James Otis: Multidimensional Freedom

A generation of thinkers, writers, and politicians propelled the residents of North America to rebel against the cruel tyranny which the British monarchy imposed on them. Among the fieriest of them was James Otis.

In the early days of 1764, Otis was a loyal British subject, living in North America, and enthusiastic about the global growth of the British Empire. But soon his investigations and thoughts caused him to see the evil side of the matter: the Empire was imposed its will upon the colonists in North America, and was in fact fueled by continually imposing oppression on the colonies.

One of the most outrageous injustices imposed on the Americans was Britain’s Stamp Act, a piece of legislation would have economically brutalized the colonies. Coordinated resistance arose: The colonies created the Stamp Act Congress to discuss the matter on a level which went beyond the borders of any one colony and united the concerns of the colonies; the Sons of Liberty organized public gatherings and vocal protests.

Outside of North America, people in other parts of the world watched the developments with interest. Not everyone sympathized with the Americans.

Those who owned and operated plantations in the West Indies, islands in the Carribean, were concerned. They understood that freedom for American colonists would create a desire for freedom among other oppressed people, including slaves.

While the colonists in North America were largely in favor of freedom for slaves, or at least had no strong objections to it, the islands in the Carribean were much more economically reliant on slavery, and found any hint of abolishing slavery to be threatening, as historian Jill Lepore writes:

Nor were the West Indian planters wrong to worry that one kind of rebellion would incite another. In Charleston, the Sons of Liberty marched through the streets, chanting, “Liberty and No Stamps!” only to be followed by slaves crying, “Liberty! Liberty!” And not a few Sons of Liberty made this same leap, from fighting for their own liberty to fighting to end slavery. “The Colonists are by the law of nature born free, as indeed all men are, white or black,” James Otis Jr. insisted, in a searing tract called Rights of the British Colonists, Asserted, published in 1764, only months after he had rejoiced about the growth of Britain’s empire.

James Otis saw that logic demanded that, if he demanded freedom for the colonists from British repression, then he would also favor freedom for slaves. The majority of North American colonists agreed with him.

Decades later, the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793 would increase the economic dependence of plantation owners in the southern states. Even with that increase, however, the majority of people in what was by then the United States favored the abolition of slavery.

Reason demanded that the concept of freedom, based on a person’s humanity, be extended to all people. James Otis understood that natural law, based on the structure of the universe and not on human legislation, gave every person the right to liberty. “In the 1760s, he,” as Jill Lepore writes,

saw the logical extension of arguments about natural rights. He found it absurd to suggest that it could be “right to enslave a man because he is black” or because he has “short curl’d hair like wool.” Slavery, Otis insisted, “is the most shocking violation of the law of nature,” and a source of political contamination, too. “Those who every day barter away other men’s liberty, will soon care little for their own,” he warned.

James Otis and his words remain as evidence for one of the strongest defenses of liberty, freedom, and justice in history. He was an intellectual warrior in the cause of justice, and realized long before many of his fellow North Americans that the colonies would and should fight for their independence, and that as a logical extension of that struggle, they would and should also fight to end slavery.

From Isolationism to Engagement: American Enters World War II

Looking back from the present day, it is obvious that the United States was part of World War II. But in the late 1930s, it was not at all obvious that America would be a part of the war.

During the late 1930s and as late as 1941, there was a strong political movement to keep the United States out of WW2. This “isolationist” movement had several causes: it was motivated by the fact that entering the war would ally us with the Soviet Union, whose atrocities and human rights violations were known; by the fact that allying with the Soviet Union would strengthen the USSR’s goal of colonizing smaller nations and building an empire; and by the fact that any alliance with the USSR would be a short-lived sham, destined to evaporate once the common enemy had been defeated.

The movement to keep American out of WW2 was called ‘anti-interventionist’ because it saw a potential entry into the war as ‘intervening’ into matters which weren’t American, but rather which belonged to other nations.

