Modern Age - Fall 2015 - 31

ARE WE ALL GERMAN NOW?

ment that did not suit his purposes. At the University of Virginia,
he advocated teaching the Anglo-Saxon language so students
would have access to an important model of a free society. Yet
Jefferson also proposed to ban Hume's History of England, which
argued with considerable success that Britain's institutions of liberty were modern rather than ancient. Jefferson, in short, was not
interested in the ancestral as such. He revered a usable past that
taught what reason showed to be political lessons.

T

hese considerations do not refute the claim that American
patriots believed they were defending the liberty of their
ancestors. The sincerity of this belief, however, does not make
it true. As Hume argued in the History, many of the precedents
on which Whigs relied were misunderstood, made up, or simply
impossible to verify. German liberty was a powerful myth that
grounded political arguments in an imagined past.
Consider Coke's distinction between Saxon/common and
Norman/feudal law, which was an important source for American
patriots. Aiming to restrict monarchical power, Coke often saw
what he wished to see, avoiding evidence that showed the two
sources of authority were closely intertwined. Blackstone urged
his readers to turn back to Caesar and Tacitus, circumventing
medieval sources. But both of these writers had their own reasons for offering idealized accounts of German liberty: for Caesar, to magnify his own military accomplishments; for Tacitus, to
provide a contrast to imperial decadence. American patriots, in
short, were engaged in a kind of literary recovery rather than the
defense of practices and institutions they knew firsthand.
Victorian advocates of the Gothic thesis tried to replace the
mythical and polemical aspects of German liberty with archival
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