The freedom of speech is today threatened in the West to a degree not seen since the nineteenth-century classical liberals battled the censorious police states of the old conservative regimes.
The free-market liberals largely won that battle, yet everywhere that a ruling class knows it is both unpopular and outnumbered it will attempt to silence free speech.
A common argument used by those who cling to illegitimate power is the claim that free speech will encourage radicalism and fanaticism. By this thinking free speech can not be tolerated because it would encourage violence and contempt for the supposed rule of law. Speech that counters the approved narrative is dismissed as misinformation or as an outright incitement.
This was true during the absolutist regimes of the seventeenth century, under Napoleon’s police state, and in the Austrian Empire prior to 1848. The ruling class insisted that free speech could not be tolerated because, it was claimed, if people were allowed to come to their own conclusions, they will turn against the state.
Thus, censorship is always an indicator of a lack of regime legitimacy, and it’s why the current federal regime in the United States is now expending so much energy accusing dissidents and detractors of spreading “misinformation.”
Among present-day enemies of free speech, the most popular version of this age-old argument is probably the claim that free speech in social media and other platforms fuels “extremism.” What counts as “extreme” of course is defined by those who want censorship. From there, it is only a small leap to then claim that free speech fosters violence. Yet, those who actually value freedom have long seen this argument against free speech as what it is: a cynical attempt by those in power to stay in power.
Today’s campaign against free speech in America is certainly not the first, and one of the greatest and most succinct explanations of the importance of free speech—in an American context—was voiced in 1836 by the Unitarian Minister William Ellery Channing.
Channing’s speech would likely be totally forgotten by students of freedom and free markets today were it not for the fact that Channing’s speech is quoted at length in 1837 by the the great laissez-faire radical liberal William Leggett. Leggett was notable as a Jacksonian radical who supported free trade and a gold standard while opposing slavery, central banking, and tariffs. Historian Ralph Raico describes Leggett as one of America’s most significant laissez-faire political theorists of the nineteenth century.
In 1837, Leggett recounted Channing’s defense of free speech when Leggett condemned censorious slaveowners in the so-called abolitionist mail crisis of 1835.
In the summer of 1835, abolitionists mailed over 100,000 anti-slavery newspapers to slaveowners and others in Southern states. Powerful slaveowners then used political connections to convince Postmaster General Amos Kendall to declare the newspapers “inflammatory” and encourage local postal officials and their allies to seize and destroy these newspapers. Kendall gave a green light to South Carolina’s postmaster Alfred Huger who sought to suppress the newspapers sent by “miserable fanatics” to “inflame the whole country.” Local pro-slavery activists and postal officials set to work stealing the newspapers and destroying them. Some activists even attempted to hunt down locals thought to have accepted and read the newspapers, and who were supposedly guilty of harboring “insurrectionary” opinions.
Political Power against Free Speech
This is the context in which Channing and Leggett called for free-speech absolutism, and against the fear-mongering claims of “fanaticism” pushed by powerful defenders of the status quo. In Channing’s words we find numerous observations that are clearly applicable to the fight for free speech today. Leggett quotes a very lengthy passage of Channing’s speech in The Plaindealer, but here are some of the more trenchant sections:
The defenders of freedom are not those who claim and exercise rights which no one assails, or who win shouts of applause by well turned compliments to liberty in the days of her triumph. They are those who stand up for rights which mobs, conspiracies, or single tyrants put in jeopardy; who contend for liberty in that particular form, which is threatened at the moment by the many or the few. To the abolitionists this honour belongs. …
The world is to be carried forward by truth, which at first offends, which wins its way by degree, which the many hate and would rejoice to crush. The right of free discussion, is, therefore, to be guarded by the friends of mankind with particular jealousy. It is at once the most sacred and the most endangered of our rights. He who would rob his neighbour of it, should have a mark set on him as the worst enemy of freedom. …
How strange in a free country, that the men from whom the liberty of speech is to be torn, are those who use it in pleading for freedom, who devote themselves to the vindication of human rights! What a spectacle is presented to the world by a republick, in which sentence of proscription is passed on citizens, who labour, by addressing men’s consciences to enforce the truth, that slavery is the greatest of wrongs!
