Book Review : Humanized History on a Grand Scale

Liberty and Power, 1600-1760 (Volume I of Liberty in America, 1600 to the Present) by Oscar & Lilian Handlin (Bessie/Harper & Row: $16.95)

Oscar Handlin, the distinguished Harvard historian, has joined with Lilian Handlin to tackle one of the central issues of America’s colonial past: How did we come by our somewhat boisterous practice of liberty? Theirs is history on a grand scale, but humanized and brought down to earth by glimpses into the lives of those who settled here more than three centuries ago.

The authors begin by portraying the Europe left behind, a place where individuals counted for little and liberty in the modern sense did not exist. Members of elite groups did enjoy liberties , as privileges were then called, but the lowly majority, entitled to no liberties, could hope only for protection. This they were granted in exchange for submitting to rules they had no part in framing, and to groups that determined their identity.

Those who founded settlements in the new world hoped to retain the social controls of the old. But as the Handlins show, the frontier conditions of a near-virgin continent undermined all such efforts. Even the Puritans, with their highly developed sense of community, could not prevent the liberties once due an elite from becoming the individual liberty claimed by all.

Too Much Space

There was just too much space. In Europe, people had no place to flee, but in Virginia or Massachusetts, individuals who chafed against the structures surrounding them could move on. The wilderness beckoned, as did the new towns springing up everywhere. No longer could people be held by the promise of protection in exchange for obedience. Settlers could strike out on their own in search of a new kind of liberty consonant with individuality.

The ability to elude group restraints gave people the power to reject rules to which they had not consented. And the habit of self-government that resulted was later to impress De Tocqueville as the basis of American liberty. Meanwhile, this space for individual maneuver reshaped religion and the family by preventing any one sect from becoming an official religion and by reducing the force of parents over their children.

Such relaxed controls, the Handlins argue, unleashed the enterprise and mobility that would prepare the way for independence. And in expanding commerce and prosperity, colonists began to consider the freedoms they had newly won as eternal, God-given rights.

Attention to Social History

Much of this discussion, presented here with verve and beautifully documented, will be familiar to devotees of early American history. What is less common for such a comprehensive work is its attention to social history, to the lives and experiences of ordinary people. These the Handlins trace in court records, assembly minutes, sermons, diaries, letters and petitions, sources that permit the authors to do more than analyze their historical period. They draw us into it, amplifying the voices of early Americans as they struggled to find their own individual sense of family, religion, commerce and politics. The richness of this material gives the reader a vivid sense of how the practice of liberty was grounded in everyday life.

Still, experience was not everything, nor were the unique conditions of a new continent enough in themselves to guarantee personal and political freedom. The latter required ideas, ideas such as John Locke’s notion that government is legitimate only when it rests on the people’s consent. The Handlins might have been a bit more sensitive to the concepts, born in Europe, that enabled early Americans to think of their unfettered lives as a model for political liberty.