St�rica
L A B O R A T O R I O
D I
S T O R I A
ALMA MATER STUDIORUM
Università di Bologna
Dipartimento di Storia Culture Civiltà
Fonti e
DOCUMENTI
storicamente.org
Laboratorio di storia
John Donoghue
Transatlantic Discourses of Freedom and Slavery during the
English Revolution
Numero 10 - 2014
ISSN: 1825-411X
Art. 32
pp. 1-24
DOI: 10.12977/stor580
Editore: BraDypUS
Data di pubblicazione: 30/121/2014
Sezione: Fonti e Documenti
Dossier: Angela De Benedictis (ed.), Rebellion, Resistance
and Revolution Between the Old and the New World: Discourses and Political Languages
Transatlantic Discourses of
Freedom and Slavery during
the English Revolution
John DonoghuE
Loyola University Chicago, Department of History
Three themes in the discursive history of freedom and slavery during the English Revolution
are explored here: the liberty of conscience, the liberty of the body, and the liberty of commerce. In the contests waged to define these liberties, contending factions of revolutionaries
refashioned their opponents’ concepts of freedom as forms of bondage. Although explored in
discrete fashion by historians, these discourses of religious, bodily, and commercial liberty
hardly operated independently from one another. Indeed, they became increasingly entangled
as the Revolution reached its imperial turn (ca. 1649-1655), accompanied as it was by the
rise of the slave trade in the West Indies and debates over the nature of «free trade» that circulated between England and the colonies. Ultimately, to recover the entangled nature of these
languages of liberty and their importance in the Revolution’s history of ideas, we must move
beyond England itself and into the wider Atlantic world to grasp the material contexts that
conditioned the Revolution’s discursive history.
Nel saggio sono esaminati tre temi nella storia del discorso su libertà e schiavitù durante la
Rivoluzione inglese: la libertà di coscienza, la libertà del corpo, la libertà di commercio. Nei
contesti in cui questa libertà vennero definite, fazioni contrastanti di rivoluzionari riformularono i concetti di libertà dei loro oppositori come forme di servitù. Gli storici hanno già in
parte analizzato questi discorsi di libertà religiosa, corporale e commerciale, che però non erano
indipendenti l’uno dall’altro. In verità essi si intrecciarono in maniera crescente quando la
Rivoluzione raggiunse la sua svolta imperiale (ca. 1649-1655), accompagnata come fu dall’inizio del commercio degli schiavi nelle Indie occidentali e da dibattiti sulla natura del «libero
commercio» che circolava tra Inghilterra e colonie. Perciò, per scoprire la natura intrecciata di
questi linguaggi della libertà e la loro importanza nella storia delle idee della Rivoluzione, è
necessario andare oltre la stessa Inghilterra e addentrarsi nel più ampio mondo atlantico per
comprendere i contesti materiali che condizionarono la storia del discorso della Rivoluzione.
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In recent decades, the so-called Cambridge School has produced some
of the most exciting work on the intellectual history of early modern
Europe. Historicizing the study of political thought, these scholars have
employed close linguistic analysis to deconstruct the competing and
often conflicting meanings of political ideas, stressing how such ambiguity reflects the diverse historical inheritances and contextual contingencies of discursive political traditions. In essence, the practitioners
of the Cambridge School have illustrated the fruitlessness of attaching
historically transcendent meaning to political concepts, which can be
understood in their various permutations in time and over time, but
never beyond time. Perhaps the best work done by historians working
in this mode has focused on the languages of liberty that flourished
in the age of the English Revolution (ca. 1640-1660). Their studies of
the Revolution have shown us how «liberty» was rarely understood or
discussed in its own right in the mid-seventeenth century. Instead, contemporaries constantly resorted to the language of slavery, a seemingly
self-evident concept, to define liberty through its antithesis. My discussion here focuses on three discourses of liberty in the wider discursive
history of freedom and slavery in the age of the English Revolution: the
liberty of conscience, the liberty of the body, and the liberty of commerce. Although all the revolutionaries prized these liberties, no conceptual
consensus existed regarding either their ideological substance or their
proper political applications. In the discursive contests the revolutionaries waged to rightly define these liberties, contending factions, predictably, applied the rhetorical device of slavery to reconfigure their opponents’ views of freedom as the harbingers of bondage. Crucially, these
discourses on the liberties of consciences, bodies, and commerce hardly
operated independently from one another, although their interdependence during the Revolution has attracted little scholarly attention. Indeed, they became increasingly entangled as the Revolution reached its
imperial turn (ca. 1649-1655), accompanied as it was by the rise of the
slave trade and debates over the nature of «free trade».
