CHAPTER FOUR

How should we define the political regime which, following the Dutch prologue and starting from the liberal revolutions, was established first in Britain and then in the United States? As regards the latter, Washington was in no doubt. We have seen him immediately after the achievement of independence celebrating the ‘wise and liberal government’ his country had given itself. Some years later, on the eve of the ratification of the federal Constitution, which consecrated a strong executive power, the general-president coined a kind of advertising slogan, declaring himself in favour of a ‘liberal & energetic’ government.¹ Yet if by liberalism is meant every individual’s equal enjoyment of a private sphere of liberty guaranteed by law—‘modern liberty’ or ‘negative liberty’—it is not difficult to perceive the rather problematic character of employing such a category. Even if we discount the problem of slavery, we know the condition of semi-slavery to which notionally free blacks were subjected.

We can ignore the population of colour in its entirety and still not thereby arrive at a different result. Those in the United States who were untainted by any crime, but interned in workhouses that were (as de Tocqueville himself acknowledged) an integral part of the ‘prison system’, did not exactly enjoy civil equality or modern liberty. And that is not all: such was the condition of the poor that, even in their capacity as witnesses, they were locked up in prison until the legal proceedings were over. And thus, ‘in the same country that the plaintiff is put in prison, the thief remains at liberty if he can pay a bail bond’. Of ‘three thousand examples’ which might be given, there was that of two young Irishmen ‘detained for a whole year while waiting for the judges to deign to hear their deposition’. We can now come to de Tocqueville’s unanticipated conclusion: we are dealing with laws consolidated by ‘customs’ and which yet can seem ‘monstrous’; they ‘have provided everything for the convenience of the wealthy and virtually nothing for the protection of the poor’, of whose liberty ‘they dispose cheaply’.²

But let us now pass over both populations of colonial origin and the poorest strata of the white community, who were denied not only political rights, but also ‘modern liberty’. Let us focus exclusively on the dominant class—i.e. on white, male property-owners. Did full civil and political equality obtain in this milieu? There are reasons to doubt it. One thinks of the ‘three-fifths’ constitutional provision on the basis of which, in calculating the number of seats due to the southern states, partial account was also taken of the number of slaves. Far from being a negligible detail, this clause played a significant role in the history of the United States: ‘four southern voters’ ended up exercising ‘more political power than ten northern voters’. Thus is explained the ‘Virginia dynasty’ that long succeeded in holding the country’s presidency.³ This was why Jefferson was branded the ‘black president’ by his opponents:⁴ he arrived in power thanks to the inclusion in the electoral result of blacks who remained his slaves. On the eve of the Civil War, Lincoln proclaimed polemically: ‘It is a truth that cannot be denied, that in all the free States no white man is the equal of the white man of the slave States.’⁵ This was a thesis repeated in 1864 by a French liberal (Édouard Laboulaye). With the ‘three-fifths’ clause, it was as if the US Constitution was addressed to ‘the folks of the South’:

Accused of breaching the principle of political equality within the dominant elite itself, the southern planters replied by declaring that, in actual fact, the principle of civil equality was infringed to their detriment. They regarded themselves as suffering negative discrimination, in as much as they were deprived of the freedom to transfer their human cattle to any part of the Union. They considered it inadmissible that owners of the instrumentum vocale should be treated worse than the owners of any other movable goods. As Jefferson Davis, president of the secessionist Confederacy, declared at the moment of abandoning the Union, the North was wrong to hamper in any way ‘property in slaves’, to act ‘to the prejudice, detriment or discouragement of the owners of that species of property’, which was ‘recognized in the Constitution’ and which, on that basis, should enjoy complete equality of treatment with other types of property.⁷ This exchange of accusations played a far from subsidiary role in the conflict that issued in the Civil War.

2. Absolute power and the community obligations of the slave-owners

From Constant onwards, modern or liberal liberty has been described and celebrated as the undisturbed enjoyment of private property. But slave-owners were in fact subject to a whole series of public obligations. There can be no doubt that the Glorious Revolution and then the American Revolution consecrated the self-government of a civil society composed of, and hegemonized by, slave-owners, who were more determined than ever not to tolerate interference by central political power and the Church. But it would be mistaken to equate the self-government of civil society, now freed from these fetters, with the free movement of the individual members composing it. Certainly, they could reduce the slaves they legitimately owned to chattels. In the New England of 1732, a master put up for sale a nineteen-year-old female slave along with her son of six months: they could be acquired (the advert announced) ‘together or separately’. There were no obstacles to bringing to market even adulterous offspring; a New Jersey master did this with the offspring of his relations with three black women whom he owned. Not by chance, slaves were frequently given names usually reserved for dogs and horses.⁸

There can be no doubt that the slave-master wielded absolute power over his legitimate ‘property’, but not to the extent of being able freely to challenge the process of reification and commodification that had occurred. In this case, the community requirement prevailed of keeping the barrier between the race of masters and the race of servants clear and fixed. Let us attend to de Tocqueville: blacks had been ‘forbidden … under severe penalties, to be taught to read or write’.⁹ The prohibition aimed to exclude the race of servants from any form of education, which was regarded as a serious source of danger not only because it was liable to fuel unacceptable hopes and claims, but also because it risked facilitating the communication of ideas and sentiments between blacks that was to be frustrated by any means. And yet, in the case of violation of such rules, to be struck in the first instance were white property-owners, who thus saw their negative liberty seriously restricted. The bans affecting slaves did not leave their masters unaffected. After Nat Turner’s rebellion, it became a crime in Georgia even to provide a slave with paper and writing materials.¹⁰

Particularly significant was the legislation that banned interracial sexual relations and marriages. Later, in 1896, when upholding the constitutional legitimacy of provisions for racial segregation as a whole, the US Supreme Court conceded that the ban on ‘the intermarriage of the two races’ might, ‘in a technical sense’, breach freedom of contract, but extricated itself from an awkward situation by adding that the right of any individual state to legislate in this area was ‘universally recognized’.¹¹ In fact, opposition was not lacking. The provision made in Virginia at the start of the eighteenth century, according to which not only those directly responsible for the sexual or marital relation were to be punished, was significant: ‘extremely severe penalties’ were prescribed for the priest guilty of having consecrated the interracial family bond.¹² And hence, along with ‘freedom of contract’, religious freedom itself was in some sense affected.

