Conceived in Liberty (3 page)

Facts, of course, must be selected and ordered in accordance with judgments of importance, and such judgments are necessarily tied into the historian’s basic world outlook. My own basic perspective on the history of man, and
a fortiori
on the history of the United States, is to place central importance on the great conflict which is eternally waged between Liberty and Power, a conflict, by the way, which was seen with crystal clarity by the American revolutionaries of the eighteenth century. I see the liberty of the individual not only as a great moral good in itself (or, with Lord Acton, as the highest political good), but also as the necessary condition for the flowering of all the other goods that mankind cherishes: moral
virtue, civilization, the arts and sciences, economic prosperity. Out of liberty, then, stem the glories of civilized life. But liberty has always been threatened by the encroachments of power, power which seeks to suppress, control, cripple, tax, and exploit the fruits of liberty and production. Power, then, the enemy of liberty, is consequently the enemy of all the other goods and fruits of civilization that mankind holds dear. And power is almost always centered in and focused on that central repository of power and violence: the state. With Albert Jay Nock, the twentieth-century American political philosopher, I see history as centrally a race and conflict between “social power”—the productive consequence of voluntary interactions among men—and state power. In those eras of history when liberty—social power—has managed to race ahead of state power and control, the country and even mankind have flourished. In those eras when state power has managed to catch up with or surpass social power, mankind suffers and declines.

For decades, American historians have quarreled about “conflict” or “consensus” as the guiding
leitmotif
of the American past. Clearly, I belong in the “conflict” rather than the “consensus” camp, with the proviso that I see the central conflict as not between classes, (social or economic), or between ideologies, but between Power and Liberty, State and Society. The social or ideological conflicts have been ancillary to the central one, which concerns: Who will control the state, and what power will the state exercise over the citizenry? To take a common example from American history, there are in my view no inherent conflicts between merchants and farmers in the free market. On the contrary, in the market, the sphere of liberty, the interests of merchants and farmers are harmonious, with each buying and selling the products of the other. Conflicts arise only through the attempts of various groups of merchants or farmers to seize control over the machinery of government and to use it to privilege themselves at the expense of the others. It is only through and by state action that “class” conflicts can ever arise.

This volume is the story of the seventeenth century—the first century of the English colonies in North America. It was the century when all but one (Georgia) of the original thirteen colonies were founded, in all their disparity and diversity. Remarkably enough, this critical period is only brusquely treated in the current history textbooks. While the motives of the early colonists varied greatly, and their fortunes changed in a shifting and fluctuating kaleidoscope of liberty and power, all the colonists soon began to take on an air of freedom unknown in the mother country. Remote from central control, pioneering in a land of relatively few people spread over a space far vaster than any other they had ever known, the contentious colonists proved to be people who would not suffer power gladly. Attempts at imposing feudalism on, or rather transferring it to, the American colonies had all failed. By the end of the century, the British forging of royal colonies, all with similar political structures,
could occur only with the fearsome knowledge that the colonists could and would rebel against unwanted power at the drop of a tax or a quitrent. If the late seventeenth-century Virginia rebel Nathaniel Bacon was not exactly the “Torchbearer of the Revolution,” then this term might apply to the other feisty and rambunctious Americans throughout the colonies.

My intellectual debts for this volume are simply too numerous to mention, especially since an historian must bring to bear not only his own discipline but also his knowledge of economics, of political philosophy, and of mankind in general. Here I would just like to mention, for his methodology of history, Ludwig von Mises, especially his much neglected volume,
Theory and History;
and Lord Acton, for his emphasis on the grievously overlooked moral dimension. For his political philosophy and general outlook on American history, Albert Jay Nock, particularly his
Our Enemy the State.

As for my personal debts, I am happy to be more specific. This volume would never have been attempted, much less seen the light of day, without the inspiration, encouragement, and support provided by Kenneth S. Templeton, Jr., now of the Institute for Humane Studies, Menlo Park, California. I hope that he won’t be overly disappointed with this and later volumes. I am grateful to the Foundation for Foreign Affairs, Chicago, for enabling me to work full time on the volumes, and to Dr. David S. Collier of the Foundation for his help and efficient administration. Others who have helped with ideas and aid in various stages of the manuscript are Charles G. Koch and George Pearson of Wichita, Kansas, and Robert D. Kephart of
Human Events.
Washington. D.C.