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To recover the history that explains both the entangled nature of these languages of liberty and their historical importance requires a historiographical intervention. As a growing body of literature has demonstrated, the English Revolution was not merely an English, British,
or European affair; it was most decidedly an Atlantic event. Although
most Cambridge School studies of the Revolution contain themselves
to European sources, its languages of liberty were not merely European
transmissions; instead, they were generated by the circulation of ideas
and experience within a wider historical geography that encompassed
the Atlantic world. The observation involves more than mere spatial
considerations. I argue here as I have elsewhere that broadening our view
of the Revolution’s impact from the national to the Atlantic yields rich
rewards for intellectual history; specifically, restoring the Revolution’s
authentic Atlantic context can help us recover the origins of abolitionist
thought, an event that most historians place in the eighteenth century.
Wedded as it was in the mid-seventeenth century to a transatlatic radical
republican program, abolitionism represented perhaps the most important breakthrough in the early modern history of ideas, although for
reasons discussed below, the existence of this breakthrough, let alone its
significance, has eluded the English Revolution’s most talented intellectual historians.
Samuel Gorton, a fiery-tempered clothier from Lancashire, braved the
Atlantic crossing to America in 1636 seeking «liberty of conscience in
respect to God» following his experience with religious persecution in
Old England. But on the afternoon of October 14, 1643, Gorton was
forced to endure what he thought he had left behind, as soldiers from
Massachusetts burned Shawomet, the village that Gorton had founded
in Rhode Island, to the ground. Five years before, Gorton and several
of his comrades had been exiled from Massachusetts for «sedition» after refusing to conform to puritan clerical orthodoxy. In their Rhode
Island exile, Gorton and his followers vowed to protect their liberty of
conscience by leaving religious belief and practice free from magiste-
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rial restriction. But fearing heretical corruption from such a «fountain
of error», the Massachusetts government deputed its militia to destroy
Shawomet and arrest Gorton and his confederates. Early that November, after a forced march in shackles to Boston, the Massachusetts Court
punished the dissenters to a year of bondage and hard labor in chains.
Although popular protest in the Bay Colony against Gorton’s «enslavement» forced his release months later, his fight against religious persecution was far from over; indeed, it could not be contained to the
colonies. To seek justice, Gorton transformed his colonial persecution
into an Atlantic event during the age of the English Revolution, fleeing
to London to plead before the Revolutionary Parliament for a colonial
charter to promote religious tolerance in New England.
While in London, Gorton wrote a pamphlet that he entitled Simplicity’s Defense. Published in 1646, the work recounted the Shawomet attack and the Boston trial. Here Gorton described how the government
of Massachusetts had acted arbitrarily, ruling as a law unto itself and
against the laws of both God and Old England. As «freeborn Englishmen in America», England’s ancient constitution protected the colonists’ property and bodies from wanton violence and warrantless captivity. But instead of living under «the laws of our native country (which)
should be named amongst them, yea those ancient statute laws», Gorton
observed that Massachusetts had made his community subject to «pretended and devised laws (which) we have stooped under, to the robbing
and spoiling of our goods, the livelihood of our wives and children».