The absolute power exercised over black slaves ended up having negative and even dramatic consequences for whites. Take Pennsylvania in the early decades of the eighteenth century. The free black caught violating the ban on miscegenation (as it later came to be called)¹³ risked being sold as a slave. This involved serious consequences for the white woman, who had to suffer forced separation from her partner and the terrible punishment inflicted on him. Let us now see what happened in colonial Virginia immediately after the Glorious Revolution. On the basis of a law of 1691, a free white woman who had had a child by a black man or mulatto could be sentenced to five years of servitude and, above all, be forced to surrender the child to the parish, which then sold him or her as a servant for a term of thirty years.¹⁴ But there is more. Well-nigh insurmountable obstacles were placed in the way of recognition of the offspring of a relationship between an owner and one of his slaves. The father faced a tragic alternative: either to suffer exile from Virginia with his de facto family; or to agree to the child being a slave together with the mother.¹⁵ More summary was New York’s legislation, which automatically converted all children born of a slave mother into slaves.¹⁶ We thus find ourselves in the presence of a society that in fact exercised such severe duress over its privileged members, partly legal and partly social, as to choke even the most natural feelings. As has justly been noted, in enslaving ‘their children and their children’s children’, white people were in fact ‘enslaving themselves’.¹⁷

Further to clarify the entanglement between the individual property-owner’s absolute power over his human livestock and his subservience to the ‘master race’ of which he was a member, we can offer a final consideration. We have already noted the law in force in Virginia whereby it was meaningless to define and treat the killing of a slave by his owner as a ‘felony’. Yet in not a few states, on the basis of legislation that survived even after the Second World War (see below, Chapter 10, §5), a white man who had sexual relations with a black woman was guilty of a ‘felony’. Thus, it was permissible for an owner to flog and beat his female slave to the point of killing her—property right was sacred; but so strong was the control exercised by the class of property-owners and the community of the free over their individual members that only by exposing himself to risks of various kinds could he have sexual relations with her. Other than by legal provisions, the ban on miscegenation was enforced by the intervention in the 1850s here and there of vigilante gangs, engaged in spying on, intimidating and attacking whites tempted by the fascination of their female slaves and women of colour in general.¹⁸

While, in one respect, they were a form of property and a chattel completely at the disposal of their legitimate master, in another slaves represented the enemy within, against whom it was necessary to be constantly on guard. Certainly, to avert the threat recourse could be had to terror, ruthlessly and even sadistically striking at guilty individuals and transforming execution into a kind of terrifying educative spectacle for all the rest: the slaves in a particular area were obliged to witness the torment of two of their fellows, guilty of murder and condemned to be burnt alive.¹⁹ But that was not sufficient. Once again, preservation of the institution of slavery required heavy sacrifices even on the part of the dominant class. In 1741, in New York, mysterious fires fanned fears of a slave revolt: condemned to death and burnt alive were two blacks whose lives the master had in vain sought to save, testifying that at the time of the fire they were at home. Some years later, in the environs of the same city, a black, having confessed to setting fire to a barn, suffered the same torment. There was only one difference: the crowd of white spectators contrived to ensure that the flames were not extinguished too quickly, so that the spectacle and sufferings of the rebel black lasted as long as possible; his cries were heard three miles away. In any case, the master heard them very clearly: he sobbed loudly, because his slave was dear to him. But he was powerless, and the most he could do was to see to it that the torture was not prolonged any further.²⁰ Faced with the security requirements of the community they belonged to, individual slave-owners could not demand free disposal over their property.

Given the circumstances, these security requirements were a permanent given. We can make a general observation:

Specific penalties were provided for slave-owners who failed to inflict the punishments prescribed by law. According to a law in force in South Carolina, on her fourth attempt at flight a female slave was to be ‘severely whipped … branded on the left cheek with the letter R, and [have] her left ear cut off’. Until 1722, it was the slave-owners themselves who, directly or indirectly, had to provide for the execution of these operations.²²

In crisis situations the duty of vigilance made itself strongly felt. We have seen a ‘military service’ of whites patrolling day and night in Richmond in 1831. In such cases, observed Gustave de Beaumont during his journey in de Tocqueville’s company, ‘society arms itself with all its rigours’ and mobilizes ‘all social forces’, seeking in every possible way to encourage ‘informing’ and control; in South Carolina, along with the fugitive slave the death penalty awaited ‘any person who has helped him in his escape’.²³ Significant too were the results of the passage of laws on fugitive slaves in 1850. Subject to punishment was not only the citizen who sought to hide or help the black pursued or sought by his legitimate owners, but also those who did not collaborate in his capture. This was a legal provision which (as its critics put it) sought to compel ‘every freeborn American to become a manhunter’.²⁴

As well as slave-owners, slave society ended up affecting the white community as a whole. Precisely because, in addition to being chattels, black slaves were also the enemy within, abolitionists were immediately suspected of treason, thus becoming the target of a series of more or less harsh repressive measures depending on the gravity of the impending danger. Severe restrictions were placed on the press: in 1800 the slave revolt in Virginia was often ignored by southern newspapers; there was the danger of spreading the contagion of subversion further.²⁵ In 1836 the president of the United States (Andrew Jackson) permitted the postmaster general to block the circulation of all publications critical of the institution of slavery. Rounding off the gag placed on abolitionists, the House of Representatives adopted a resolution banning the examination of anti-slavery petitions.²⁶

Repression could take much more drastic forms. In 1805, denouncing writings liable to have an incendiary impact on slaves, South Carolina passed laws that provided for executing as traitors those who were in some way stained with the guilt of having stirred up a slave revolt or supported it. Georgia proceeded similarly.²⁷ Bound up with terror from above was terror from below. While it took less ruthless forms in the North (it aimed at preventing meetings and destroying the means of propaganda or the property of ‘agitators’), in the South violence against abolitionists took the form of a pogrom that did not hesitate to torture and physically eliminate traitors and their supporters, with complete impunity.²⁸ The situation in the South in the years preceding the Civil War was described as follows by Joel R. Poinsett, an important political figure in the Union, in a letter written by him at the end of 1850:

In fact, the contemporary historian who cites this testimony concludes that, through recourse to lynching, violence and threats of every kind, the South succeeded in silencing not only any opposition, but also any mild dissent. In addition to abolitionists, those who wanted to distance themselves from this pitiless witch-hunt felt threatened, and were threatened. They were impelled by terror into ‘holding one’s tongue, killing one’s doubts, burying one’s reservations’.³⁰ There is no doubt about it: the terroristic power wielded by slave-owners over their blacks also ended up affecting, on a lasting basis, members and fractions of the dominant race and class.