When the Japanese Empire attacked the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor, America’s perspective changed. The war was no longer “someone else’s business,” but rather it was now “our business,” as historian Mary Grabar writes:

Of course, there was internal opposition to the war. There was a very strong and public anti-interventionist movement. One of the fears was that the anti-interventionists had was about allying with the Soviet Union, whose executions and mass starvations were already known. They were rightly concerned about the Soviets’ imperialist ambitions. As Melvyn Leffler noted, “Almost a third of all Americans” continued to distrust our military ally the Soviet Union even at the height of the fighting against the Nazis, and most polls showed that fewer than half of all Americans expected cooperation to persist in the postwar period.” But after the attack on Pearl Harbor, many anti-interventionists, including future President Gerald Ford and aviator Charles Lindbergh, gave the war effort their full support.

American entered the war, forming an uneasy and uncomfortable alliance with the Soviet Socialists. During the war, the American public was clear that this was, at best, a temporary alliance of convenience, and that after the war, there would be no illusion of continued cooperation between the USSR and the free democratic countries of the western Allies.

Unique Causes for a Unique War: America’s Revolutionary Revolution

The decades leading up to the beginning of the Revolutionary War in 1775 included the growth and development of both economic and political motives. Britain’s expensive imperial program of the military defense for the colonies placed a financial burden on the North American colonies: they were told that they must pay for a defense which they neither wanted nor requested.

The British had accumulated large debts from financing the French and Indian War (1754 to 1763). After the war, the ongoing expenses of maintaining garrisons of English soldiers in North America also mounted.

The colonists argued that they were capable of defending themselves and didn’t need armies sent from across the Atlantic. Such armies were not only unnecessary, but often caused problems (fights, drunkenness, rowdiness, theft, vandalism, etc.) among the people whom they were allegedly defending.

A long series of parliamentary actions, even dating back to before 1754 but increasing thereafter, amounted to repeated taxes on the colonists. The evils of taxation were amplified by the fact that the colonists were not allowed to elect any of their own representatives to Parliament.

The residents of the thirteen colonies were supposed to be British citizens, on a legal par with those living in England, but in reality, they were denied the right to freely elect their own representatives.

In addition to the brutalities of taxation, the colonists were subjected to other forms of economic terror. Regulations listed certain products which colonists could purchase only from England, not from any other countries. Certain products from the colonies could be shipped only to England and not to other countries.

Beyond economic concerns, the colonists desire religious freedom: the spiritual landscape of North America included a diverse collection of Lutherans, Jews, Methodists, Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, Quakers, Baptists, and other groups. The British government, however, acknowledged Anglicanism (Episcopalianism) as the only official church.

Politically, the colonists had two goals: first, participation by freely electing representatives to Parliament; second, freedom of speech and of the press.

The English were oblivious to the human misery which they caused. Making it even worse, Parliament inflicted an additional form of oppression on the colonists in 1763: the Proclamation Line. This boundary forbid the residents of the thirteen colonies from settling west of a line drawn on the map.

The Americans were forbidden from pioneering into the largely unsettled and uninhabited lands west of the existing colonial civilization, as historians Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski write:

The imperial program sparked colonial resistance. In the West, Americans refused to conform to the Proclamation Line or obey the trade regulations. But on the seaboard resistance was more ominous as colonists defiantly challenged Parliament’s authority to impose taxes, especially the Stamp Act. An intercolonial Stamp Act Congress met in New York and issued protests. People adopted nonimportation agreements, uniting most Americans in an attempt to put economic pressure on England to repeal the act. Most importantly, colonists responded with violence. Groups calling themselves “Sons of Liberty” enforced the nonimportation agreements, forced stamp agents to resign, and mobilized mobs to ransack the homes of unpopular Crown officials. The Connecticut and New York Sons of Liberty even signed a treaty pledging aid if British troops tried to enforce the Stamp Act. In the face of this opposition, Parliament repealed the act but passed a Declaratory Act proclaiming Parliament’s right “to bind” the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.”

The colonial response to Britain’s economic aggression galvanized resistance and united the colonies. Organizations within colonies, and among colonies, created a network which would grow stronger and eventually coordinate the revolution: an organization which would more and more clearly the demands for relief from taxation, the demands for elected representation, the demands for freedom of speech and of the press and of religion, and the demands for political liberty and eventually complete political independence.