He saluted Winthrop as the «Great and Honoured Idol General» who
by the «sleights of Satan» endeavored «to subject and make slaves» of all
those within and without his jurisdiction. But despite their appeal to
English law, as antinomians, Gorton and his followers believed that their
first duty was to pursue the completion of the Protestant Reformation
by remaining obedient not to puritan clerics and magistrates, but to «the
law that God had written on our hearts», which they discerned through
their consciences as guided by scripture and the holy spirit. «Now the
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rule is evident», Gorton wrote,
that if the ministration of justice and judgment belongs to no officer,
but to a man as a brother, then to every brother, and if to every brother,
whether rich or poor, ignorant or learned, then every Christian in a
commonwealth must be king, and judge, and sheriff and captain, and
Parliament man, and rule, and that not only in New England but in
Old, and not only in Old, but in all the Christian world; down with all
officers from their rule, and set up every brother for to rule.1
samuel gorton, Simplicity’s Defense Against Seven-Headed Policy (London, 1644), William r. staples, ed., (Providence: marshall Brown, 1835),
80-83
But finding them to be a company of gross and dissembling hypocrites, that,under
the pretence of law and religion, have done nothing else, but gone about to establish themselves in ways to maintain their own vicious lusts, we renounce their
diabolical practice, being such as have denied in their public courts that the laws
of our native country should be named amongst them; yea, those ancient statute
laws, casting us into most base, nasty and insufferable places of imprisonment, for
speaking according to the language of them; in the meanwhile, breaking open
our houses in a violent way of hostility, abusing our wives and our little ones, to
take from us the volumes wherein they are preserved thinking thereby to keep us
ignorant of the courses they are resolved to run, that so the vitiosity of their own
wills might be a law unto them; yea, they have endeavored, and that in public
expressions, that a man being accused by them, should not have liberty to answer
for himself, in open court… But the God of vengeance, unto whom our cause is
referred, never having our protector and judge to seek, will shew himself in our
deliverance out of the hands of you all; yea, all the house of that Ishbosheth and
Meribbosheth, nor will he fail us to utter and make known his strength wherein
we stand, to serve in our age and to minister in our course, today, and to-morrow;
and on the third day, can none deprive us of perfection… the Lord never gives a
name as an empty title, but according to the nature of the thing named, so that if
he speak, I have said ye are gods, of any besides himself, it is to declare, that they
have not only the name but the very nature of the god of this world; and therefore
he saith, they shall die even as Adam, who aspired and usurped the place of God…
1
Gorton 1644 [1835], 80-83.
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No man, no king, no court could rightfully claim to limit the divine
sovereignty of the discerning liberty with which God had endowed his
creation. When man-made authorities, such as the Massachusetts court,
ruled arbitrarily over their fellow creatures, they not only violated English law, they usurped the very sovereignty of God. In New England,
as Gorton wrote, such tyrannical hubris bound not only the consciences of the people, but their bodies as well. The radical’s days in chains
as a convict laborer made his testimony to bondage in the Bay Colony
personal.
The transatlantic circuit through which Gorton tendered his petition
and thus his radical reformation mission would impact the struggle for
liberty of conscience in Revolutionary England. Gorton’s foe, Edward
Winslow, a founder of Plymouth Colony and a commanding figure
among the political elite of New England, left for London to make
Massachusetts’ case against the radicals. Countering the latter’s argument that the Bay Colony had violated any colonists’ liberty of conscience, Winslow argued instead in his own pamphlet, Hypocrisy Unmasked
(1647), that puritan clerics and magistrates were the absolute champions
of liberty of conscience. It was proper, just, and necessary, he argued,
for godly ordained authorities to protect the people’s consciences, and
thus the commonwealth as a whole, from spiritual corruption and error;
to allow antinomians such as Gorton and company to persist in their
heresies would promote sedition and pollute the spiritual estate of the
commonwealth. As Winslow wrote in Hyprocrisy Unmasked, «the Civil Magistrate is the minister of God, a Revenger to execute wrath on
him that doth evil. And therefore a broad difference is to be put between
such evil doers and those tender consciences who follow the light of
God’s word». Here Winslow defined liberty of conscience not as Gorton had, as religious toleration, but as the liberty to worship God free
from corruption and error in an orderly commonwealth commanded by
godly magistrates. He bolstered this line of thought by drawing atten-
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tion to Gorton’s increasingly radical profile in London.2 While residing
in the City, Gorton had attracted the ire of more moderate puritans by
preaching to congregations of Levellers first in London and eventually
in the New Model Army. Antinomian radicals, the Levellers had fostered the most successful popular republican program of the Revolution,
organizing a mass movement based in London that forged links with
the provinces and the military. Their program strove for a religiously
tolerant constitutional settlement to the English Revolution based on a
democratic franchise. When Winslow republished Hypocrisy Unmasked
in 1649, he retitled it, The Danger of Tolerating Levellers in a Civil State.