3. Three legislations, three castes, one ‘master-race democracy’

So how are we to define the political regime of the society we are examining? Are we dealing with a liberal society? The problem posed in connection with a figure like Calhoun is now presented in more general terms. At least until the Civil War, there were three different sets of legislation in the United States. In relation to slaves, things are immediately clear. In the mid-nineteenth century, the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass calculated that there were seventy-two crimes in Virginia which, when committed by a slave, carried the death penalty, whereas only two of them involved the same penalty for a whiteman.³¹

But special laws also affected men of colour who were notionally free—and not only because, in different ways depending on diverse local realities and in different historical periods, they were excluded from certain professions, from the right to own land, from the possibility of testifying in courts against whites or forming part of the judicial panel. There was a still more revealing circumstance: even ignoring slaves, the same crime continued to have very different consequences depending on the skin colour of the person responsible for it. Obviously, only free people of colour ran the risk of being reduced to slavery. This was the fate that befell those in Pennsylvania, who, in the early decades of the eighteenth century, were caught breaking the ban on miscegenation, or if they were not able to pay the fine issued to them for having traded with other blacks without permission.³² Certainly, the situation in the North changed with the abolition of slavery that followed the Revolution. But the complete control whites had over the magistracy remained in place. This was something highlighted by de Tocqueville, and its consequences were spelt out in the North as follows by a particularly courageous judge from Ohio: ‘The white man may now plunder the Negro, he may abuse his person; he may take his life: He may do this in open daylight … and he must be acquitted, unless [there be] some white man present [prepared to give evidence against the culprit]’.³³

Clear and insuperable was the barrier separating whites, the dominant race, from people of colour as such. In the words of Beaumont, ‘[w]hether slaves or freemen, negroes everywhere form a different people from the whites.’³⁴ This was an observation confirmed by de Tocqueville: ‘In Philadelphia blacks are not buried in the same cemetery as whites’. Segregation also obtained in prisons: ‘blacks were also separated from whites for meals’. And again: ‘in Maryland [a slaveholding state] free blacks pay taxes for schools just like whites, but cannot send their children to them’.³⁵ And (we might add) in mid-nineteenth-century Virginia, the law denied notionally free blacks ‘the right to learn how to read and write’.³⁶

We are in the presence of a racial state, articulated (according to the explicit declaration of its theorists and apologists in the South), into ‘three castes— … free whites, free colored, and slave colored population’.³⁷ Still in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the caste model was also evoked by some observers of the North. Referring to their own society, where slavery had been abolished, they spoke of a division into ‘Brahmins and pariahs’, as demonstrated by the racial segregation that operated at every level, from public transport to theatres and from churches to cemeteries, and which allowed blacks to enter hotels, restaurants and meeting-places for the most part solely in the capacity of servants. Yes, acknowledged another observer, who proposed to banish blacks from Indiana in order to spare them a yet worse fate, they were treated like ‘a race legally and socially excommunicated, as the Helots of Sparta—as the Pariahs of India—disfranchised outcasts; a separate and degraded caste’.³⁸

When we identify three castes in the post-bellum United States, we are obviously ignoring the Indians, who were regarded until the Dawes Act of 1887 as ‘domestic dependent nations’—that is, as a set of nations with their own particular identity, under the protectorate of Washington, and whose members did not form part of American society in the strict sense.³⁹ It should be added that the discourse of the three castes is not without a dubious ideological component: it tends to neglect the differences that remained within the white community, which could impact heavily not only on the material living conditions, but also on the civil rights, of the poorest strata. The Articles of the Confederacy, designed to regulate the new state that was being formed, explicitly excluded ‘paupers’ and ‘vagrants’ from the group of ‘free inhabitants’ (Article IV). But it is true that, when we examine the society as a whole, the main demarcations were colour lines and, within the black community, the line separating slaves proper from the rest—from ‘free’ blacks, who in fact lived the nightmare of being deported or enslaved in their turn. On the other side, the absolute centrality of the colour line galvanized (as the southern ideologue of the three castes pointed out) the ‘spirit of equality’ within the white community, with a fairly rapid disappearance of the most odious forms of discrimination.⁴⁰

In this sense we can speak of ‘castes’, as do distinguished historians of the institution of slavery.⁴¹ But registration of the naturalistic and racial rigidity of the relations between social classes tells us little about the nature of the political regime in the society under examination. On the basis of the history of South Africa, reference has sometimes been made to ‘segregationist liberalism’⁴² in order to explain the tangle of freedom (for whites) and oppression (of colonial populations). It is a category that completely excludes from the focus of attention the practices of expropriation, deportation and annihilation implemented against the native populations of southern Africa or the Amerindians. Even as regards blacks and other ethnic groups, such a category seems to refer only to the period subsequent to the abolition of slavery. Like the adjective, the substantive is misleading. On the one hand, the white community soon shook off censitary discrimination, long recommended and in fact regarded as insuperable by exponents of classical liberalism. On the other, the property-owner-citizens were subject to a series of obligations that it would be very difficult to integrate into the modern liberty theorized by Constant.

On other occasions, rather than to ‘segregationist liberalism’, reference has been made to ‘aristocratic republicanism’,⁴³ explicitly in connection with the pre–Civil War United States. Such a definition completely obscures the character both of the dominant aristocracy and of the plebs oppressed by it, and the entanglement between social classes and ethnic groups. Nevertheless, the substantive makes it possible to take a step forward: we are not dealing with property-owners interested solely in the enjoyment of their private sphere; they also led a rich political life. While far from being generally enjoyed, ‘modern liberty’ was scarcely the sole objective of the protagonists of the Revolution and the Founding Fathers of the United States. For Hamilton, the ‘distinction between freedom and slavery’ was clear: in the first case, ‘a man is governed by the laws to which he has given his consent’; in the second, ‘he is governed by the will of another’.⁴⁴ Or, in Franklin’s words, submitting to taxation from a legislative body where one is not represented signifies being considered and treated as ‘a conquer’d People’.⁴⁵ To be excluded from political decisions, to be subject to laws imposed from without, however reasonable and liberal, was synonymous with political slavery or, at any rate, represented the onset of it.

In fact, Calhoun, the author with whom we began when we posed the crucial question—what is liberalism?—professed democracy even more than liberalism; he was an eminent member of the Democratic Party of the United States. The category of liberalism should unify the two Anglo-Saxon countries. But Calhoun defined the Constitution of his country as ‘democratic, in contradistinction to aristocracy and monarchy’, and hence in contradistinction to Great Britain, where ‘title[s] of nobility’ and other ‘artificial distinctions’ that had been abolished in the North American republic survived.⁴⁶ Certainly, it was not an unqualified democracy, as might appear from the title of de Tocqueville’s book, which (as we shall see), in expressing itself thus, thought it possible to ignore the condition of Indians and blacks. Still less was it the ‘frontier democracy’ to which an eminent US historian, inclined to hagiography, pays homage.⁴⁷ Apart from anything else, the definition suggested by him evokes, in reticent, uncritical fashion, only the gradual expansion of the white colonists to the West, and hence only the relationship between two of the ‘three races’ referred to (as we shall see) by Democracy in America.