The organizations which arose in opposition to the English taxes were organizations which were a part of creating a new identity: the identity of being, not English subjects living in America, but rather the identity of being Americans.

Wars are nothing new in history, but America’s Revolutionary War was a new type of war. The wars up until that point in time were driven mainly by dynastic ambition or material greed.

America’s struggle for independence was not a “top-down” war, called for and motivated by a small leadership class, but rather was a “bottom-up” war, reflecting the political desperation of the middle and lower classes who’d suffered horribly under British taxation.

To say that the American Revolution was caused largely by taxes seems, at first glance, to imply that the colonists were greedy people motivated by material wealth. But the Americans had the insight that taxes struck at much more than one’s wallet. Taxes are an assault on human dignity. Taxation is not only a violation of property rights, but in subtle and nefarious ways, a violation of all human and civil rights.

To fight a war, not because the royal family decreed it, but because the broad lower and middle classes were seeking their human and civil rights — seeking liberty, freedom, and opportunity — this was a new and different kind of war.

A new type of war called for new types of strategies.

George Washington and the Continental Army were working, not merely to capture selected military or economic targets, but rather to expel the British military from the land, and to liberate that land, as historian Russell Weigley writes:

The paradox of George Washington’s mode of strategy wran deeper than its most obvious feature, the incongruity between a defensive strategy and the necessity to remove the British forces from North America in order to secure political independence. There existed a further incongruity between the eighteenth-century conventionality of the ideas about warfare entertained and applied by the wealthy and conservative Virginia gentleman turned Commander in Chief of a revolutionary army, and the incorrigibility revolutionary dimensions of the war in which Washington had to fight. For in terms of the eighteenth century’s conceptions of war, the War of American Independence was indeed revolutionary. It is a commonplace of history, but a correct one, to assert that in Europe the eighteenth century was an age of limited war. Until the French Revolution at the end of the century, European armies of the period carefully restrained the destructiveness of war, and they did so because European statesmen restrained the aims of war. A variety of considerations, all involving the statesmen’s and soldiers’ awareness of the delicacy of the social fabric of Europe under the ancien regime, made European war in the eighteenth century habitually a contest for limited objectives of a fortress or province or two or of favorable dynastic alliance. The War of American Independence was revolutionary in the very scope of the Americans’ objective: to eliminate British power completely from the vast extent of the thirteen rebellious colonies.

Had George Washington and the American been able to fight a true war of attrition, they would have gladly done so. But the Continental Army lacked money, supplies, and men sufficient for that strategy. Because it was not a true war of attrition, the American Revolution inflicted fewer casualties that it might otherwise have.

Washington’s strategy was, instead, a modified version of attrition. He worked to develop his forces into nimble and mobile units; the British were, by comparison, clunky and slow-moving. Washington developed strong intelligence networks, informing him of British activities.

The British forces were larger and better equipped, so Washington avoided large-scale confrontations in battle. He opted for surprise attacks and raids. In so doing, he left the British continually harassed, fatigued, and nervous.

Instead of outlasting the British in a traditional version of a war of attrition, Washington exhausted and unnerved the British.

By war’s end, Washington was finally able to enjoy numerical superiority when facing the British at Yorktown in 1781, due in part to French armies who joined the Americans. But throughout most of the war, Washington’s forces were smaller than their British opponents, and had to rely on speed, agility, and elements of surprise.

Founding a University: What Makes Princeton Different?

Starting in 1636, North America was home to a growing number of colleges and universities. For more than a century before the United States was founded, America was a flashpoint for education.

Harvard was founded in 1636 with the purpose of providing Puritan clergymen for the Unitarian and Congregationalist churches. The College of William and Mary was founded in 1693 as “a perpetual college of divinity” by royal charter, and therefore serving the Anglican Church.

St. John’s College in Annapolis began as King William’s School in 1696, and was upgraded to a college in 1784, receiving a new name in the process. Its founders were a diverse group of Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics.

Yale was founded in 1701 to train Congregationalist ministers. The Kent County Free School, established in 1723, was recast as Washington College in 1782 by the Episcopal priest William Smith.

