free as long as slavery was tolerated in any of France’s territories, including the sugar-rich island of St. Domingue.  Significantly, the Girondins favored an open and representative form of government while the Mountain favored the draconian centralization of power famously known as “the Terror.”  In France, in the short run, the Mountain triumphed over the Gironde, executing an impressive number of dissenters along the way.  The triumph was short-lived, and the struggles over how to exercise power in the newly liberated French “nation” rapidly ended in Napoleon’s Consulat and Empire.  In the French context, radical democracy proved too fragile a plant to survive the prevailing winds. 

Slavery was not an issue in France proper, and the dramatic inequality in social condition could be more or less peacefully absorbed within the system of social classes that replaced the ancient régime system of estates.  With the passage of time, it has become possible for historians virtually to erase the significance of that transition, although many acute observers—at the time and since—have recognized it as among the most momentous in the history of the western world.  Today, the transition from estates to classes appears almost inconsequential to many, although few of those who lived through those turbulent years would have agreed.  But those who resist the magnitude of that upheaval apparently fail to recognize that it was precisely what made it possible for people to begin to see slavery as the antithesis of freedom and consequently to see the struggle against slavery as the struggle for both freedom and equality.  The French revolution against a legally sanctioned traditional social structure effectively “grannied”—Zora Neale Hurston’s expression for midwifery—the campaigns for emancipation and abolition that would dominate colonies and former colonies, including the fledgling United States, throughout much of the nineteenth century.

The articles that frame this issue—Robert Paquette’s on the continuing debate about the Denmark Vesey slave revolt and Sean Wilentz’s on the role of Jeffersonian democracy in the origins of political antislavery—both engage aspects of the struggles over the legitimacy of slavery that would ultimately divide the United States in a war between North and South that determined the development of the modern nation.  Paquette and Wilentz both explore the historical issues with close attention to the ways in which other historians have discussed them.  Both also focus, Wilentz more explicitly, on two of the earliest decisive political conflicts and paved the way to the War: the Missouri Crisis and Nullification. 

Focusing closely on the problem of evidence, which is frequently daunting in the case of slave revolts, Paquette joins a heated scholarly debate over Denmark Vesey that has been unfolding in the pages of The William and Mary Quarterly.  Michael Johnson, a widely respected southern historian, who may be best known for the book, Black Masters, which he co-authored, resurrected the argument that the Vesey revolt was a figment of the white imagination—if not of white paranoia.  There is a delicious irony in Johnson’s position, and especially in the defense and publicization of it in the pages of The Nation by the leftwing historian and journalist Jonathan Weiner.  Traditionally, the intellectual Left, following the lead of the pioneering Communist historian, Herbert Aptheker, has insisted upon the ubiquity of slave revolts.  Their arguments followed the trail Aptheker had blazed in insisting that black slaves actively resisted their enslavement.  They were countering the view of Ulrich B. Phillips and other historians, who presented slaves as Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimas, people who were content in the condition for which they had been intended.

Now Johnson, who has always staunchly opposed the view of slaves as complacent pawns in the hands of their owners, is arguing that what has been taken to be one of the major slave conspiracies in North America never occurred.  The complex arguments may be followed in Paquette’s engrossing article.  Drawing upon a broad and meticulous command of the evidence, he forcefully argues that the revolt unquestionably did occur and that Vesey, a well-educated craftsman, did plan and lead it with an intelligence and determination that gave slaveholding Charlestonians every reason to fear for their safety.  Above all, the revolt, together with the pervasive concern about covert and active resistance, justified their heightened political vigilance and determination to protect slavery as a social system from the interference of northern abolitionists as well as from the natural propensity of the slaves to resist their own enslavement.  The puzzlement remains the revolution in intellectual positions: How do we account for a left-wing historian’s denial of the existence of an important slave revolt and a more conservative historian’s defense of its existence and of the talent and purposefulness of its leader?

Wilentz, in an article that originated as the Christopher Lasch lecture at the 2004 national meeting of The Historical Society, focuses upon the development of political antislavery, arguing, “the triumph of American antislavery marked one of the most extraordinary intellectual as well as political reversals in our history.”  According to Wilentz the extraordinary reversal by which many Americans came to view slavery as aberrant rather than natural—as it had been by most people throughout most of history—did not originate with Abraham Lincoln, or even with the emergence of northern abolition and, subsequently, the organization of the Republican party, but with “the Jeffersonian antislavery legacy” and the “great fragility” of the “second party system.”  Wilentz carefully analyzes the political negotiations and arguments of the various parties in the years before the crisis over the admission of Missouri as a slave state.  Without rejecting the widely-received view that the Republicans eventually emerged as the defenders of free labor, Wilentz expands our understanding of the origins of the Republicans’ political antislavery by insisting on the importance of constitutional and legal debates. 