Historians Robert E. Brown of Michigan State University and Forrest McDonald of Wayne State University were kind enough to read the entire manuscript and offer helpful suggestions even though it soon became clear to them and to myself that our fundamental disagreements tended to outweigh our agreements.

To my first mentor in the field of American history, Joseph Dorfman, now Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, I owe in particular the rigorous training that is typical of that keen and thorough scholar.

But my greatest debt is to Leonard P. Liggio, of City College, CUNY, whose truly phenomenal breadth of knowledge and insight into numerous fields and areas of history are an inspiration to all who know him. Liggio’s help was indispensable in the writing of this volume, in particular his knowledge of the European background.

Over the years in which this manuscript took shape, I was fortunate in having several congenial typists—in particular, Willette Murphey Klausner of Los Angeles, and the now distinguished intellectual historian and social philosopher, Dr. Ronald Hamowy of the University of Alberta. I would particularly like to thank Mrs. Phyllis Wampler of
Wichita, Kansas, for her heroic service of typing the entire manuscript in its final form.

The responsibility for the final product is, of course, wholly my own.

MURRAY N. ROTHBARD

December 1973

Until the close of the Middle Ages at the end of the fifteenth century, the Americas remained outside the ken of Western civilization. The Americas had been “discovered” and settled as many as ten thousand years before, by tribes crossing over from Asia on what was then a land bridge across the Bering Strait. By the late fifteenth century, one million of these “American Indians” lived north of Mexico alone, in diverse cultures and tribes scattered throughout the continent. As recently as the end of the tenth century, Norsemen, the great seamen of Scandinavia, spread across the North Atlantic and planted a settlement in Greenland. From there, the Viking Leif Ericson explored and settled “Vinland”—somewhere on the northeast coast of North America—about the year A.D. 1000. Norse objects dating from the mid-fourteenth century have been found in North Central America. But these sporadic contacts made no imprint on history, for the New World had not yet been brought into any continuing economic or social relation with the Western world: hence, its existence was not even known beyond the narrow circle of those few who, like the Norsemen, had actually been there. The same holds true for the possibility that French fishermen were already making use of the abundantly stocked waters off Newfoundland by the late fifteenth century. In neither case was Europe really made cognizant of the new lands.

Western Europe, during the early Middle Ages, was a stagnant and war-torn region, burdened by feudalism, a hierarchical rule based on assumed and conquered land titles, and on the virtual enslavement of the peasantry, who worked as serfs in support of the ruling castes. A great
revival during the eleventh century, inaugurating the High Middle Ages, was based upon the rise of trade between Italian towns that had remained relatively free of feudal restrictions, and the commercial centers of the eastern Mediterranean. The revival of industry and trade and the concomitant growth in living standards provided the necessary economic base for a flowering of learning and culture. The emerging commercial capitalism and growing civilization soon developed most intensively in the city-states of northern Italy, the centers of the vital Mediterranean trade with the East.

It was this “international trade” that began to break up the isolated, local self-sufficiency at subsistence levels that had characterized feudal Western Europe. The local feudal manor could no longer be a stagnant, self-sufficient, agricultural, and “domestic-industry” unit if it wished to purchase the products of the Middle East and especially of the Orient. The Orient furnished luxury goods of all kinds—silks, damasks, jewels, dyes, tropical fruits—but its great contribution was spices, the preeminent commodity in Mediterranean trade. Spices not only enhanced the taste of food, but also preserved it. For in those days, before refrigeration, spices were the only way to preserve food for any length of time.