In the new edition, Winslow cautioned the English that just as Gorton
and his like had seditiously undermined the authority of God’s anointed
in America, he and his Leveller allies would do the same vis-à-vis Parliament and the puritan clergy in England. Winslow did not exaggerate
the Leveller threat; mass meetings and unruly protests in London and
mutinies in the New Model Army, occasioned by petitioning campaigns gathering tens of thousands of signatures, forced the army high
command, at the behest of Parliament, to crush the Levellers, which it
did so through waves of arrests and executions.3
edward Winslow, The Danger of Tolerating Levellers in a Civil State (London, 1649) (from the title page)
The danger of tolerating levellers in a civil state, or, An historicall narration of the
dangerous pernicious practices and opinions wherewith Samuel Gorton and his
levelling accomplices so much disturbed and molested the severall plantations in
New-England : parallel to the positions and proceedings of the present levellers in
Old-England : wherein their severall errors dangerous and very destructive to the
peace both of church and state.
2
Winslow 1646.
Winslow 1649. For Gorton’s time in London and the rise and fall of the Leveller
movement, see Donoghue 2013, 170-197.
3
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Soon after its violent repression of the Leveller movement, the English
state, via the newly established Revolutionary Republic, embarked upon
its first concerted program of imperial expansion. The program included the colonial conquest of Ireland (1649), the armed subjugation of
Royalist colonies in the West Indies and the Chesapeake (1651), and a
victory over the Dutch (1652-1654) in the first of three seventeenth century naval wars against its most potent maritime rival. But the Republic
turned to legislation as well as force of arms to bring its Atlantic empire into being, most notably through the first Navigation Act (1651),
which opened up what its authors called a «free trade», a long-held goal
of the Revolutionaries, for all English merchants. Written chiefly by
Maurice Thomson and Martin Noell, two slave traders and absentee
plantation owners with estates in the Chesapeake and Caribbean, the
Navigation Act closed off the colonies to foreign trade and ended any
existing English trading monopolies in the nation’s Atlantic colonies.4
the navigation act (1651), printed in Henry scobell, A Collection of Acts
and Ordinances of General Use, Made in Parliament… in Two Parts (London, 1658), 2: 176
For the increase of the shipping and the encouragement of the navigation of this
nation, which under the good providence and protection of God is so great a means of the welfare and safety of this Commonwealth: be it enacted by this present
Parliament, and the authority thereof, that from and after the first day of December, one thousand six hundred fifty and one, and from thence forwards, no goods
or commodities whatsoever of the growth, production or manufacture of Asia,
Africa or America, or of any part thereof; or of any islands belonging to them, or
which are described or laid down in the usual maps or cards of those places, as well
of the English plantations as others, shall be imported or brought into this Commonwealth of England, or into Ireland, or any other lands, islands, plantations, or
territories to this Commonwealth belonging, or in their possession, in any other
ship or ships, vessel or vessels whatsoever, but only in such as do truly and without
fraud belong only to the people of this Commonwealth, or the plantations thereof,
as the proprietors or right owners thereof; and whereof the master and mariners
are also for the most part of them of the people of this Commonwealth, under the
For the Navigation Act, see Scobell 1658, 2: 176. For scholarship on free trade and
the Navigation Act, see Farnell 1964, 439-454; Armitage 2000, 100-124; Leng 2005,
933-954.
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penalty of the forfeiture and loss of all the goods that shall be imported contrary
to this act; as also of the ship (with all her tackle, guns and apparel) in which the
said goods or commodities shall be so brought in and imported; the one moiety to
the use of the Commonwealth, and the other moiety to the use and behoof of any
person or persons who shall seize the goods or commodities, and shall prosecute
the same in any court of record within this Commonwealth.
While all merchants saw commercial expansion as vital to English empire-building, the exact nature of the «free trade» clamored for in England and the colonies remained in dispute. As Dudley Digges wrote in
1615 «well-minded merchants like Hercules in the cradle» would make
England «a staple of commerce for all the world to advance the reputation and revenue of the Commonwealth».5 In 1641, at the outset of
the English Revolution, Henry Robinson urged Parliament to help the
nation’s merchants make «England the Emporium or Warehouse from
whence other Nations may bee furnished with forraine commodities».6
Commerce was clearly described as crucial for English empire-building,
but as its discursive context reflects, the Navigation Act of 1651 intervened in an international, seventeenth century debate about the nature of
imperial «free trade». Hugo Grotius sparked the debate in 1609 with the
publication of Mare Liberum. Here, the Dutch jurist argued that unlike
landed territory, the sea could not be divided into politically exclusive
dominions; it was in the interest of each state, and thus of humankind
in general, to leave the seas to open navigation and thus unrestricted
commerce.7 John Selden, taking the opposite tack in his 1635 book,
Mare Clausum, found that England’s imperial destiny lay in circumscribing English waters, both in Europe and in ports abroad, to English
commerce, to protect English sovereignty and the prosperity that such
5
Digges 1615, 2-3.
