Jacksonian Freedom: Civics From A Toddler
If you’re like me, Andrew Jackson is one of your favorite jerks. He was a collection of truly impressive and admirable qualities wrapped up in an illiterate, short-tempered, stubborn, and genocidal package that historians claim audibly rattled due to the bullets in his body from all the duels he fought. I love telling Jackson stories and would like to start with one today as I find it both amusing and illuminating regarding the conception of American Freedom.
In 1811, Jackson was leading a coffle along a road that was part of native land but protected by the federal government due to a treaty. (A coffle is a line of slaves, usually tied together at the neck, for transporting great distances. Told you Jackson was a jerk.) At the time, trade and travel into native lands was monitored, especially when it came to slave trade, so Jackson was asked to show his passport and papers to a federal agent. This story has two reported endings, so I’ll give you both and you can pick.
1. Jackson pulled out a copy of the U.S. Constitution claiming that, as an American, it permitted him wherever his business took him.
2. Jackson displayed his pistols claiming they were the only passport he needed.
Whichever ending you care for, (I know which one sounds more Jacksonian to me,) Jackson claimed that his unwillingness to give proper documentation was because he viewed it as an insult to ask an American to gain permission to travel on public land. (Again, it was technically native land protected by the government.) For Jackson, American freedom meant the liberty to do whatever one wished. Any restriction on that liberty through regulation, governance, or paperwork, was tantamount to slavery.
This “Jacksonian Freedom” became a popular philosophy and informs much of the conflict leading to the Civil War and beyond. Its simplified, schoolyard version is “it’s a free country,” usually invoked after I’d explained to the child that they couldn’t just take my book and throw it across the playground. In either iteration, it’s a gross misinterpretation of a foundational argument of the American experiment.
As I’ve cited before, the argument for America made in the declaration is based on the work of philosophers like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They both try to derive government logically from square one, what they call the “state of nature”. It is the state of absolute freedom and equality, according to Locke. An individual has no requirement or obligation but to themselves.
BUT, as soon as there is another person in the world, there are regulations on that freedom. Because everyone is free and equal, any right an individual has, every other individual also has. And every individual has an obligation to respect the right of everyone else so that their right will also be respected. This is the seed of the social contract which Locke claims is the origin of government which is simply a system of securing that social contract. At its core, our U.S. Declaration and Constitution are attempts to codify that social contract.
As we all recover and reflect from the recent festivities of the 4th of July, it’s useful to question what the founders meant by independence, freedom, and liberty. I’d argue it’s not the Jacksonian, “I’m free to do whatever I want because I’m an American” interpretation. That’s anarchy. The founders were declaring freedom from a government that wasn’t protecting the social contract. They weren’t declaring freedom from the rules of the contract. They were declaring freedom for the people to participate in and change the contract as needed.