It is said that abolitionism tends to stir up insurrection at the south and to dissolve the Union. Of all pretenses for resorting to lawless force, the most dangerous is the tendency of measures or opinions [emphasis in original]. Almost all men see ruinous tendencies in whatever opposes their particular interests, or views. All the political parties which have convulsed our country, have seen tendencies to national destruction in the principles of their opponents. So infinite are the connexions and consequences of human affairs that nothing can be done in which some dangerous tendency may not be detected. There is a tendency in arguments against any old establishment to unsettle all institutions, because all hang together. There is a tendency in the laying bare of deep-rooted abuses to throw a community into a storm. Liberty tends to licentiousness, government to despotism. Exclude all enterprizes which may have evil results, and human life will stagnate. …
A casual, innocent remark in conversation, may put wild projects into the unbalanced or disordered mind of some hearer. Must we then live in perpetual silence? Do such changes make it our duty to shut our lips on the subject of enormous wrongs, and never to send from the press a reprobation of the evil?
Here we find much that reminds us of our current situation. Channing notes that enemies of freedom claim they must limit free speech in the name of human rights. Moreover, the censors claim they do not oppose free speech per se, but only when it leads to extremism. Only when free speech excites certain “tendencies” must we censor speech. This is as good and destroying free speech in toto, however, since, as Channing puts it: ”Almost all men see ruinous tendencies in whatever opposes their particular interests, or views.”
For Channing, the cry of “fanaticism” is a predictable strategy by those in power to put the words of their enemies beyond the pale of acceptable speech. To equate free speech with extremism or radicalism, therefore, is to declare free speech too dangerous to tolerate. Channing, however, dismisses this, declaring: “Exclude all enterprizes which may have evil results, and human life will stagnate.”
Leggett the Secessionist and Anti-Unionist
Having expressed his approval of Channing’s lecture, Leggett then concludes that it is an honor to welcome others like Channing, to the “brotherhood of … fanaticks and incendiaries.”
But, here we also find evidence of Leggett’s latent secessionism that—as we have noted here before—was a core component of Leggett’s political ideology. In his final comments on Channing’s words, Leggett goes on to remind his audience that freedom is preferable to political unity.
Leggett notes that pro-slavery fire eaters “continually hold up [secession and disunion] as a bugbear to intimidate the people of the north from the exercise of one of their most sacred rights [of free speech].” Leggett, however, is not dissuaded by threats of national disintegration and writes:
We cannot give up Freedom for the sake of Union. We cannot give up the principle of vitality, the very soul of political existence, to secure the perishing body from dismemberment. No! rather let it be hewed to pieces, limb by limb, than, by dishonourable compromise, obtain a short renewal of the lease of life, to be dragged out in servitude and chains. Rather let the silken tie, which has so long united this sisterhood of states in a league that has made our country the pride and wonder of the world, be sundered at once, by one fell blow, than exchanged for the iron cord of despotism, and strengthened into a bond fatal to freedom. Dear as the federal compact is, and earnestly as we wish that time, while it is continually crumbling the false foundations of other governments, may add firmness to the cement which holds together that arch of union on which our own is reared, yet rather would we see it broken to-morrow into its original fragments, than that its durability should be accomplished by a measure fatal to the principles of liberty.
It is not at all surprising that today’s political ruling class, like the slavedrivers of old, would condemn their critics as purveyors of misinformation and fanaticism. Some even claim that we must destroy free speech in the name of “unity” or “democracy”—by which they mean the status quo. Our reaction to this should be like Leggett’s. We ought to gladly embrace the dismemberment of the United States if those who rule over it would have us give up even one iota of the freedom of speech.