6
Robinson 1641, 20.
7
Grotius 1609.
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sovereignty assured when applied to England’s watery dominions.8
The English free trade debates of the Revolutionary era fell along the
ideological fault lines established by Grotius and Selden. In a 1651 pamphlet entitled The Advancement of Merchandize, Thomas Violet argued
that free trade should end merchant monopolies among English merchants and allow foreign merchants to trade in English ports at home
and abroad. He warned Parliament that «we must match the Dutch at
their own weapons, and give them as great privileges, as they have given
to our Clothiers [...] and by this way you will make England truly the
Empress of the Sea, when every Sea-Port-Town will be an Amsterdam».9
A year later, the Republic’s propagandist in chief, Marchmont Nedham,
sought to bolster public support for the Navigation Act and by virtue
the naval war with the Dutch by translating Selden’s two volume Mare
Clausum into English under the title, Of the Dominion, or Ownership, of
the Sea.
Free trade under the auspices of the Navigation Act pleased English
merchants who had wished to do away with pre-existing commercial
monopolies. The Act, however, proved equally unpopular with English
sugar planters in the West Indies, who had depended on Dutch merchants for many commodities; the most profitable of these so-called
commodities came in human form in the way of enslaved Africans.
Without Dutch slave traders, as the planters knew, the wildly lucrative
sugar boom on Barbados would never have exploded. The Council and
Assembly of Barbados responded to the Navigation Act with a Declaration that they published not in London but in The Hague, obviously
to reach their Dutch commercial allies in the most direct fashion possible. The Declaration flatly stated that the people of Barbados were refusing to obey the Act, particularly the clause forbidding «all Forraigners
Selden 1635. See Book I: xx-xxiii for the colonial and imperial implications of
Selden’s argument.
8
9
Violet 1651, 10-11.
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from holding any commerce with the inhabitants of this Island». For the
islanders, restricting commercial liberty in this way was economically
unfeasible. According to the Declaration, they had depended upon «the
Dutch for their subsistence». They would, furthermore, never «be so ungratefull to the Dutch for former help as to deny them or any other Nation the freedome of our Ports and Protection of our laws». Moreover, as
the colonists observed, the Dutch sold «us [commodities] much cheaper
to us then [the merchants] of our own nation». The Barbadians also felt
that the Navigation Act was as politically unjust as it was economically
destructive. The colonists had settled Barbados without any assistance
from a far off Parliament that proposed to rule over their commercial
lives even though the colonists had «no representatives no persons there
chosen [by them] to propose or consent». The Declaration concluded by
calling for «free trade both at home & abroad», a customary liberty that
they argued had long been enjoyed by all «true Englishmen» [Declaration
1651, 1-5].10
A Declaration Set forth by the Lord Lieutenant General (and) the Gentlemen
of the Council and Assembly (the Hague, 1651) [the Barbados assembly’s
declaration against the navigation act], 1-2
Shall we be bound to the Government and Lordship of a Parliament in which we
have no Representatives, or persons chosen by us, for there to propound and consent to what might be needful to us, as also to oppose and dispute all what should
tend to our disadvantage and harm? In truth, this would be a slavery far exceeding
all that the English nation hath yet suffered. And we doubt not but the courage
which hath brought us thus far out of our own country, to seek our beings and
livelihoods in this wild country, will maintain us in our freedoms; without which
our lives will be uncomfortable to us… By the abovesaid Act… [foreign] nations
are forbidden to hold any correspondence or traffic with the inhabitants of this
island; although all the ancient inhabitants know very well, how greatly they have
been obliged to those of the Low Countries for their subsistence, and how difficult
it would have been for us, without their assistance, ever to have inhabited these
places, or to have brought them into order; and we are yet daily sensible, what
necessary comfort they bring to us daily, and that they do sell their commodities
a great deal cheaper than our own nation will do; but this comfort must be taken
10
Declaration 1651, 1-2.
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from us by those whose will must be a law to us: but we declare, that we will never be so unthankful to the Netherlanders for their former help and assistance, as
to deny or forbid them, or any other nation, the freedom of our harbors, and the
protection of our laws, by which they may continue, if they please, all freedom of
commerce and traffic with us.