The same William Smith also founded the College of Philadelphia, better known as the University of Pennsylvania, was suggested by Benjamin Franklin as early as 1740, but its first classes began in 1751. (To complete his ‘hat trick,’ William Smith had also been involved in the founding of St. John’s College in Annapolis.)

The Bethlehem Female Seminary, better known as Moravian College, began in 1742, founded by the Moravian Church.

This impressive growth was dominated by only a few denominations — Anglican/Epsicopal, Roman Catholic, Unitarian, Congregationalist, and Moravian. But spiritual landscape of North America was more diverse: there were Lutherans, Quakers, Baptists, Methodists, and many other groups. The next phase in founding American colleges and universities would embrace that diversity.

The University of Delaware in 1743 and Princeton University in 1746 were the first two Presbyterian institutions of higher education, as Dennis Kennedy writes:

The only clergyman who signed the Declaration of Independence was Rev. John Witherspoon, the president of the College of New Jersey, which is today Princeton University.

Although founded in 1746, the college did not move to the town of Princeton until 1756, and was not renamed until 1896. The founder’s personality shaped the institution decisively.

At that time, this college was a stalwart Presbyterian institution. Witherspoon had emigrated from Scotland. He helped to shape the political thinking of many key Americans, including James Madison, who attended Witherspoon’s college, while preparing for the ministry. Witherspoon befriended the young man and had a profound impact on Madison’s life. Obviously Madison chose a political career, but his theologian training served him well. John Eidsmoe writes: “One thing is certain: the Christian religion, particularly Rev. Witherspoon’s Calvinism, influenced Madison’s view of law and government.”

The diversity of spiritual traditions among the nation’s founders led to the incorporation of multiple perspectives into the various documents (The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, and The Bill of Rights) and into the various texts (not only The Federalist Papers, but also The Anti-Federalist Papers).

This diversity included Anglicanism in George Washington, Congregationalism in Sam Adams, Roman Catholicism in Charles Carroll, and — as in the case of Princeton University — Witherspoon’s Presbyterianism.

But Madison is not the only shaper of America whose thinking Witherspoon helped shape. Eidsmoe also states: “John Witherspoon is best described as the man who shaped the men who shaped America. Although he did not attend the Constitutional Convention, his influence was multiplied many times over by those who spoke as well as by what was said.”

It is possible that the case for Presbyterianism’s influence is here overstated. The influence of Anglicanism, continuing into Episcopalianism, was also immense. The sheer numbers of Lutherans and Roman Catholics among the population meant that those two denominations were also significantly formative.

Populating the Great Plains and the Upper Midwest: Germans from Germany — and Germans from Russia

Germans had arrived in North America as early as 1683. They quickly became a significant part of the economy.

By the time the United States became an independent nation in 1776, Germans had earned reputations as excellent farmers, craftsmen, merchants, and technical innovators.

The German-Americans earned this admiration in the original thirteen colonies, and also helped America to defend its freedom in the war from 1775 to 1783.

As the nation expanded westward, German-Americans pioneered into the new regions, and continued to earn respect from their fellow citizens. German-Americans were seen as hard workers and wise managers of their assets, as Thomas Sowell writes:

German immigrants’ achievement as farmers in the United States remained outstanding in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In eastern Texas, German farmers were by 1880 producing a larger volume of output per farm — and on smaller farms — than other Texans.

Many of the Germans came to America, not from Germany, but from Russia. Large groups of Germans had left Germany, seeking economic opportunities, and gone to Russia. They settled in Russia, but found that low literacy rates and poor financial systems limited the income which they could generate from their farms. So they moved again, this time to America.

In Nebraska, Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming, Germans who had re-immigrated from Russia established good reputations as farmers and had excellent credit ratings at banks. Germans, both from Germany and from Russia, eventually achieved prosperity in Oklahoma, after harrowing years of pioneering in a virgin territory.

Germans in the great farming states in the middle of the country helped to create the best aspects of the nation’s agriculture system, aspects which still benefit the United States more than a century later.

