“Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death!” (American Revolution, #2)
Why did the American colonists of the 1770s rebel against their British motherland? As we’ve seen in the first post of this series, they did not suffer from particularly bad material circumstances – quite the contrary, both if you compare them with contemporary Englishmen or the wider world. What sprung them (but not others) into action is their political philosophy, based on the Enlightenment. The ideas expressed there also made their way into the crucial writings of the American revolutionaries. What is special about America, however, is the central importance ascribed to liberty. We’ll close this post with some reflections for whom liberty was sought. As always, board games will feature along the way!
You can read all published articles in the American Revolution series here:
“Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death!”
The War of Independence: 1775-1776
The Enlightenment Basis
18th century political philosophy was based on the Enlightenment. Philosophers like John Locke, Charles de Montesquieu, or Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz postulated that man could use reason to find out how the world worked. Their understanding of human beings living together was founded on the ideas of the social contract (the thought that the governed need to be (or initially have been) in agreement with the government put over them) and natural law (the thought that before there are man-made laws, certain other rules which derive from man’s nature already structure how people live).
The political enlightenment came in two strands – liberalism and republicanism. Liberals focused on the individuals and their rights (especially to their own body, their autonomous conduct, and their property). Republicans emphasized on the pursuit of the common good for the community by the action of virtuous individuals. Traditionally, the American Revolution has been seen as predominantly influenced by liberalism, yet from the 1960s on, the vast inspiration which men like Thomas Jefferson or John Adams drew from republicanism (and for which George Washington would provide a shining example) has found scholarly attention.
Many enlightenment thinkers were endowed with bold optimism – the world was the best that was possible, and man was about to make it even better. Yet the American revolutionaries were grounded in an older anthropology, that of 16th century Protestant reformer John Calvin, noted for his moral strictness, and 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, the contemporary of the English Civil Wars: They held that men were evil at heart. Their base instincts needed to be tamed. That would be the task of the institutions to be created by the new country.
Foundational Documents
The 18th century was a time of frantic writing. Public figures spent a good deal of their time writing books, pamphlets, essays, and a myriad of public and private letters. It is thus unsurprising that the American Revolution also had a plethora of documents in which the revolutionaries made their case. Let’s look at the two most influential of them.
So far, we have dealt with very lofty ideas. These were even loftier for the Americans of the time, most of which had only very limited formal education (or none at all). They did have, however, an immensely keen interest in politics. The work which made Enlightenment thinking accessible for a broad audience (and related it directly to their lived experience) was Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, a slim pamphlet which began with laying out in plain language how man had rights distinct from those given to him by the government, and how the British government violated these rights in the American colonists. Now Paine did not stop, as almost all his predecessors had done, by blaming parliament or King George III’s advisors – he laid the blame straight at the door of the king himself. By this break with the most elevated and revered representative of the British Empire, Paine made his readers consider alternatives that went beyond the mere redress of grievances, representation in the British parliament, or an American parliament under British suzerainty. A full rupture, an independent America, and a country without a king at all were now on the table.
Common Sense was the most influential and popular pamphlet of its time – Paine himself alleged that there had been 120,000 copies printed within the first three months of its publication (when the American colonies had a population of around 2.5 million). Thus, it should not surprise that Common Sense has been featured in board games on the American Revolution:
Washington’s War (Mark Herman, GMT Games) portrays Paine’s writing as a relatively straightforward event which allows the American player to put down three PC (political control) markers. While this decreases in usefulness as the war develops (as more and more PC markers will be placed), it’s one of the best cards to draw as the American player in the first years of the war.
Liberty or Death (Harold Buchanan, GMT Games) takes the typical COIN approach of split event cards which may benefit either side: Either Paine’s writings have an effect on the populace of several cities which will shift their allegiance in favor of the American Patriots (and make it more resistant to British overtures by adding propaganda), or his pamphlet just provides the pretext for the British authorities organize a backlash which will strengthen the British militarily and financially (yet also at the price of Patriot propaganda). Note that in both cases cities will be the targeted spaces, as it was of course easier to get in touch with the newest political writings in a larger settlement which had better access to the outside world (and might multiply them in their local printshops).
Common Sense was short and impactful. Yet one piece of writing from the early American Revolution beats it on both accounts – the Declaration of Independence. As the war between Americans and British was well underway by mid-1776, the revolutionary leaders had given up on reconciliation through the king. Instead, they adopted Paine’s tack: The Declaration grounds its reasoning in natural law:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The Declaration then argues that government exists to secure these rights and that the people have the right to abolish it and institute a new government if the old one has become destructive to these rights. From then on, the longest part of the Declaration is a list of how these rights have been violated – once more, not merely by parliament or the king’s advisors, but by the king himself.
Thus, the Declaration concludes that the thirteen United States of America
“ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.”
That is powerful stuff, written in the masterful hand of Thomas Jefferson. If you haven’t done so, I encourage you to read the Declaration of Independence (it’s shorter than this blog post)! And if you have read it already, read it again. It will be worth it.
It’s also worth it to hold the Declaration of Independence event card in Washington’s War – probably the single most powerful event in the game. The American player gets to place one PC marker into each colony. That could be up to 13 PC markers (normal placement gives you one to three)! As with Common Sense, the event decreases in usefulness later when most of the spots for PC markers are filled already.
Once more, Liberty or Death adopts an ambiguous approach: Depending on who resolves the event (the American Patriots have the best chances, being first to choose if they are eligible), the event will either add Patriot forces (and propaganda), or remove them.