Wilentz’s argument about Missouri in particular brings us back to the question of freedom and equality by exploring the contributions of Jeffersonian antislavery thought.  For Wilentz, a strong Jeffersonian strand pervades American political throughout the early years of the republic and plays an important role in the discussions over Missouri’s admission as a slave state.  The extension of slavery challenged Jefferson’s claim in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. No small number of slaveholding intellectuals perceived the danger this claim posed to their society—and many also understood the underlying problem of the tension between freedom and equality.  In response, they insisted that the Declaration and the Constitution were separate documents and that the claims of the former were not written into the latter.  Their opponents openly differed and increasingly took the position expressed early in the Missouri debates by Timothy Fuller of Massachusetts, as quoted by Wilentz: “The Declaration of Independence…defines the principle on which our National and State Constitutions are all professedly founded,” namely “that all men are created equal.”

The ideal of individual freedom had deep roots in Christianity, but neither the Bible nor Christian tradition repudiated slavery in the world of Caesar.  The tension between freedom and equality and their extension to all of God’s children would only occur in the next world.  Christian thought nonetheless developed in conjunction with secular thought even when it was in deep conflict with it.  Martin Luther stands as one of the great pioneers in bridging this gap, notably in his insistence on “the freedom of the Christian.”  Bradford Smith offers a fascinating account of the ways in which Reformation thought—and specifically Luther’s—engaged with humanism and thereby with the developments in secular thought.  This engagement, however inadvertently and however much Luther might have deplored the consequences, opened the way to the deepening attention to secular concerns and, eventually, to the abolitionist’s interpretation of Christianity as a call for freedom and equality in the world.

Many political and religious groups continued to resist these tendencies and to defend a very different link between Christianity and politics.  Stanley Payne, in a masterful review of recent work in Spanish history, includes an exploration of some recent studies of the Carlists who attempted to defend an organic traditionalism in which Catholicism explained and supported traditional social relations.  In this perspective, freedom and equality were to be guarded against, primarily because of the threat they could pose to a viable and stable social order.

Jacob Neusner does not directly engage the problem of freedom and equality—in religion or in the world—but his thoughtful discussion of the development of modern Jewish history and studies clearly demonstrates the growing intrusion of secular concerns into an important current in American Jewish thought.  According to Neusner, the modern history of American Judaism began with the work of Jacob R. Marcus, who, during the years immediately following World War II, “wrote and edited the earliest genuinely professional monographs and books in the field.”  In The Dynamics of American Jewish History, Gary Zola has collected eleven of Marcus’ programmatic essays together with essays by prominent scholars on the significance of Marcus’ life and work.  The great originality of Marcus’ effort lay in his decision to focus on the history of American—rather than European or Palestinian—Jews.  His decision effectively established American Jewish history as a professional subject, and he complemented his writing with inaugurating the systematic collection of relevant materials by founding the American Jewish Archives at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of religion in Cincinnati. 

Marcus’ conception of American Jewish history was shaped by his commitment to Reform Judaism, and, in Neusner’s judgment, “drew from historical study what he conceived to be the normative lessons that validated the reform of Judaism embodied by Reform Judaism.”  Marcus thus “cavalierly” dismissed Rabbinic Judaism, insisting that he would “not accept the rules set forth by a handful of farmers in ancient Babylonia.”  Neusner’s dispassion in this assessment is all the more admirable since he himself ranks as one of our foremost scholars of those ancient “farmers” and their more polished Mishnaic successors.  Neusner makes an especially important point when he notes that Marcus had the mind of a reform theologian for whom “the facts of history formed the data of theological reflection.”  In effect, Neusner is suggesting that Marcus established the legitimacy of American Jewish history as a subject by embracing the primacy of secular history over Judaism as a religion.  The proper place of secular concerns in the writing of religious history remains a thorny problem that has surfaced in previous issues of The Journal and cannot cheerfully be dismissed as a simple conflict between reason and faith.  The intrusion of secular imperatives into religion itself overshadows most discussions of religious history and figures as an important dimension of the history itself.

The tension between freedom and equality and the relation of both to religious faith—the relation of this world to the next—remains a vital problem in today’s world.  This issue of The Journal offers a series of perspectives on some of the more pressing issues and invites our readers to reflect on the legacy and influence of this history on the pressing problems that confront us at home and throughout the world. 
 
