How the free American mind was built

Step 1 of 6

Start with a problem rather than a principle. The ship is off course, the patent that authorized the voyage covers land hundreds of miles south, and some aboard have already said that when they go ashore nobody will have power to command them. They were right about the law. What forty one men do about it is the whole of what follows: they write down a government and sign it, before landing, because there is no other way to have one. Nothing here is a theory of liberty. It is an agreement made under pressure by people who needed something to hold, and its authority comes from nowhere except the signatures at the foot of it.

Step 2 of 6

Eighty years on, the argument from consent has built colonies, and one of them has legalized slavery in writing. The library holds that document: the Body of Liberties of 1641 protects a man from torture in one article and legalizes bondage in another. Sewall is a judge in that colony, and he takes the same scriptural grammar the founders of it used and turns it on their practice. He argues from Acts 17 and from the sons of Adam, which is to say from the premise the colony claimed to be built on. Read it knowing it did not work. It was answered, it did not change the law, and slavery continued in Massachusetts for most of a century afterwards. What to watch for is not its influence but its availability: the argument existed, in print, and was refused.

Step 3 of 6

Sewall lost because a colony can hold two convictions and act on the convenient one. Fifty years later Mayhew takes on the text that made refusal look like sin. Romans 13 tells Christians to submit to the higher powers, and it had been read for a century as settling the question. Mayhew does not dispute the text. He reads the apostle's own reasons for obedience, that the ruler is a terror to evil and a minister for good, and points out that a ruler who is neither has stopped answering the description. Watch the method rather than the conclusion. He is not arguing that scripture is wrong or that obedience is optional. He is arguing that the verse means what it says, and that what it says has conditions in it. That move is what makes lawful resistance thinkable.

Step 4 of 6

Twenty five years pass, and the argument stops being academic. Langdon preaches this in May 1775 to the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, six weeks after Lexington, to men who are already a government without being a legal one. Mayhew had established that a ruler could forfeit obedience. Langdon is speaking to people who have acted on that and now have to justify what they are standing up in its place. Watch where he puts the weight. The sermon spends less time on the crown's offenses than on the character of the people who will have to govern themselves, because his claim is that corruption, not tyranny, is what ends a free government. It is the least comfortable document in this path, and the only one addressed to men who had already won something and might waste it.

Step 5 of 6

A year later the question changes from whether to refuse to what to write down. Mason's sixteen articles are adopted in Virginia three weeks before the Continental Congress votes on independence, and they are the first place the argument stops being a sermon and becomes an instrument: not a claim about what men are, but a list a government can be measured against. Watch the difference between an article and an argument. There is no persuasion here, no scripture, no enemy named. There is also the contradiction the path has already met in Sewall, since the men adopting these articles held slaves. Read the first article closely and decide for yourself whether its wording is a general claim or a careful one.

Step 6 of 6

Everything the path has read is now in one document written for one purpose. The grounds of separation are the grounds Mayhew supplied, the list of offenses answers Langdon's question about when a government has failed, and the phrasing carries Mason's. It is not a fresh argument and it does not pretend to be. What is new is the audience and the risk: this is addressed to the world, signed, and treasonous. Watch the shape rather than the famous sentences. It is a legal document, laid out like a case: the principle, the facts, the attempt at remedy, the conclusion that follows. And it leaves the contradiction unresolved. The library holds Washington's general orders of 2 July 1776 and Abigail Adams writing to her husband on 31 March.