Calhoun was concerned to distinguish the democracy whose theorist he aspired to be from ‘absolute democracy’, guilty of wanting to ride roughshod over the rights of states and slave-owners.⁴⁸ Hence we are at the antipodes of the ‘abolitionist democracy’ dear to an eminent US historian and passionate Afro-American activist.⁴⁹ But then how are we to define a democracy which, far from wanting to abolish or even simply repress or hide slavery, celebrated it as a ‘positive good’? Reference has sometimes been made to ‘Hellenic democracy, based on the work of non-European slaves’.⁵⁰ But this definition too is inadequate. It overlooks, or does not accurately describe, the fate reserved for Indians. And it does not take account of another crucial element: absent from ancient Greece was the racial chattel slavery which, in the American case, was conjoined not with direct democracy but representative democracy. Corresponding to the modernity of the mode of production was the modernity of the political regime.

With reference in particular to the English colonies, another distinguished black theorist and activist speaks interchangeably of ‘white plantocracy’ or ‘planter democracy’.⁵¹ However, calling attention to but one narrow social caste, this definition commits the error of concentrating exclusively on the South, which was not in fact separated by any barrier from the North. This applies at an economic level: after land, slaves were the country’s largest property; in 1860 their value was three times greater than the share capital in manufacturing and the railway industry. The cotton grown in the South was far and away the most sizeable US export, and made a decisive contribution to financing the country’s imports and industrial development.⁵² At a political—constitutional level, the obligation to take part in hunting down escaped slaves and returning them obviously also extended to the citizens of the North. Finally, on an ideological level, we must not forget the racial apartheid in force in the free states. If the process of expropriating and deporting Indians is added to this, it is clear that, albeit with obvious differences between its two parts, the racial discrimination practised in the United States played a decisive role at a national level. Finally, although more adequate than those cited above, even the category of ‘white democracy’⁵³ has a limitation—that of not stressing the proud seigneurial self-consciousness of the community of the free and the explosive violence such a community could unleash against the excluded.

Following, then, the suggestion of distinguished US historians and sociologists, we should speak of a ‘Herrenvolk democracy’—that is, a democracy which applied exclusively to the ‘master race’.⁵⁴ The clear line of demarcation between whites, on the one hand, and blacks and Indians, on the other, was conducive to the development of relations of equality within the white community. The members of an aristocracy of class or race tended to celebrate themselves as ‘peers’; the manifest inequality imposed on the excluded was the other aspect of the relationship of parity established between those who enjoyed the power to exclude ‘inferiors’. It must be added that the equality in question was primarily a clear line of demarcation from the excluded. This is what was expressed by the slogan that presided over the American Revolution: ‘We won’t be their Negroes’! For the rest, conflicts and mutual charges of abuses of power and violations of the principle of equality were (as we know) not lacking within the community of freemen and masters.

After all, it was Josiah Tucker who had already come close to understanding the true nature of the republicanism for which he reprehended Locke and the rebellious American colonists: ‘all Republicans ancient and modern … suggest no other Schemes but those of pulling down and leveling all Distinctions above them, and of tyrannizing over those miserable Beings, who are unfortunately placed below them.’⁵⁵ And again: ‘he that is a Tyrant over his Inferiors is, of Course, a Patriot, and a Leveller in respect to his Superiors.’⁵⁶

4. Freemen, servants and slaves

However, if they can serve to analyse the society that emerged from the American Revolution, what help is the discourse of the three castes and the category of ‘master-race democracy’ when it comes to understanding the politico-social relations that obtained in England? At least until the abolition of slavery in the colonies, the situations on both sides of the Atlantic had not a few points in common—and not only because slaves and the slave market were far from absent from the metropolis itself. More important is the consideration that the British Empire should be analysed as a whole, without repressing the reality of the colonies. Its economic development and political and military rise owed much to the asiento—that is, to a monopoly on the slave trade. At the same time, those who derived their wealth from trade and property in human cattle were well represented in the British parliament. Hence we see the caste of white freemen and that of slaves operative here as well. Certainly, viewed from the London observatory, the third caste—notionally free blacks—was completely irrelevant. An initial difference between the two shores of the Atlantic thus emerges.

There is another, more significant one, which concerns the bulk of the metropolitan population. Within the American white community itself, there were small sections to which legal equality and even negative liberty were denied. This emerges from the description of de Tocqueville, who comments that it was the legacy of the ‘civil laws’ of England, clearly weighted in favour of the rich.⁵⁷ In the United States the group of whites denied these privileges was a rather small sector, which fairly rapidly disappeared. The very presence of blacks, whether slaves or semi-slaves, encouraged the spread of a sense of relative equality between members of the higher ‘caste’. The situation of the white community in England was very different. Here exclusion from the enjoyment of legal equality and negative liberty was much more widespread. Let us ignore Ireland, which even after the formation of the United Kingdom in fact continued to be a colony. Let us focus on England proper, starting with Locke.

He made a sharp distinction between three groups: men ‘by the right of Nature, subjected to the absolute dominion and arbitrary power of their masters’, or subject to a ‘perfect condition of slavery’,⁵⁸ who were the black slaves from Africa; then freemen; and finally, white servants who were blood relations of the freemen. A key paragraph of the Second Treatise of Government clarifies this:

Here Locke primarily had in mind the two figures of the black slave and the indentured white servant. As we know, even the second was subject to buying and selling, was in large measure a commodity, exported to America and regularly traded on the market where possible purchasers arrived alerted by adverts in the local press. It goes without saying that the master possessed an extensive right of punishment, even if not as unlimited as that wielded over the black slave. We can understand then the comparison with the servant in the Old Testament, who, although not subject to a ‘perfect condition of slavery’, experiences a condition that might by contrast be defined as ‘imperfect slavery’. This imperfect slavery was defined by Locke by the term of servitude or drudgery.