On the East Coast, by contrast, Germans gained their reputations from business, industry, and technological development.

Whether on the coasts or in the interior, whether in agriculture or in urban commerce, Germans maintained a stellar reputation for diligence, cleverness, and superlative work ethic.

Black Leaders Confront Woodrow Wilson: Challenging Progressivist Racism

When President Woodrow Wilson revealed the deep-seated racism that motivated his policies, civil rights leaders took action. Two leaders in particular opposed Wilson: Ida B. Wells and Monroe Trotter.

Ida Wells started as a journalist in 1894. She wrote for a newspaper called the Daily Inter-Ocean, a Republican newspaper in Chicago. This newspaper boldly and persistently denounced lynching.

Because women in the United States were voting by this time, Ida Wells also organized the Republican Women’s Club in 1894. Her efforts resulted in Lucy Flower being elected as a trustee for the University of Illinois. This was long before the 19th amendment was passed in 1920.

Although Ida Wells enjoyed expanding rights for women and for African-Americans in the 1890s and early 1900s, President Woodrow Wilson was determined to stop the Republican Party. In 1912, Wilson began taking away the civil rights which Blacks had enjoyed since 1863, as historian Dinesh D’Souza writes:

Segregation wasn’t limited to the South. Following his election, Woodrow Wilson mandated segregation for all the agencies of the federal government. This had never happened before. In a sense, Wilson was burying the ghost of Lincoln, who would have been appalled beyond measure. The black community was apoplectic. Black leaders like Ida B. Wells and Monroe Trotter Protested Wilson’s racism, but the Democratic president was unmoved.

African-Americans and Whites had worked side-by-side in integrated and desegregated federal agencies since the time of Abraham Lincoln. But Woodrow Wilson, fueling his Democratic and Progressivist movements, undermined civil rights in ways that the nation hadn’t seen in fifty years.

Monroe Trotter, a Black civil rights leader, called Wilson’s policies “preposterous,” and confronted President Wilson in November 1914 at a meeting in the White House. When Wilson dismissed Trotter’s concerns, W.E.B. DuBois remarked that President Wilson was “insulting and condescending.”

Wilson boldly argued for segregation, as Dinesh D’Souza reports:

Wilson indignantly told these black leaders that they had no reason to complain, because segregation was in fact beneficial to blacks. Wilson also echoed the argument from Plessy that segregation was just, since whites were being separated from blacks just as much as blacks were being separated from whites.

The outbreak of WW1 gave Wilson another opportunity for racist behavior. His administration dictated that, in the U.S. Army, African-American officers were segregated from White officers. Unlike President Theodore Roosevelt before him, or President Warren Harding after him, Woodrow Wilson stubbornly clung to racism throughout his administration.

Crisis Causes Creativity: Bartering, an Inventive Solution During the Great Depression

People are often at their most creative when facing urgent problems. The Great Depression was a nationwide financial collapse, and individuals, seeing that government programs were incapable of offering much help, found their own solutions.

If the monetary system was failing, people reasoned, then they would find a way to complete transactions outside of the system. The government, in the form of the federal reserve system, lurked inside any cash transaction. But bartering would sidestep the government entirely, as historian Amity Shlaes writes:

One late summer day in 1931 in Salt Lake City, the money ran out. Not just the money in the banks, and not just the money in the town coffers - the money that citizens had to spend. Locals reached into their pockets and, finding nothing, began to trade work and objects. Barbers traded shaves and haircuts for onions and Idaho potatoes. From there, the trading spread to other products. Life in Utah had always been a desert when it came to water. Now it was a desert when it came to money, as well. People in Utah knew how to survive in a desert. Maybe they could find a way to manage in the money desert as well.

The nation’s economy, under the influence of various programs designed to improve it, would deteriorate further, conditions in 1937 being worse than in 1931. But ordinary citizens invented ways to avoid government influence and maintain some element of productive economic activity.

Government efforts, however well-intentioned, generated the opposite of the desired effects: President Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ made the misery of the Great Depression worse.

Bartering, and in some cases even ‘black market’ activity, provided the necessities of life - food, clothing, housing, medical care - despite government strategies.