Freedom For the Privileged

Virginian Heresies

Much negative commentary has been issued on the New England Puritan settlements in the seventeenth century.   Most of it is misleading.  Much less negative commentary has issued forth on the English settlements in Virginia.  This is surprising in some respects, but on the other hand, maybe not unexpected.  After all, if one had to compare the two settlements: New England and Virginia, why the latter would be superior in every respect. 

It is true that they were different.  The New England Puritan settlements (and the Quaker settlements in what later became Pennsylvania) were animated by principles of freedom from persecution and oppression.  Virginia's animus, however, was a replication of royal prerogative and aristocratic privilege.
 

Ideas of liberty and freedom in Cavalier Virginia were different from those in New England--less communal and more hierarchical. . . . In a Cavalier utopia, Virginians possessed liberty in proportion to their rank.  Gentlemen had many liberties.  Yeomen had some liberties.  Labourers and servants at the bottom had new liberties, or none.  This hierarchical system was firmly in place by 1660. 

The great growth of African slavery came later.  Slavery did not create this system in Virginia, but was created by it.  Hegemonic liberty in Virginia was thought to be entirely consistent with the keeping of slaves, which was justified in terms of a freeborn master's right to enslave others (laisser asservir).  Edmund Burke wrote that "freedom is to them not only enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege. . . . [I]n such a people, the haughtiness of dominion combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invincible."  [David Fischer, Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies, New Zealand and the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p.43f.]

Slavery in the United States did not grow out of a vacuum.  It was helped along by the Tudor and Stuart and Cavalier notion that aristocratic bloodlines were inextricably linked to the blessings of freedom; those with lesser privileged blood did not deserve or warrant freedom.   To that extent, the lower orders were sub-human. 

There lies an indictment of the seventeenth century settlements in Virginia that is rarely heard today.  But as for those Puritan settlements, why, they were tyranny incarnate. 

We suspect that Voltaire's cynical observation--that history is a trick the living play upon the dead--is true in this case.