Chain of Liberty is a site dedicated to the preservation of law and liberty in America. The name is inspired directly by a quote from Thomas Jefferson, who said concerning the Constitution: “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” He said this in a policy statement against the Alien & Sedition Acts, statutes that he, James Madison, and John Marshall all considered to be unconstitutional. The Constitution is the chain that is meant to hold down the power of the federal government so that liberty might flourish.
The Founders understood that true liberty does not mean just doing whatever you want; there are natural limits on liberty, and beyond those limits you cross over to license. John Marshall, the greatest Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, insightfully commented on the precarious nature of liberty:
“The Genius of the Constitution and the opinions of the people of the United States cannot be overruled by those who administer the government. . . [That] liberty is sometimes carried to excess, that it has sometimes degenerated into licentiousness, is seen and lamented; but the remedy has not yet been discovered. Perhaps it is an evil inseparable from the good to which it is allied, perhaps it is a shoot which cannot be stripped from the stalk without wounding vitally the plant from which it is torn.”
The Founders knew that the internal checks of the Constitution would never work if the virtue of the people was not sustained. As John Adams observed: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Edmund Burke, a man who the Founders admired for his defense to Parliament of America’s grievances against the Crown, eloquently expressed the need for virtue:
“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon the will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
The Father of the Constitution, James Madison, wove together the Constitution and this need to control human nature in a famed passage of Federalist 51:
“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”
Thus, the “chain of liberty” is not just the Constitution of government, but also the “eternal constitution” which sustains the people’s virtue. The chain is meant to restrain both the power of the government and the immorality of the people so that we may truly be free.