Within the British Empire three different legal situations coexisted—the first marked by liberty, the second by servitude, and the third by slavery in the strict sense. Notwithstanding the racial abyss that was now open, and which separated black slave from white servant, in England the latter did not form part of the community of the free in the strict sense. Even if different from that wielded by ‘a lord over his slave’, the power of ‘a master over his servant’, who was subject to the ‘ordinary discipline’ applied by the master within his family, was indisputable.⁶⁰ Significantly, although he was concerned to distinguish between slave and servant, Locke sometimes also used the second term to refer to the figure of the slave proper. In the First Treatise of Government, we can read: ‘those who were rich in the patriarch’s days, as in the West Indies now, bought men and maid-servants, and by their increase as well as purchasing of new, came to have large and numerous families’.⁶¹ As demonstrated by the reference to the property-owners of the West Indies and the property right they exercised over the offspring of ‘servants’, it is clear that the discourse here concerns hereditary slavery.

The tripartite division formulated by Locke also appears in Mandeville. In the first place, we have ‘the great Number of Slaves, that are yearly fetch’d from Africa’ to America.⁶² In England, on the other hand, ‘Slaves are not allow’d’, but free men can avail themselves of ‘the Children of the Poor’, of ‘willing Hands for all the Drudgery and hard and dirty Labour’.⁶³ Once again we encounter the three figures of the freeman, the servant and the slave. It is so difficult to confuse the second with the first that the similarities with the third leap to the eye: ‘the meanest Indigent part of the Nation’ is ‘the working slaving People’, which is eternally destined to perform ‘dirty slavish Work’.⁶⁴

Finally, let us turn to Blackstone. In celebrating England as the land of liberty, he stressed that there was no place in it for ‘proper slavery’, ‘strict slavery’, ‘absolute slavery’, wherein the master was endowed with absolute, unlimited power over the life and fate of the slave. This insistent clarification left room for forms of compulsory labour different from that to which blacks in the colonies were subjected. In the great jurist’s writings too an intermediate condition between liberty and slavery ends up emerging, a sort of non-‘absolute’ slavery, slavery not understood in the ‘strict’ sense. Along with slaves, ‘domestics’, ‘apprentices’ and ‘labourers’ were servants. We are dealing with ‘different types of servant’, each with its specific characteristics, but all brought together by the fact of being subject to servitude.⁶⁵ Active once again is the legacy of Grotius, for whom servitus was the general category for understanding and defining the character of work. In Locke, Mandeville and Blackstone what is new is the stress on the distinction between two types of servitus—that in force in the metropolis and that operative in the colonies. Thus, we pass from Grotius’ bipartite division to a tripartite division.

5. England and the three ‘castes’

But now, setting aside major authors, let us take a look at the social reality and ideology that characterized Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Far from the ‘vestiges of slavery’ referred to by Smith, the persistence of servile relations is very clear from the treatment of the poor and the possibility of disposing of their children as a res nullius in workhouses, in the army, in prisons, and in the recruitment of servants sent to settle the colonies. An economist we have already encountered, Wakefield, drew attention to ‘English slavery’ and ‘white slaves’ in 1834.⁶⁶ At this time authors of the most varied political persuasion compared slaves across the Atlantic with suffering workers in England: anti-abolitionists who echoed Calhoun-type statements; more or less radical currents that aimed at a more general emancipation of labour; more detached observers who confined themselves to registering the fact, like the economist we have just cited. And the comparison was established not simply by focusing on the spectre of death from starvation that constantly haunted the English worker. Certainly, this is an aspect that cannot be ignored: the number of poor people who, in order to avoid starvation, committed some crime in the hope of being able to survive as deportees or ‘galley slaves’, was not negligible.⁶⁷ But considerable attention was also paid to encroachments on a more specifically liberal freedom—namely, ‘modern liberty’. For this to emerge with greater clarity, let us leave behind the cities and industrial centres and move to the countryside to hear the rural labourers’ grievances:

Around twenty years later, the popular and radical Reynold’s Newspaper, condemning the ‘slavery’ that existed in England, listed the flogging of soldiers and sailors, the separation of husbands and wives in workhouses, the obligation of rural servants to request permission from their masters before they could marry, and the systematic sexual abuse to which ‘the wives and daughters of the poorer orders’ were subject.⁶⁹

Wakefield reported the cahier de doléances deriving from the countryside and considered them incontrovertible. Writing on the immediate eve of the abolition of slavery in British colonies, he believed it possible to distinguish three figures—‘freeman’, ‘slave’ and ‘pauper’—within the empire as a whole.⁷⁰ We are put in mind of the discourse of the three castes we have encountered in a theorist from the American South. In fact, in 1864 the Saturday Review (a periodical that circulated among the middle and upper classes) observed that the poor in England formed ‘a caste apart, a race’, placed in a social condition that underwent no alteration ‘from the cradle to the grave’, and which was divided from the rest of society by a barrier similar to that existing in America between whites and blacks. The respectable English periodical proceeded as follows:

We are—it is important not to forget it—in 1864. Many decades had passed since the Glorious Revolution and the birth of liberal England. And yet, if the situation was unstable and tending to change as a result of popular struggles, the reality of a caste society continued to make itself felt. Already abolished thirty years earlier in the English colonies, the caste of slaves was on the point of disappearing in the United States as well. Having been three, the castes were becoming two in number on both sides of the Atlantic: corresponding to the black semi-slaves of the United States were the white servants of England. A more or less rigid barrier continued to separate both from the caste of genuine freemen.

A sort of social apartheid seems to correspond to the racial apartheid. In eighteenth-century England we find Charles Seymour, Duke of Somerset, having his coach preceded by outriders who were charged with clearing the road in order to spare the nobleman the annoyance of meeting with plebeian persons and glances.⁷² Even a century later, a kind of segregation existed between the different social classes in English churches.⁷³ And the already noted cahier de doléances drawn up by rural labourers bemoaned the fact that even then the aristocracy resorted to a curtain to shield itself from any ‘vulgar gaze’.⁷⁴ When Senior visited Naples, what made him angry was the mixing of ranks: ‘In cold countries the debased classes keep at home; here they live in the streets’. Worse, they were so little removed from the upper classes that they lived in the cellars of seigneurial palaces. The result? ‘[Y]ou never are free from the sight, or, indeed, from the contact of loathsome degeneration.’⁷⁵

6. The reproduction of the servile caste and the beginnings of eugenics

How to ‘continue the race of journeymen and servants’?⁷⁶ Smith’s phrase reveals that social mobility was limited or non-existent. The heaviest, worst-paid work was entrusted to a stratum that tended to be reproduced from one generation to the next, and hence to a kind of hereditary servile caste.

