The nation's founders: individual freedom versus the common good

¶ … Individual Freedom

When the English Parliament and Crown enclosed their views with undue fiscal and theoretical restrictions upon the citizens of the North American colonies, the men who would become known as America's Founding Fathers rejoined with a quick, powerful, rhetorical and later military response. These politicians cum philosophers approached the legal authorities with the disdain of an unjust ruler, purporting instead a policy of individual rights protected by a government that allows for the common good. To the leaders at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, the liberties of all men were clear; "They are entitled to life, liberty, and property."

In their actualization of these beliefs, they created a system that mixed the importance of individual liberties with the great need to protect the common good in a careful balance that is the basis of the American political paradigm.

The great thinkers of pre-Revolution America adopted a synthesized political ideology that made use of newly en vogue democratic approaches and common sense in the creation of a new republic. Both before and after July 1776, American republicanism melded the call for the protection of liberties that ought to be guaranteed the individual with the need to govern a large amount of people and protect their common good. In defining this balance, the ideas upon which they called included both their own colonial experiences and also were the derivation of particularly Scottish and English theories. The political, social, and economic systems for which they provided were based on the familiar aspects of popular sovereignty, liberty, equality, property, the common good, and representation.

The Founding Fathers' obsession with republican formulas is bound in the documents and lives of Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Franklin, Madison, and others. Each make use of texts external to the colonies, like Common Sense by Thomas Paine. Paine, a corset maker's son who turned down his apprenticeship for scholarly examination of the public realm, directly influenced Benjamin Franklin with his plea for American Revolution and a further republican discourse in The Rights of Man. "These are the times that try men's souls," he writes.

As the colonies struggled to insert themselves in the supposedly-involved government provided by the English Constitution, they found that they were unable to participate. "The foundation of English liberty," they conclude in their Declaration of Rights (1774) at Philadelphia, "and of all free government, is a right in the people to participate in their legislative council."

This right guarantees both the protection of the individual and that of the common good in the balanced format that colors of all American politics. They further define this balance in the next resolution, "That the respective colonies are entitled to the common law of England, and more especially to the great and inestimable privilege of being tried by their peers of the vicinage, according to the course of that law."

This careful balance had been previously established in the Resolutions of the Stamp Act, which guaranteed people the rights of liberties but also provided for the protection of the common good through a representative government. This is embodied in the first three resolutions:

I. That His Majesty's subjects in these colonies, owe the same allegiance to the Crown of Great-Britain, that is owing from his subjects born within the realm, and all due subordination to that august body of the Parliament of Great Britain.

II. That His Majesty's liege subjects in these colonies, are entitled to the inherent rights and liberties of his natural born subjects within the kingdom of Great-Britain.

III. That it is inseparably essential to the freedom of a people, and the undoubted right of the Englishmen, that no taxes be imposed on them, but with their own consent, given personally, or by these representatives.

The Resolutions go on to state that the Parliament has been non-compliant with the system, but the value of the system was not undervalued. Benjamin Franklin ensured that the rights of the individual man had to be protected by, with, and for a great good in his autobiography. "In our way thither," he wrote, "I projected and drew a plan for the union of all the colonies under one government, so far as it might be necessary for defense, and other important general purposes."

These general purposes include the rights later provided to the states, federal government, and those left to be protected for the individual in the American Constitution, but it is in their early synthesize in the burgeoning political philosophy that they are born.

"Tis not in numbers but in unity that our great strength lies: yet our present numbers are sufficient to repel the force of all the world."

With these words, Paine succinctly displays the heart of the American political philosophy into which all the other works are written. By guaranteeing a certain separation and allowing for the individuality of the states, the United States government does not usurp the liberties of the individual for the sake of the common good, but instead reverts their channeling through directly-elected local and state officials who then are able to properly lead the greater cause of American government politics, with threat of elected revocation of power should representation be neither sufficient nor accurate. These conclusions were most incorporated into the American will not in the work of its politicians, but in its very citizens. In Letters From An American Farmer, J. Hector St. John De Crevecoeur writes of the careful balance of freeman and his representative government, "What then is the American, this new man? ... He is an American, who, leaving behind all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds."