Is liberty being allowed to do what you want, to believe what you want free of all coercion? Is liberty being able to take small pleasures in life, is it about making your own way in life without someone else telling you what to do?
For English speakers in the early and mid eighteenth century, liberty was perhaps all of these things, but above all else it was about being able to own property and not having someone else take it away from you or do anything to it without your consent. Freedom of religion was also important, to be sure, but it was a sideshow to what truly mattered: power. That's right, I just linked the two concepts, and the property owners of the time certainly did in mentality if not in direct word. Perhaps this is a dangerous concept to be illustrating in such words considering as how I am defining the differences between Canadian and American mentalities, as per our last post over two weeks ago:
Defining A Border: Why Are We Not One Country?
The truth of the matter, though, is that world politics are defined by power struggles as much if not more so than by ideological crusades; a world of military forces, cults of personality, etc. means that even the noblest of goals is going to continue to be fought over for some time. While the human race has taken great strides toward progress by diplomacy and moral force, the fact remains that not all of us are interested in such paths. The story of how the modern world and our two nations came about illustrate this all too well. This story is a long one that takes us back to the plagues of the fourteenth century, when the New World was not much more than Nordic legend, at least over in Europe.
By the time the illnesses had run their course, many countries in Europe lost over half their population. Farms started going untended, market places started breaking down, feudalism looked to be a memory. Lords were in desperate need of workers to keep their estates running, the labor side of which was finding that they could make demands for a better life if the management wanted to keep things running. Heirs, even lowly commoners, found themselves in possession of multiple lots and belongings as entire generations would leave only one or two males left in large families. Some of them turned to trades and business, others to controlling the land as their former noble superiors had done for thousands of years of human history, but all of them found that they now had power unlike anything that had been imagined before. In Britain, the House of Commons slowly grew in importance.
By the seventeenth century, that house, along with its upper counterpart of Lords, was able to turn the course of history by overthrowing a king. While that particular revolution soon became overwhelmed by religious zeal, its main issue was never truly forgotten: power did not ultimately rest in the hands of one individual who was claiming sovereignty based on some assumption that human power rested in religious excuse (namely the divine right of kings). The main issue, of course, was taxation. You know, money, personal freedom to properly use money and individual economic value. Some people would take this to the extreme in the next century and try to rid the world of anything other than the currency of economics, relegating religion and morals to the realm of either usefulness or menace. A very classic line to sum all this up comes from one such "enlightenment" thinker who wrote much in the way of history (particularly focused on Rome), Edward Gibbons:
“The policy of the emperors and the senate, as far as it concerned religion, was happily seconded by the reflections of the enlightened, and by the habits of the superstitious, part of their subjects. The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.”
At the same time there were people still interested in the concept of freedom itself. Some still clamored for religious freedom, as many do today even in North America. Some wanted to be able to just keep a small home with ground to grow things in. Some just wanted to be able to move about freely and not be tied down to any settlement. Some just wanted to be left alone. As wars over the power to control these things heated up not only in the British Isles but also in France, these sorts found themselves heading across the ocean to the vast unexplored wilderness of North America. In 1607, Englishmen came to make this sort of thing happen in Virginia, and a year later Frenchmen did the same in Quebec. The early years were extremely difficult, especially in the brutal northern climate that the French encountered, and settlement remained largely defensive and frontier-like for some time. Furthermore, except for the landing in 1620 that would start up the world of New England, these ventures were also meant to be commercial experiments. Virginia had tobacco potential, and Quebec had fur. The foundations of two nations were little else than trading posts to begin with:
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| Part of reconstructed and surviving Jamestown. Like Quebec and Tadoussac, little of the primal origins of Jamestown remains intact, owing both to development and historic disasters. The place is definitely worth a visit, as with any historic site, because one gets to experience, with all the senses, the conditions and landscape that the people of history did. Compared to England and France, wilderness North America was a rough affair for European ideas of comfort. |
But before much time had passed, and people were making lives for themselves so far away from problems back home, people started arriving looking for something other than a piece of the game. People started putting down foundations for homes and experiencing something that was just as appealing as a fight for freedom: a quiet life. Many people who have come to call this continent home have done so not for reasons of power or belief, or both, but because they wanted something a little bit better than the possibility of having everything destroyed on an annual basis. Come by tomorrow as we conclude this series and see how this quiet life developed just a little bit differently in the United States and Canada, to see what impact politics did have on everyday life.
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