 

Presumably Professor [Michael] Johnson has a higher estimation of the slaves’ capacities, but his discussion of the weapons question should raise eyebrows.  To substantiate his thesis, he stresses the inability of Charleston’s investigators to uncover any "stockpiled weapons." Testimony from slave witnesses indicated that the rebels intended to arm themselves largely by plundering vulnerable deposits of arms in and around the city.  Professor Johnson dismisses the possibility by noting the inability of most slaves to operate firearms.  But he seems oblivious to several obvious criticisms.  Few of the major slave revolts in the history of the Western hemisphere began with stockpiled weapons.  Stealing weapons to stockpile them would have increased the risks of exposure to authorities.  Slaves in open violent revolt armed themselves initially with makeshift weapons and weapons quickly liberated from places whites were known to have stashes.  Professor Johnson cleverly shifts the argument from arms to firearms, but testimony from co-conspirators revealed that Tom Russell, a slave blacksmith, had manufactured a number of pike-heads.  Official searches turned up none of them, and Governor Bennett proclaimed, "No weapons (if we except thirteen hoop-poles)"—which could have been used to accommodate the pike-heads—"have been discovered." 

Years later, the testimony of Thomas C. Brown, a Charleston-born free person of color who claimed to have worked with Vesey and to have known about the plot, suggests that the authorities had looked in the wrong spot.  Some years later, the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child met Brown in Philadelphia, the adopted home of scores of Charleston-born persons of color who had lived through the Vesey affair.  She recorded Brown’s words and then quoted from them in 1860 in response to a query about slave insurrections from Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was preparing an article on Vesey for the Atlantic Monthly.  According to Childs’ transcription of Brown’s words, Denmark Vesey "was called the leader of the insurrection, and it was said arms were collected in his house.  I was a carpenter, and worked with Vesey, who was also a carpenter; and I knew of his plan . . . . I heard, at the time, of arms being buried in coffins, at Sullivan’s Island.  But that is not the negro burying ground.. . . . I was told Vesey said to those that tried him, that the work of insurrection would go on; but as none but white people were permitted to be present, I cannot tell whether he said it."

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From Stanley G. Payne's "History, Nation, and Civil War in Spanish Historiography"

During the past generation, greater controversy about history, particularly contemporary history, has developed in Spain than in any other western country—not surprising, given the intense internal conflicts Spain endured during much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, although it stands in contrast to the relatively irenic spirit of burying the hatchet, which characterized Spain’s paradigmatic transition to democracy between 1975 and 1982.  The first major controversy came from what in Spain are termed the “peripheral nationalists”—Basques, Catalans and others—who challenged the central narrative of all-Spanish history in ways that were more political than postmodernist, although the two influences tended to converge.  After the new democratic “state of the autonomies” effectively federalized the country, the new critique placed in dispute the very concept of a Spanish nation, or even a “Spain,” as distinct from what was now being called merely the “Spanish state.” 

By the 1990s a new wave of defensive historiography arose, which re-vindicated the Spanish nation and a pluralistic but nonetheless unified Spain.  The lingering effects of the Civil War of 1936-39 and the long Franco regime that followed were still felt, since the latter had imposed a concept of nation and unity stemming from the conquest of one half of Spain by the other—hardly a convincing example of all-Spanish nationalism.  In addition, in the Spanish universities, an ideologically dominant, usually Socialist, professoriate gained hegemony; although often critical of peripheral nationalist historiography’s exaggerations and artificial deconstructions, it maintained its own exclusivist and politically correct agenda regarding the controversies of twentieth-century Spain.

In 1999, at the first national convention of The Historical Society, two sessions were devoted to contemporary Spanish history—the first on Carlism and its influence during the nineteenth century, the second on the key issue of the Soviet Union and the Spanish Civil War.  The work, together with other studies by the same scholars, has been published, which provides an excellent opportunity to examine some of these problems through works available in English.
 
 

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From Jacob Neusner's "The Dynamics of American Jewish History"

New books by Gary Zola and Jonathan Sarna capture the beginnings and the maturity of the study of the history of American Jews.  Jacob R. Marcus (1896-1995), a principal in the beginning of the study of American Jewish history who founded the American Jewish Archives at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR), Cincinnati, just after World War II, wrote and edited the earliest genuinely professional monographs and books in the field.  After half a century, the field came to realization with Jonathan Sarna’s history of American Judaism, an astute and compelling account.  Marcus focused on collecting the data and explaining their importance, and Sarna has put it together to form a coherent, continuous account.
 
 

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From W. Bradford Smith's "German Pagan Antiquity in Lutheran Historical Thought" 

Since "revival of antiquity" proved central to the Renaissance, the problem for Germans lay in articulating their relation to both classical and Christian antiquity. Considering the character of the German Renaissance, Lewis Spitz noted that "the culture of the North . . . could not be a Renaissance in the sense of a rebirth of classical antiquity." Scholars north of the Alps—unlike their Italian colleagues, who found ample evidence for their origins in the ancient literary tradition—were forced to ferret out the few traces of their Teutonic forefathers left by classical authors. The violent enmity between Rome and the early Germani complicated matters, since classical texts often presented the ancestors of sixteenth-century German humanists in less than glowing terms. Still, the Germani were omnipresent in the history of the Roman Empire from the time of Marius until the end of the western Empire, and that presence permitted German humanists to compare the relative virtues and vices of the two peoples. The place of the Germans in the history of the Church was more problematic, since the Bible seemed to make no mention of them at all.  Worse yet, much of Germany did not accept Christianity until the eighth and ninth centuries, and then only at the point of Charlemagne’s sword.  That the ancient Germani were heathens could not be doubted—so why should they be able to restore the Church and establish true religion?