The reproduction of this caste or race was absolutely necessary. According to Mandeville, a decidedly beneficial role was played by war. If, with its periodic massacres, it did not provide a remedy for excess male births, women, sought after by too many aspiring, competitive males, would become a kind of rare commodity accessible only to the rich. Society would then lose its re-supply of ‘the Children of the Poor; the greatest and most extensive of all temporal Blessings’. The hereditary reproduction of the poor destined to perform ‘the Drudgery of hard and dirty Labour’ would prove difficult or impossible.⁷⁷

The natural order, of which war was a part, spontaneously generated the race of semi-slaves that society could never do without. However, this supposedly spontaneous process must be encouraged by timely political interventions from above. According to Mandeville, access to education on the part of the ‘Labouring Poor’ was to be avoided at all costs: the ‘Proportion of the Society’ would be compromised by it.⁷⁸ The requisite cheap, docile and obedient labour force would risk disappearing. Other representatives of the liberal tradition invoked much more extensive intervention. For the purposes of generating a potentially perfect race of docile workers and instruments of labour, the concentration-camp universe of the ‘workhouses’ could prove useful. Locking up the children of delinquents and ‘suspects’ therein, one could (observed Bentham) produce an ‘indigenous class’ that would be distinguished for its industriousness and sense of discipline. If early marriage was promoted within this class, treating the offspring as apprentices until they attained their majority, the workhouses and society would dispose of an inexhaustible reserve of manpower of the highest quality. In other words, through the ‘gentlest of all revolutions’—a sexual revolution⁷⁹—the ‘indigenous class’, propagating itself in hereditary fashion from one generation to the next, would be transformed into a kind of indigenous race.

Sieyès envisaged a similarly ‘gentle’ revolution, and likewise for the purposes of producing a class or race of labourers as docile as possible. Like Bentham, the French liberal indulged in a eugenicist utopia (or dystopia). He imagined a ‘cross’ (croisement) between monkeys and ‘blacks’ for creating domesticated beings adapted to servile work: ‘the new race of anthropomorphic monkeys’. In this way, whites, who remained at the top of the social hierarchy as directors of production, could dispose of blacks as auxiliary instruments of production, or slaves proper, who would precisely be the anthropomorphic monkeys:

While, on the one hand, it was necessary to encourage the production and reproduction of a race of servants or actual slaves, on the other, it was necessary to limit, so far as possible, the unproductive, parasitic surplus population, the mass of poor who, far from creating wealth, devoured it like locusts. To maintain the demographic balance, Malthus called for a policy that postponed marriage and procreation among the popular classes; otherwise, nature would dispose of them with wars, famines and epidemics. In this respect the role of medicine was problematic. In 1764 Franklin wrote to a doctor: ‘Half the Lives you save are not worth saving, as being useless; and almost the other Half ought not to be sav’d, as being mischievous. Does your Conscience never hint to you the Impiety of being in constant Warfare against the Plans of Providence?’⁸¹ Some decades later, de Tocqueville hoped that one could finally be shot of the ‘prison rabble’ like rats, maybe thanks to a massive fire.⁸² Did the French liberal ‘dream of genocide’?⁸³ The claim is exaggerated. But there remains his harsh polemic against a ‘bastard charity’ that threatened order: ‘It is the philanthropy of Paris that is killing us.’⁸⁴

A general conclusion is indicated. The eugenic temptation runs deep in the liberal tradition. Not by chance, the discipline that took this name had its baptism in Great Britain and experienced extraordinary success in the United States.⁸⁵

7. The elusive liberalism of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

As in the case of the United States, we are compelled to pose a crucial question in connection with Great Britain: Was it a liberal society? Even after the abolition of slavery in the colonies proper, we certainly cannot speak of generalized enjoyment of the quintessential liberal freedom—modern liberty—by the United Kingdom’s inhabitants.

The Irish certainly did not enjoy it, being as they were (acknowledged de Tocqueville) constantly subjected to ‘emergency measures’ and at the mercy of ‘military tribunals’ and a numerous, hateful gendarmerie. In Castlebar, on the basis of the Insurrection Act, ‘any man caught without a passport outdoors after sunset is deported’.⁸⁶ In the press of the time, the condition of the Irish was often compared with that of blacks across the Atlantic. According to the judgement in 1824 of a rich English merchant, who was a disciple of Smith and an ardent Quaker and abolitionist (James Cropper), the Irish found themselves in a worse situation than black slaves.⁸⁷ In any event, the Irish represented for Britain what the blacks were for the United States; they were ‘two phenomena of the same kind’.⁸⁸ De Beaumont’s opinion found indirect confirmation from de Tocqueville. From Democracy in America we know of the complete deafness of the judiciary, monopolized by whites, to the legitimate complaints of blacks. A conclusion suggests itself, also indicated by evidence gathered in Maryland: ‘The white population and the black population are in a state of war. They never mix. One of them must give way to the other.’⁸⁹ The French liberal heard a similar observation in the island subjugated and colonized by Britain: ‘To tell the truth, there is no justice in Ireland. Virtually all the country’s magistrates are in open warfare with the population. So the population does not even have the idea of public justice.’⁹⁰ In both cases a cornerstone of the Rechtsstaat—the judiciary—was at war with a substantial part of the population.

On both sides of the Atlantic, laws that prevented or hampered access to education and outlawed marriage with members of the higher caste served to prolong the oppression of the blacks and the Irish. In Ireland, too, miscegenation was a crime punished with great severity; on the basis of a law of 1725, a priest guilty of secretly celebrating a mixed marriage could even be condemned to death.⁹¹ And in Ireland as well, attempts were made to obstruct the native population’s access to education. We can conclude on this point by attending to the words of a nineteenth-century liberal Anglo-Irish historian: British legislation aimed to deprive the Irish of their ‘property’ and ‘industry’; it ‘was intended to make them poor and to keep them poor, to crush in them every germ of enterprise, to degrade them into a servile caste who could never hope to rise to the level of their oppressors’.⁹²

In 1798, three years prior to the formation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the Irish numbered ‘about four and a half million—a third of the population of the British Isles’.⁹³ Accordingly, a higher percentage of people were to be deprived of their negative liberty than in the United States, where, at the time of independence, blacks made up one-fifth of the population. It must be added that, before and after the Glorious Revolution, Britain’s rulers treated the Irish, on the one hand, like Indians, to be deprived of their land and thinned out through more or less drastic measures; and on the other, like blacks whose forced labour might conveniently be used. Hence the oscillation between practices of enslavement and genocidal practices.

