afloweroutofstone:

Edmund Fawcett, “Liberalism: The Life of an Idea,” 2014, pg. 99-101:

The slogan “Liberty!” has evoked different things in the United States at different times. Abraham Lincoln, who knew the power and malleability of words, saw the point. When dedicating a military cemetery at Gettysburg in 1863 Lincoln spoke of the United States as a “new nation, conceived in liberty.” With his usual clarity in a speech at Baltimore the following year he added the telling rider: “We all declare liberty but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.”

Jefferson imagined America’s westward expansion as extending “an empire of liberty,” and on Jeffersonian tongues in the first two decades of the nineteenth century “liberty” evoked a spacious idyll of independent farms and small government. In the long Republican domination from the Civil War until the 1890s, “liberty” meant chiefly emancipation, national progress, and freedom for businesses not to have to listen to the demands of the workers or the complaints of their customers. In the heyday of Democratic liberalism from 1932 to 1980, “liberty” and “freedom” pointed to what government was trying to secure for all citizens: a fairer economic shake and a more equal voice in politics. After the Republican realignment of 1980, the works again evoked freedom from government, especially in the selective sense of lower taxes and less red tape.

“Liberty” has evoked different things at one and the same time. At the nation’s birth, American rebels wanted to free themselves from the British parliament’s campaign to pay for Britain’s wars by taxing the colonies. The rebels wanted free to be free of British creditors who lent money to pay for the war of independence. On victory, the Americans wanted to be free of British attempts to restrain the seizure of Loyalist property and to protect native Indian lands on the northwest frontiers from grasping American settlers. That frontier impulse continued to give “liberty” an American edge. To Jackson’s followers in the 1830’s, “liberty” meant freedom for a young nation to expand with its slaves across Indian lands and into Mexico. It meant freedom for self-made men to get ahead in the world by whatever it took. For Jackson’s opponents, the first American liberals known as Whigs, the term had other associations. To Whigs “liberty” evoked self-mastery, freedom from warfare with the nation’s neighbors and, hard as Whigs found it to reach one, an answer to the scourge of slavery.

In 1860, on the verge of civil war, all four presidential candidates spoke of “liberty” and “freedom.” To John Bell, the Whig would-be reconciler of the sections, “liberty” meant public order and respect for the constitution. To Stephen Douglas, who still hoped the extension of slavery to the West could be left to popular decision in the new territories, “liberty” meant democratic choice. To John Breckinridge, the southern candidate, “liberty” meant the natural or constitutional right—take your pick—of the states to be left alone. To the radical Wide Awakes, who led pro-Lincoln torchlight parades in northern cities, “liberty” meant emancipation of southern slaves and freedom from southern obstruction of progressive legislation in Congress. In the election of 1912, four candidates—Taft, the conservative Republican, Debs, the social democrat, Roosevelt, the Progressive Republican rebel, and Wilson, the “New Freedom” Democrat— each had their own distinctive vision for the country under the banner of “Liberty.” Examples multiply. Then came Herbert Hoover’s “ordered liberty,” Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms,” and Martin Luther King’s hoped-for nation “free at last, free at last” from the injuries of racialism.

Americans were not arguing past each other in mutual incomprehension. To think that is to cheapen and mystify disputes of substance into crass but persistent misunderstandings. Theirs was not a verbal or conceptual confusion. They could understand the lexical grammar of “free from” and “free to.” They could see the difference between bring free (as when an unblocked river is free to flow) and being at liberty (as when a person is not stopped or inhibited by authority). To the extent that they meant different things by ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ their differences were pragmatic. Americans were not in conflict over the meanings of terms or the content of an idea. They were not, without realizing it, deploying different ideas. Their conflicts rather bore on the political focus of the same idea and the diverse uses that idea might be put to in public argument. Americans did not agree on which freedoms mattered most. They differed on the urgency, directness, and salience of a variety of political freedoms.