A Stitch in Haste

For my obligatory Independence Day post, I'll point you to an interesting article from the the American Heritage blog:

Patrick Henry may or may not have said, "Give me liberty or give me death." But if he did, it was no big deal. Patriots had been using that particular refrain ever since the Stamp Act resistance ten years earlier.
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Most likely, he also played the slave card. White Virginians were terrified that British officials would soon declare freedom for all slaves who fought against their masters, and eight months later Virginia's royal governor did just that. To recruit soldiers, Patrick Henry at that point waged an intensive propaganda campaign based on the British offer to free the slaves.

Henry also speculated extensively in Western lands, and to promote his interests he of course was a rabid Indian fighter. One of his main complaints against the British was that they had closed off settlement in the West. Henry's personal perspectives — fearing slaves, hating Indians, craving expansion — were shared by most white Virginians, and it is highly unlikely that these did not figure in his thundering speeches intended to arouse anti-British sentiment.

Weird: Change that to "fearing gays, hating immigrants, craving expansion of Western democracy" and you have a modern radical neoconservative. Go figure.

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Libertarians tend to be quite familiar with the pesky problem of needing, ad nauseum, to debunk the myths of America's founding specifically and American history generally. The hopeless blather of "the Framers were Christian" for example. Or that "In God We Trust" was always the motto. Or that the Civil War was, initially, a war about slavery and not about abstract but important constitutional principles. Or that the Great Depression represents a failure of "unrestrained capitalism" rather than of interventionist government policies. Or that the New Deal solved it rather than prolonged it. And so on.

More from the article:

Americans, from the beginning, were both democrats and bullies. Despite the hesitancy of elites, most patriots at the time of our nation's birth believed people should govern themselves, and that is why they threw off British rule. They also believed they had the right, even the obligation, to impose their will on people they deemed inferior. These two core beliefs are key to understanding American history and the American character, and we do an injustice to ourselves and to our nation when we pretend otherwise.

The clash between unbridled majoritarianism and restrained, respectful libertarianism — the ultimate "war for independence" — wages on.

(Cross-linked at Blog Against Theocracy.)