Liberty: The Central Value of the American Revolution
The Declaration of Independence alludes to “unalienable Rights” for which it lists three examples: “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Modestly couched in the middle is the most important one which, in the thoughts of many revolutionaries, might even trump the others: When Patrick Henry spoke against British encroachment on March 23, 1775, he closed his speech with “Give me liberty, or give me death!” – rousing not only his fellow Virginians in opposition to Britain, but also inspiring the name of one of the most popular board game treatments of the American Revolution.
Liberty had been an important value since time immemorial, but the Enlightenment changed what the English tradition had understood by it: Freedoms were not the result of a generous grant (usually by a monarch) to individuals or groups, they were innate to human beings (once more, a natural law idea). Thus, the founders of the United States were very sensitive to any violations of their liberty.
Liberty has become so synonymous with the American Revolution that it is even used as a stand-in for victory points in board games dealing with the subject: The solo game Don’t Tread on Me (R. Ben Madison, White Dog Games) uses liberty as the measure of American success – and, as the player represents the British side, too much liberty means defeat.
The cooperative game Witches of the Revolution (M. Craig Stockwell, Atlas Games) measures victory by increasing liberty and minimizing tyranny, for which the players need to perform missions of witchcraft – as you can see, the game is taking a few, er, liberties with history.
Both the liberal and the republican strain of Enlightenment thinking prized liberty, albeit with different interpretations: Liberalism extolled the freedom from external, especially state, interference, republicanism the freedom to fulfill oneself by acting for oneself and one’s community.
The two strands agreed that liberty had pre-requisites: Only someone who was economically independent, who owned property could be free. That was a more attractive argument in America than elsewhere, as the distribution of wealth was relatively equal there. Also, the assumption that only property owners were free could also be turned into a demand: Those without property demanded to be given land on the western frontier, so that they could be free as well, to become the kind of free-holding farmer whom many of the founders (including the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson) thought to be the foundation of the American republic.
Liberty for Whom?
That brings us the last consideration – for whom did the American Revolution seek liberty?
Of course, for Americans, who were supposed to enjoy the same liberties as Englishmen across the Atlantic (and, as the Revolution progressed, some more). As American society was more equal than its British counter-part, the liberties won also extended to a much larger group of people – whereas only one or two percent of Brits could vote for parliament at the time, more than half of Americans would win this crucial right in the American Revolution… that is, more than half of white, male Americans.
Women supported the American Revolution in crucial ways – from the mass movement of making clothes for the soldiers in the militia and the Continental Army to Martha Washington’s highly symbolic decision to stay with her husband at through the harsh conditions of the winter camp at Valley Forge. Yet calls for an improved status of women, as Abigail Adams exhorted Continental Congress, to “remember the ladies […] Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands”, remained unheeded. Women’s rights were not improved by the American Revolution, and the American women only won the suffrage more than a century later.
In 1776, slavery existed in all American colonies. Around 20% of the population was Black, and almost all Black Americans were enslaved. While both the British authorities and the American revolutionaries were committed to slavery, the clash between them offered opportunities to the enslaved: Some used the confusion of war to escape bondage, others took up arms for one side or the other for the promise of manumission after the war. George Washington, initially opposed to Black troops in the Continental Army, soon came to see their value.
No founder embodies the ambivalent stance toward slavery more than Thomas Jefferson, who owned 600 slaves during his adult life. And still, the same Jefferson included a condemnation of slavery in the initial draft of the Declaration of Independence, alleging that the king of England had instituted the evil of slavery in America – a sentence which was struck in the final version as it seemed too out of touch with the practice of slavery in which so many of the American revolutionaries voluntarily participated, not exactly being forced to do so by the king.
Yet the American Revolution had unintended side effects: The service of Black Americans on the revolutionary side convinced many white Americans of the injustice of slavery, and it was abolished in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania by 1800. And the philosophy, the language of the Revolution formed the backbone of the abolitionist movement which demanded liberty and independence for all Americans, regardless of their race (for example, Frederick Douglass in his speech “The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro”).
Finally, the American Indians got the worst deal from the American Revolution. They were explicitly not meant by the promise of liberty – in fact, the westward pressure of the American colonists aimed to dispossess them of their land and livelihoods. As the British colonial government had stopped westward expansion after the Seven Years’ War, many American Indian tribes allied themselves with the British in the War of American Independence (mirrored in Liberty or Death by the victory conditions: The Indians, just like the British, need Support (for British rule) to exceed Opposition; they also need to maintain their villages and limit the increase in Patriot forts.
The historical British defeat was theirs as well – as America won the western dominion to the Mississippi River in the war (and would later acquire claims to all land up to the Pacific from France and Mexico), Native-held land would be settled by American colonists and the American Indians subjugated, confined to reservations, and, in many cases, killed.
Games Referenced
Washington’s War (Mark Herman, GMT Games)
Liberty or Death (Harold Buchanan, GMT Games)
Don’t Tread on Me (R. Ben Madison, White Dog Games)
Witches of the Revolution (M. Craig Stockwell, Atlas Games)
Further Reading
Allison, Robert J.: The American Revolution. A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, New York City, NY 2015 is exactly what it says on the tin.
The two documents discussed in detail here can be read online. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense is here; the Declaration of Independence here.
On the central importance of liberty/freedom for the American political discourse since the Revolution, see Foner, Eric: The Story of American Freedom, W.W. Norton, New York, NY/London, 1999.
On the beginnings of American political thought, see: Hofstadter, Richard: The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, Knopf, New York 1948, and Bailyn, Bernard: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA 1967, online here.