The reconciliation of early Germanic sacred and secular history thus posed a formidable challenge to German humanists.  To solve the problem, they tended to follow the general framework established in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.  Eusebius, the first Christian historian, presented what became the canonical reading of the ancient past:  The civilization of antiquity, leading to the creation of the Roman Empire, laid the foundations for the construction of the Church of Christ in this world.  Eusebius viewed the union of Roman and Christian history through a political lens—and the conversion of the Emperor Constantine to Christianity as the culmination of history.  Renaissance humanists, by and large, accepted the general outlines of Eusebius’s view of history but placed greater emphasis on the cultural, and not the political, legacy of antiquity. The works of Renaissance neo-Platonists expressed the belief that pagan philosophy and Christianity were both forms of divine revelation, and classical culture, no less than the prophecies of the Hebrews, had emerged to prepare the way for the Gospel.  The cultures of antiquity, therefore, had a role to play in God’s plan, and the task for Germans in the Reformation era was to situate their nation within the eschatological framework implicit in this view of history. 

They had two options.  The first, articulated in the late-thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by followers of Joachim of Fiore and later elaborated by the heresiarchs John Wyclif and Jan Hus, required rejection of the Eusebian paradigm to emphasize the conflict between classical civilization and Christianity.  This viewpoint—which presented Constantine’s conversion as the end of the true Church, when poison in the form of money, worldly authority, and secular learning invaded the Church—enjoyed certain rhetorical advantages: It rendered moot the question of origins . . . . A second, nationalist position, built upon the German Emperors, enjoyed greater favor among the humanists for presenting the Germans as a people of great antiquity, in no way inferior to the Romans in pedigree and virtue. Since the time of Charlemagne, the Holy Roman emperors had maintained that they were the true heirs of the Caesars, and they sought to demonstrate the direct descent to the Germans of Roman Imperial authority. Humanists expanded on the formula by seeking to restore the ancient Germans to their rightful place and explain their relation to the civilized peoples of antiquity . . . . Such revisionist history proved difficult to support on the basis of the available evidence. 
 
 

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From Sean Wilentz's "Jeffersonian Democracy and the Origins of Political Antislavery in the United States: The Missouri Crisis Revisited" 

The triumph of American antislavery marked one of the most extraordinary intellectual as well as political reversals in our history.  Lincoln and the Republicans came to power in 1860 thanks to a new sectional coalition of moderate abolitionists, former Whigs, and former Jacksonian Democrats.  While the Republicans honored the U.S. Constitution’s ban on direct interference with slavery where it existed, they believed that the institution was an affront to God, democracy, equality, and human progress–“the definitions and axioms of free society” that Lincoln traced back to Thomas Jefferson.   By halting slavery’s expansion, the Republicans were confident that they could put slavery on the road to extinction in perfectly constitutional ways–an interpretation of the Constitution that prompted southern secession. 

This revolution in American political and constitutional thought did not develop all at once, nor was it, as some writers have suggested, solely or even chiefly the work of Lincoln and his party.  Both the Republican political coalition of the 1850s and its antislavery constitutionalism were foreshadowed during the first decades of the republic by a sectional rupture among Jeffersonian Republicans that historians have either slighted or misinterpreted.  Once understood, the story of that rupture undermines what has become the prevailing paradoxical view of democracy and slavery after the Revolution, recently popularized by Garry Wills.  This view vaunts anti-democratic Federalists as antislavery heroes and condemns Jeffersonian democrats as frauds.  When properly understood, however, the story recovers the Jeffersonian antislavery legacy, exposes the great fragility of the "second party system" of the 1830s and 1840s, and vindicates Lincoln’s claims about his party’s intellectual origins.  The story also offers historical paradoxes of its own, in which hard-line slaveholding Southern Republicans rejected the egalitarian ideals of the slaveholder Jefferson while anti-slavery Northern Republicans upheld them–even as Jefferson himself supported slavery’s expansion on purportedly antislavery grounds. 

The Jeffersonian rupture over slavery drew upon ideas from the Revolutionary era.  It began with congressional conflicts over slavery and related matters in the 1790s, and it reached a crisis during the first great American debate about slavery in the nineteenth century, over the admission of Missouri to the Union. 

 
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