The planters also knew that English slave traders within and outside Parliament had written the bill in part to promote their own investments,
and so the planters regarded the Navigation Act as the height of corruption that had «enslaved» them to a regime of grasping regicides. Having
established their arbitrary government in England through the sword,
the Revolutionaries had violated the rights of free born Englishmen in
the colonies to protect the property they had accumulated through «free
trade», which they, in contrast to Parliament, defined as nationally unrestricted commerce. Here we see how partisans in the Navigation Act
debates used the same language of liberty to define conflicting policies,
a discursive pattern that also marked the struggle over liberty of conscience. But free trade discourse revolved around a common economic
interest that surpassed the historical significance of rhetorical patterns.
For both merchants in England and English planters in the West Indies,
free trade meant the freedom to trade slaves.11
Exploring the ideologically-conflicted discourse of freedom and slavery in
the age of the English Revolution becomes even more illuminating when,
in circum-Atlantic fashion, we move from England and Barbados and
back to Rhode Island. In 1652, as the debates over free trade and, by virtue, the future of the English slave trade, began in earnest, Samuel Gorton
steered legislation through the Rhode Assembly to end slavery and slave
trading in the colony. As the ordinance stated,
«whereas there is a common course practiced amongst English men to
buy negers to that end they may have them for service or slaves forever;
11
For the Barbados sugar boom and ensuing boom in slave trading to the island, see
Gragg 1995, 65-84; Menard 2006.
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for the preventing of such practices among us, let it be ordered, that
black mankind or white being forced by covenant bond, or otherwise be
set free as the manner is with the English servants». The law also prohibited colonists from selling their slaves by charging a fine, 40 pounds
sterling, for any who attempted such a sale; the fine was more than
twice the going rate for a slave in Barbados; in this way, the assembly
legislated the profitability out of the slave trade. The Rhode Island abolition law was the first of its kind in the early modern Atlantic, and it was
informed by knowledge of slavery and slave trading around the Atlantic.
The first clause of the ordinance makes this clear, taking note that it had
become «common course amongst Englishmen to buy negers to have
them as slaves forever.12
rhode island’s 1652 abolition law printed in John russell Bartlett, Records of
the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in New England, 1636-1663,
2 vols. Providence, ri, 1857), 1:242-243
Ordered, whereas there is a common course practiced amongst English men to
buy negers to that end they may have them for service or slaves forever; for the
preventing of such practices among us, let it be ordered, that no black mankind
or white being forced by covenant bond, or otherwise, to serve any man or his
assigns longer than ten years, or untill they come to be twenty four years of age, if
they be taken in under fourteen, from the time of their coming within the liberties
of this colony. And at the end or term of ten years to set them free, as the manner
is with the English servants. And that man that will not let them go free, or shall
sell them away elsewhere, to that end that they may be enslaved to others for a long
time, he or they shall forfeit to the colony forty pounds.
Importantly, five years before the abolition ordinance, Rhode Island had
ratified a religiously tolerant, republican constitution entitled The Acts
and Orders of Rhode Island. The whole body of the colony’s freeman
had met in their separate towns, where they participated in drafting,
deliberating, and ratifying the constitution, which rejected the ancient
constitutional mix of monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic forms of
government, stating explicitly «that the form of government established
12
Russell Bartlett 1636-1663 [1857], 1:242-243.
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is democratical; that is to say, a government held by ye free and voluntary consent of all, or the greater part of the free inhabitants». Although
democracy was commonly held to be the gateway to anarchy in the
early modern period, the Acts and Orders declared that far from having
democracy «prove an anarchy and so a common tyranny», the Rhode
Islanders believed that «popular» government prevented anarchy by making elected officials directly accountable to the people and the rule of
law, thus ensuring against the lawlessness of arbitrary government.13
While historians of republican thought in the English Revolution have
largely neglected the influence of colonial experience, contemporaries
did not, as we know from Winslow’s discursive conflation of Gorton’s
radicalism with Leveller republicanism. Putting the Acts and Orders
in Atlantic context is particularly revealing in this regard. The Rhode Islanders established their constitution in 1647, the same year that
the Levellers proposed their own, called the Agreement of the People,
which like its colonial counterpart, combined the ideals of religious toleration with democratic republicanism. Linking the radical republican
programs that unfolded diachronically in Old and New England, we
see how the Atlantic dimensions of Leveller ideology carried the struggle against political slavery into a protest against the rise of economic
slavery in the colonies. The historical significance of this process can
hardly be understated, as it undid the classical link between slavery and
republican liberty, with the former providing the material foundations
for the latter to thrive. Indeed, in the midst of the English Revolution’s
imperial turn, the classical inheritance of the slave-holding republic was
experiencing an early modern renaissance, one that would be affirmed
over a century later by the framers of the Constitution of the United
States. While many southern delegates to the Constitutional Convention sought to guard against their political «enslavement» by ensuring
their liberty in the property of their slaves, the colonial radicals of the
13
Russell Bartlett 1857, 1: 38-65.