The Oriental commodities were produced in China, India, Ceylon, or the East Indies, and transported by Muslim merchants—Indian and Arab—to the ports of the Middle East and the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean, where northern Italian merchants took over to transport the goods to Western Europe. Sales were then made, often by German merchants, at such places as the great “fairs,” notably the fairs of Champagne in northeastern France. Thus, pepper, by far the most important of the spices, was largely grown on the Malabar Coast of India, and from there taken to the eastern Mediterranean and thence to Europe. In exchange for these products from the East, Western Europe exported timber, metals, and especially woolen textiles, which had become its major commodity for export. From the late eleventh century, England became the major European supplier of raw wool, because of its advantages of soil and climate, as well as the advanced scientific management of its monastic sheep ranches. The English wool was then exported to Flanders for weaving into cloth. The cloth was exchanged for spices at the great fairs of Champagne, and then carried by the Italian merchants to sell in the Middle East.

Three main routes connected the West with the Orient. One was a virtually all-sea route from China, India, Malaya, and the rest of the Orient to the Red Sea, and thence up to Cairo and Alexandria. A second went up the Persian Gulf to Baghdad, and thence overland to Antioch or to various cities of the eastern Mediterranean. The third, a northerly route, traveled overland by caravan from North China westward to the Caspian and Black seas. This last route was made possible in the thirteenth century by the establishment of Mongol rule over this vast trading
area. In all of this trade, the northern Italians, as we have indicated, were predominant in Europe; they were the great merchants, shippers, and bankers of the Western world.

In the mid-fourteenth century, a severe blow was struck at this vital pattern of European trade with the Orient. This blow was the general collapse of Mongol rule in Asia. The end of Mongol rule in Persia destroyed the freedom of Italian—especially Genoese—traders in that critical terminus of the overland route. And the liquidation of Mongol rule in China ended Mongol friendliness to Western trade, which had permitted both commerce and cultural contact with the West; thereafter, traditional Chinese suspicion of foreigners reasserted itself. The consequent forced closing of the overland route doubled the price of silks in Europe.

Ordinarily one would have expected the Mongol collapse and the closing of the overland route to spur a search by northern Italians—especially the Genoese—for an all-sea route to the Orient. Indeed, Genoese captains by the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries had already sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar and south along the western coast of Africa in search of new spice routes, and had already discovered the Canary and Madeira islands. But a cataclysmic set of changes at the turn of the fourteenth century was to divert attention from such sea exploration and drastically alter the pattern of European production and trade.

The expansion of medieval production and trade and the concomitant cultural progress of Europe came to an abrupt halt at the beginning of the fourteenth century. As wealth and capital continued to accumulate in Western Europe from the eleventh century on, this growing wealth provided great temptations to Power to seize and divert that wealth for its own nonproductive, indeed antiproductive, purposes. This power loomed in the emerging nation-states of Western Europe, particularly in France and England, which set about to confiscate and drain off the wealth of society for the needs and demands of the emerging state. Internally, the state siphoned off the wealth to nurture an increasingly elaborate and expensive state apparatus; externally, the state used the wealth in expensive wars to advance its dynastic power and plunder. Furthermore, the states increasingly regulated and intervened in, as well as taxed, the market economy of Europe. The several nascent states of the modern era ruptured the harmonious and cosmopolitan social and economic relations of medieval Europe. A unity in free-market relations was sundered and ravaged by the imposed violence and plunder of the governments of the new nation-states.

Specifically, the new policy of statism of England and France at the beginning of the fourteenth century involved first the immediate expulsion and confiscation of the wealth of Jewish merchants, Italian bankers, and vital independent financial institutions, such as the crucial fairs of Champagne. For the longer run, the monies necessary to support
the state apparatus and army were derived from privileges and monopolies granted by governments to associations of merchants and craftsmen who aided in the collection of taxes, in return for the assurance of profits by excluding native and foreign competitors. The consumer was completely sacrificed to that producer who proved the best help in the collection of taxes, and incentives for initiative, inexpensiveness of product, and technical progress were destroyed. Detailed regulations and controls were established by government-privileged guilds to assure the collection of taxes and to prevent competition from more efficient producers within and without the guild monopoly. As a result of the growth and development of warfare, the state apparatus, monopoly, and taxation, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Europe were marked by stagnation, depression, and even retrogression.