In Britain itself the popular classes saw their negative liberty seriously infringed, to the extent that they were assimilated in the culture and press of the time to an inferior ‘caste’ or ‘race’. But now it is appropriate to concentrate on relations within the upper ‘caste’. As we know, the American colonists’ rebellion developed out of protests against the negative discrimination they suffered by dint of their exclusion from the legislative body. At the same time, we must not forget that in eighteenth-century Britain the right to representation was a privilege granted by the Crown, so that even large industrial towns were excluded from the House of Commons, where, by contrast, boroughs which had virtually been abandoned, but which had the right to be ‘represented’ in London mainly by local nobles, were present. Bearing in mind that the House of Lords was the hereditary preserve of the landed aristocracy, a conclusion is dictated: in the case of Britain itself, not even relations within the property-owning classes were stamped by equality.

Equality was further compromised by another circumstance: only the second electoral Reform Act, put through by Disraeli in 1867, ‘effected the full political emancipation of Non-conformists’. Until then, significant forms of religious discrimination were in force:

Hence, on closer inspection, the non-conformists (among whom must obviously be included the Jews)⁹⁵ were deprived not only of political equality, but also of full legal equality. Only in 1871 did all universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, ‘throw open College Fellowships and University posts to persons of every, or of no, religious denomination’.⁹⁶

The argument with which Macaulay criticized the exclusion of Jews from political rights in 1831 is significant:

In a paradoxical argument against the forms of discrimination of which Jews were victims, Macaulay seems to echo anti-Jewish stereotypes, but in reality the meaning of his discourse is clear: it was absurd and inadmissible to seek to deny political and even civil equality to those who, economically at any rate, were already members of the dominant elite.

Finally, it should be borne in mind that, like the class that was the protagonist of the American Revolution and the establishment of a racial state, the English aristocracy in no way restricted itself to aspiring to a merely negative liberty. Some decades before Hamilton (and the American revolutionaries), in England Sidney had already declared that ‘nothing denotes a slave but a dependence upon the will of another’, or upon a law to which he had not given his consent.⁹⁸ Locke did not formulate things very differently, when with political ‘slavery’ he contrasted ‘liberty’ understood as ‘be[ing] under no other legislative power but that established by consent in the commonwealth’.⁹⁹ Again it was Locke who stressed the equivalence between the English and Latin terms;¹⁰⁰ and the latter clearly implied the participation of the cives in public life. The English philosopher argued along similar lines to the American revolutionaries, who not by chance appealed to him: he who wants to decide on his own, excluding me from the process of forming laws, may legitimately be suspected of ‘hav[ing] a design to take away everything else’, not just political ‘liberty’; he ultimately aims to ‘make me a slave’.¹⁰¹

Regardless of the position adopted by this or that theorist, the English aristocracy aimed to play, and really did play, a political role of the first order. In addition to the upper house, ‘the lower house of Parliament was essentially a landowners’ club’ until almost the end of the nineteenth century. The aristocracy exercised political power directly: ‘it was the landed elite, not a separate service elite, that was in control of public affairs’.¹⁰² It was a control that encompassed the judiciary and local government and which, above all in the countryside, was seamless. Virtually until the end of the nineteenth century, ‘the grandees and gentry were still the unchallenged authorities, responsible to no one but themselves.’¹⁰³

As in the South of the United States, the uncontested power of a social class in England did not preclude the imposition of restrictions on its individual members. The titled property-owner was required to respect a series of obligations, sanctioned partly by law and partly by custom. One thinks of primogeniture and the inalienability of property, as well as the endogamy that was fairly widespread within the aristocracy—a practice that once again calls to mind the ban on miscegenation in the United States. The members of the nobility ‘were concerned with voluntary service to the state, both locally and nationally, as civilians and as military men’. While they enjoyed their property and their wealth, patrician officers adopted the pose of ‘chivalric heroes’ required, when the nation was in danger, to exhibit ‘spartan and stoical bravery’.¹⁰⁴

How should we define the society we have been analysing? Once again, we encounter the problem that has dogged us since the beginning of this book: Can we speak of liberalism in connection with Calhoun’s thinking and the reality of the United States where he lived and worked? And can we speak of it in relation to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland? Given the dominant representation of liberalism today, what sense would it make to define as liberal a society where a considerable part of the population was subject to military dictatorship, where the popular metropolitan classes were at least partially excluded from negative liberty, where this type of liberty was by no means the ideal of the possessing classes, and where the principle of civil and political equality was limited among the latter in various ways?

8. Liberalism, ‘property-owning individualism’ and ‘aristocratic society’

In an attempt to overcome the difficulty encountered in defining eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British society, reference has sometimes been made to ‘individualism’ rather than liberalism; and the history of the intellectual tradition being examined now seems profoundly stamped with a ‘property-owning individualism’ or ‘possessive individualism’.¹⁰⁶ This definition has some legitimacy. In Locke, political power begins to be configured as tyranny, and hence violence, when it attacks private property (belonging to the dominant class); and it is then licit to resist such violence. The citizen, in fact the individual, takes back the power he already possessed in the state of nature, which consists in ‘us[ing] such means for the preserving of his own property as he thinks good and Nature allows him’.¹⁰⁷ The sphere of legality is the sphere of respect for private property, while violence is defined in the first instance by its violation.

Paradoxically, despite its critical intentions, the category of ‘property-owning individualism’ ends up crediting the ideological self-consciousness of the classes that arrived in power in England and America advancing the slogan of liberty and property. Marx argued quite differently. Capital denounced the ‘stoical peace of mind [of] the political economist’ and of liberal thinkers in the face of ‘the most shameless violation of the “sacred rights of property”‘, and ‘the forcible expropriation of the people’, carried out in England. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, in order to speed up the enclosure process, brutal methods were sometimes employed without hesitation: entire villages were destroyed and razed to the ground, so as to force the peasants to flee and transform common land into private property and pasture in the service of the textile industry.¹⁰⁸

In examining the category of ‘property-owning individualism’, we have hitherto concentrated on the adjective. If we now turn our attention to the noun, we shall find that it too proves rather problematic. The excluded were likened by the dominant class to instruments of labour, bipedal machines. In other words, they saw their quality as human beings and individuals denied. Certainly, the privileged insisted strongly on this quality, which they attributed exclusively to themselves. But is this individualism? Here, too, we find the modern historian aligning himself with the ideological self-consciousness of a social class and political movement he intends to criticize.

