The Freedoms We Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America

A brilliant and original examination of American freedom as it existed before the Revolution from the Smithsonians curator of social history. The American Revolution is widely understoodby schoolchildren and citizens alikeas having ushered in freedom as we know it a freedom that places voting at the center of American democracy. In a sharp break from this view historian Barbara Clark Smith charts the largely unknown territory of the unique freedoms enjoyed by colonial American subjects of the British kingthat is American freedom before the Revolution. The Freedoms We Lost recovers a world of common people regularly serving on juries joining crowds that enforced (or opposed) the kings edicts and supplying community enforcement of laws in an era when there were no professional police. The Freedoms We Lost challenges the unquestioned assumption that the American patriots simply introduced freedom where the king had once reigned. Rather Smith shows that they relied on colonial-era traditions of political participation to drive the Revolution forwardand eventually betrayed these same traditions as leading patriots gravitated toward monied men and elites who would limit the role of common men in the new democracy. By the end of the 1780s she shows Americans discovered that forms of participation once proper to subjects of Britain were inappropriateeven impermissibleto citizens of the United States. In a narrative that counters nearly every textbook account of Americas founding era The Freedoms We Lost challenges us to think about what it means to be free.