Topics:  Dissenting Voices

Throughout the nineteenth century, the political rhetoric conjoining national pride and liberty was open to critique, especially by abolitionists in Great Britain and the United States. British pride in "British Liberty" was assailed by abolitionist urgings: "LIBERTY, extend thy thund'ring voice / to Afric's scorching climes," while citizens of the United States were more than embarrassed by the gap between the founding rhetoric of political liberty and the status of slaves. It was no coincidence that the anti-abolitionist political party created in 1844 was called the Liberty Party. As Frederick Douglass proclaimed, "This Fourth of July is yours, not mine." Defenders of slavery had to insist on more labored definitions of liberty; John Calhoun, for instance, argued that "Liberty, . . . when forced on a people unfit for it, would instead of a blessing, be a curse, as it would in its reaction lead directly to anarchy-the greatest of all curses." Much later, other groups who felt disenfranchised within the United States would also critique the rhetoric of liberty, as did Saum Song Bo, a Chinese immigrant: "The word liberty makes me think . . . that this country is the land of liberty for men of all nations except the Chinese."

Another dark side of liberty was unregulated capitalism, attacked by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables. Even the Statue of Liberty could be understood as a figure of capitalistic excess, as an 1885 British political cartoon makes clear. And conservative authors saw that revolutionary fervor in the service of Liberty could make for injustices; British authors such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, and Anthony Trollope write of how the pursuit of an abstract ideal of liberty is at variance with individual liberty.