Rather than ‘property-owning individualism’, the categories applied to England by some leading liberal authors of the nineteenth century seem more apt. In Constant’s view, ‘England is, at bottom, simply a vast, opulent and vigorous aristocracy.’¹⁰⁹ The judgement formulated by de Tocqueville in the 1830s was no different: ‘Not only does the aristocracy seem more solidly stable than ever, but the nation leaves the government, seemingly without any signs of disapproval, to a very small number of families’, an ‘aristocracy’ primarily based on ‘birth’.¹¹⁰ Hence we are dealing with an ‘aristocratic community’ characterized by the domination of ‘a small number of powerful and wealthy citizens’.¹¹¹ Besides, it was Disraeli himself who criticized the Whig Party, which long dominated the country that emerged from the Glorious Revolution, for having aimed to establish an aristocracy and oligarchy on the Venetian model.¹¹²

9. ‘Master-race democracy’ between the United States and England

A question remains unanswered: Albeit intrinsically aristocratic, was England nevertheless a liberal society? Constant was in no doubt: it was the country where ‘social differences are most respected’ (wholly to the advantage of the aristocracy), but where, at the same time, ‘the rights of each man are most guaranteed’.¹¹³ This was also de Tocqueville’s opinion, but only after 1848, once anxiety about the socialist and Bonapartist drift of France had eclipsed any other consideration. ‘[T]he aristocratic constitution of English society’ was incontestable, and yet it was still the ‘wealthiest and freest country’.¹¹⁴

Prior to the fall of the July Monarchy, by contrast, de Tocqueville had his doubts and reservations. It was necessary to distinguish between ‘two different forms of liberty’. One should not confuse ‘the democratic and, dare I say it, correct conception of liberty’ with the ‘aristocratic conception of liberty’, understood not as ‘common right’ but as ‘privilege’. The latter prevailed in England, as in ‘aristocratic societies’ in general, with the result that there was no place for ‘general liberty’.¹¹⁵ Democracy in America referred and subscribed to the observation of a US citizen who had journeyed extensively in Europe: ‘The English treat their servants with a stiffness and imperiousness of manner which surprises us.’¹¹⁶ Not that the pathos of liberty was absent among those who adopted the stance of absolute masters. On the contrary: ‘It can happen that the love of liberty is all the more alive among some the less one encounters guarantees of liberty for all. The rarer it is, the exception in such cases is all the more precious.’ This aristocratic conception of liberty produces, among those who have been thus educated, an exalted sense of their individual value and a passionate taste for independence.¹¹⁷

Regardless of the value judgement, which is the converse, we are put in mind of Burke’s well-known observation: freedom appears even ‘more noble and more liberal’ to slave-masters. Should we equate England with slaveholding Virginia? In fact, points in common were not wanting, as emerges from a reading of de Tocqueville. He observed that in the United States whites refused to recognize ‘the common features of humanity’ in blacks.¹¹⁸ But in England, too, inequalities were so marked and insuperable that ‘each class assumes the aspect of a distinct race’; ‘general ideas’ were lacking, starting precisely with the idea of humanity.¹¹⁹

At this point, de Tocqueville was concerned to distinguish American democracy from the aristocracy predominant in England. However, on several occasions his analysis ended up drawing attention to the similarities between the two societies. What took the form of class relations on one side of the Atlantic presented itself as race relations on the other. In the case of England, we can speak of liberal society in the same way that Burke spoke of liberal society in connection with the Virginia and Poland of his time. An essential point remains: often excluded from the enjoyment of civil rights and negative liberty in England itself, the popular classes, by de Tocqueville’s indirect but all the more significant admission, continued to be separated from the upper class or caste by a gulf that calls to mind the one obtaining in a racial state.

In this sense, it can be said that for some time even the society which emerged in England from the Glorious Revolution was configured as a sort of ‘master-race democracy’, on condition that this category is not understood in a purely ethnic sense. On this side of the Atlantic, too, an insurmountable barrier separated the community of the free and masters from the mass of servants, not fortuitously compared by Locke to ‘natives’. And far from being satisfied with negative liberty, the dominant aristocracy cultivated the ideal of active participation in political life, cultivating ‘republican’ ideals. Several influential contemporary interpreters base their arguments on this, when referring to a ‘neo-Roman’ vision or ‘Machiavellian moment’.¹²⁰ And again we face the danger of inadvertent transfiguration: these two categories highlight the pathos of free, egalitarian participation in public life, but end up passing in silence over the macroscopic exclusion clauses presupposed by such pathos. The ideal of a rich public life, of ‘neo-Roman’ or ‘Machiavellian’ character, is indeed present in an author like Fletcher, who on the one hand declared himself ‘republican in principle’, while on the other he advocated slavery for vagrants. Locke can be assimilated to such a milieu. He declared in favour of black slavery in the colonies and ‘drudgery’ for wage-labourers in the metropolis. At the same time, with his focus on the aristocracy he developed a pathos of the Commonwealth and the civitas, which echoes the republican models of antiquity. This, at least, was the opinion of Josiah Tucker, who identified and denounced Locke as a ‘republican Whig’ and supporter of slavery.¹²¹

But perhaps the author who in England best expressed the ideal of ‘master-race democracy’ was Sidney. His insistence on the equality of free men was very marked: ‘the equality in which men are born is so perfect, that no man will suffer his natural liberty to be abridged, except others do the like’. Definitive is his condemnation of political slavery, inherent not only in absolute monarchy, but also in any political regime that claimed to subject the freeman to laws decided without his consent. But this pathos of liberty implied the demand for the master’s right to be ‘judge’ of his own servant without outside interference.¹²² One should not lose sight of the fact that ‘in many places (even by the law of God) the master hath a power of life and death over his servant’.¹²³ It was understood that ‘the base and effeminate Asiaticks and Africans’, incapable of understanding the value of ‘liberty’, were rightly regarded by Aristotle as ‘slaves by nature’ and ‘little different from beasts’.¹²⁴ Not by chance—together with Locke, Fletcher and Burgh—Sidney was indicated by Jefferson as a leading authority for understanding ‘the general principles of liberty’ that inspired the United States.¹²⁵

Tucker also conjoined Locke and Sidney, but this time critically. He further pointed out that Sidney was an admirer of ‘Polish liberty’¹²⁶ (and of a country where serfdom in its harshest form, to which peasants were subjected, was intertwined with the rich political life of the aristocracy that dominated the Diet), and paid homage to ‘republican liberty’ (see below, Chapter 5, §2). Also expressing himself in flattering terms about Poland, as well as the ‘southern colonies’ of America, was Burke, who not by chance became the tutelary deity of the slaveholding South. Admiration for a regime of republican liberty founded on the slavery or servitude of a considerable proportion of the population, for a ‘master-race democracy’, was well represented in English liberalism. The authors expressing such positions could in their turn count on widespread sympathy across the Atlantic.