Liberty Chronicles

It is Reformation Day, and a particularly special one at that. 500 years ago today—as goes the legend—Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral. In Luther’s day, Halloween was All Saint’s Eve—part of Allhallowsmas or Hallowstide, a three-day, ritual-packed observance of Christianity’s early martyrs and first saints dating to the eighth century. The unconverted Romans looked at the first saints and saw a small clique of radical, fanatical, cannibalistic zombie/death-cultists, but by Luther’s time Christians were no longer hiding out in catacombs. They ran some of the world’s most powerful institutions. With power came the ability to transform folk beliefs and theology into political weapons, tools for statecrafting.

Further Reading

Godwin’s Lives of the Necromancers [insert PDF link when made available]

Marshall, Peter. William Godwin: Philosopher, Novelist, Revolutionary. PM Press. 2017.

Miller, Perry. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. Boston: Beacon Press. 1954

Trevor-Roper, H. R. The European Witch-Craze of the 16th and 17th Centuries. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 1969.

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Sheldon Richman can be found on Twitter @Sheldon Richman, readers can find his articles at the Libertarian Institute, and his books at Amazon.

Beard, Charles. An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, 1913.

Hyneman & Lutz (eds.) American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1760-1805, Two Volumes. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. 1983.

Morgan, Edmund. The Birth of the Republic, 1763-1789. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1956.

Richman, Sheldon. America’s Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited. Griffin & Lash, 2016.

Wood, Gordon. The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States. New York: The Penguin Press. 2011.

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In 1741, African slaves, Spanish sailors, Irish servants and soldiers, and antinomian Dissenters conspired to burn New York’s Fort George and murder the city’s wealthy and powerful inhabitants. They hatched their plot at John Hughson’s tavern and spread word to the surrounding countryside and down Long Island. At the sight of flames from the city, country slaves and servants should rise up, kill their masters, and move on the city where they would welcome a Spanish flotilla of conquerors and personal freedom.

Brown. Major Problems in the Era of the American Revolution, 1760-1791, Second Edition. Houghton-Mifflin.

Middlekauf, Robert. The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789, Revised Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005.

Nellis, Eric. The Long Road to Change: America’s Revolution, 1750-1820. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2012.

Paine, “Common Sense”

Rediker & Linebaugh. Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press. 2000.

Wood, Gordon. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Knopf. 1992.

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The colonists governed themselves and had little need for imperial management; colonists all over disparaged the idea of monarchy and Tom Paine smashed it to pieces; the world’s most powerful state lost its most vigorous appendages, and the settlers expanded all sorts of civil rights to new cohorts. We remember the triumphant victory of a new nation-state, and the gains made by some toward exercising a greater control over that state; but revolution bred counter-revolution.

“The Indictment and Trial of Sir Richard Rum”

Bushman, Richard. From Puritan to Yankee: Character and Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1967.

Rorabaugh, W. J. The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1979.

Smith, Barbara Clark. The Freedoms We Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America. New York: The New Press. 2010.

Young, Alfred, ed. Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. 1993.

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Mauritius is a rare example of a Creole culture from the start. There really aren’t many of these in world history. The island had no indigenous human beings and the first human visitors to the island were Muslims from East Africa and Arabia in the medieval era. There were no permanent settlements there until the 17th century when the Dutch arrived.

Bernardin de St. Pierre, Paul and Virginia, 1788.

Gordon, Daniel, ed. Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New Perspectives in Eighteenth-Century French Intellectual History. New York: Routledge. 2001.

Vaughn, Megan. Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius. Durham: Duke University Press. 2003.

Vink, Markus. “The World’s Oldest Trade: Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century.” Journal of World History 14, No. 2 (June 2003): 131-177.

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For two decades, New Orleans was a town with about 400 riotous, irreligious, desperate individuals. Jean-Baptiste, Sieur de Bienville always hoped the French Empire would take more interest in the area—it was the gateway to wider America, the key to the continent’s greatest river, its richest soils, and a highway for the Indian trade. If only it actually had people in it!

French, Douglas E. Early Speculative Bubbles & Increases in the Supply of Money. Second Edition. Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute. 2009.

Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 2005.

Ingersoll, Thomas. Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1716-1819. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press. 1999.

Code Noir or “Black Code” of Louisiana, 1724

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Barr, Juliana. Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands. Chapel Hill (NC): University of North Carolina Press. 2007.

Historical Documents Relating to New Mexico, Nueva Vizcaya, and Approaches Thereto, to 1773, Charles Wilson Hackett, ed. Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution. 1926.

—“Papers of Admiral Mateo de Vesga, 1620-1622,” pp. 119-137.

—“Reply of the Fiscal,” pp. 419-463.

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Along with Frederick Douglass, the most famous slave in history was probably Olaudah Equiano.  On Equiano’s Middle Passage, he shared space belowdecks with other Africans from possibly dozens of ethnic groups, speaking different languages. Once loaded into the ship’s hold, they were all outsiders.

Music by Kai Engel

Further Readings

Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800. London: Verso. 1997.

Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History. London: Penguin Books. 2007.

Vincent Caretta. Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man. London: Penguin Books. 2005.

Selections from Snelgrave: “Slavery’s Defenders vs. the First Abolitionists”

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Peter Leeson is the Duncan Black Professor of Economics and Law at George Mason University. His work often reads as forays into high weirdness, voyages to strange unknown countries penetrated only by the light of economic reasoning.

Leeson, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates. Princeton University Press. 2011.

WTF?! An Economic Tour of the Weird. Stanford University Press. 2017.

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Rediker, Marcus. Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. Boston: Beacon Press. 2004.

“The Saga of Pirate Captain John Gow”

“From Pirate to Tyrant: John Plantain, King of Madagascar”

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