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Atlantic’s first revolutionary age believed that the tyranny and vice that
flowed from slavery and slave trading would destroy republican virtue in
a reformed commonwealth.
In conclusion, the discourses of liberty of conscience, liberty of the body,
and commercial liberty evolved in a historically interdependent fashion,
circulating around the Atlantic world within the wider discourse of
freedom and slavery that characterized the political culture of Revolutionary England and its colonies. From the magistrate’s perspective,
Samuel Gorton’s liberty of conscience, once made a civil liberty, would
enslave the body politic to the arbitrary power of democratic seditionists
bent on the anarchic project of usurping the divinely ordained prerogatives of the puritan magistracy. But from Gorton’s perspective, the puritan magistracy’s discretionary power to enforce religious conformity
on behalf of the public good actually usurped the divine sovereignty of
the believer’s conscience. From the perspective of Gorton and the antinomian radicals of Rhode Island, only democratic forms of government
could protect the divine prerogative of universal religious freedom.
Complete liberty of conscience was critical for antinomians, as spiritual
experimentation provided the way to discern the true path to reformation. Magistrates, however, reconfigured spiritual experimentation into
sedition, producing in Gorton’s own words, a condition of political «slavery» that had led the court to claim «dominion over bodies» via hard
labor in chains as the ultimate means to preserve its own misguided
notion of religious liberty. Turning to the debate over the Navigation
Act, both sides used the term «free trade» to define their support for
antithetical imperial policies regarding mercantile competition. But the
contentious discourse that evolved from a shared political language nonetheless promoted a common, commercially lucrative goal: free trade
in any discursive guise would promote slave trading. Transcending the
rhetorical dialectics that wed English liberty to the slave trade via the
promotion of free trade, radical Rhode Islanders tried to abolish the slave
trade, viewing it not as a form of commercial liberty, but as a threat to
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republican liberty. In the end, without an Atlantic perspective on English Revolutionary discourse, recognition of such a milestone in early
modern political thought remains impossible.
Finally, the Atlantic context that illuminates the abolitionist dimensions
of radical republican discourse in the English Revolution also sheds light
on the limitations of the linguistic turn in the study of political thought.
To put a finer point on the matter, the real question here involves the
emphasis that historians of the Cambridge School of political thought
have placed upon language, as if it more than anything else can reveal
the mutability and historically transient meanings of terms like freedom
and slavery. Although it has contributed invaluably to our understanding of the history of ideas in the early modern period, the Cambridge
School has confined the study of slavery in the English Revolution to
the discursive realm, using it as a mere metaphor for the condition of
subjection to political tyranny. Yet the Revolutionary period marked the
rise of plantation slavery in the English Atlantic; not coincidentally, the
discourse of freedom and slavery in the free trade debate occasioned by
the Navigation Act reflected a turf battle over how the slave trade was to
be conducted in the West Indies. Colonial radicals in Rhode Island transcended this debate by passing an abolitionist law that conveyed their
belief that the tyranny of chattel slavery would corrupt the virtue of
republican liberty in a just commonwealth. To be grounded in any kind
of authentic reality, the history of political thought in the English Revolution, like the history of any political event, must take into account
material contexts as well the linguistic and high political. Without broadening the contextual universe of discursive analysis, we risk reducing
the history of freedom and slavery in the English Revolution to the
interplay of rhetorical devices, when it ultimately produced the original
attempt to equate republican liberty with the end of chattel slavery.
JoHn DonogHUe
Transatlantic Discourses of Freedom and Slavery during the English Revolution
17
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