I’m always thrilled when I discover history that has been lost from the curriculum of modern education.
The excerpt below is from an essay that chronicles the struggle between the Individual and the State in colonial America:
America was never the golden “land of the free” of the conservative-libertarian legend, and yet it managed for a very long time to be freer, in institutions and in intellectual climate, than any other land.
Colonial America did not set out deliberately to be the land of the free. On the contrary, it began in a tangle of tyranny, special privilege, and vast land monopoly. Territories were carved out either as colonies subject directly to the English Crown, or as enormous land grabs for privileged companies or feudal proprietors.
What defeated these despotic and feudal thrusts into the new territory was, at bottom, rather simple: the vastness of the fertile and uninhabited land that lay waiting to be settled. Not only relative freedom, but even outright anarchist institutions grew up early in the interstices between the organized, despotic English colonies.
“The Origins of Individualist Anarchism in the US” – Murray N. Rothbard
