People labored out of necessity, out of poverty, and that necessity and poverty bred the contempt in which laboring people had been held for centuries. Freedom was always valued because it was freedom froth the necessity to labor.
-- Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution
Freedom means work.
-- GeneralOliver O. Howard,
Freedman's Bureau, 1865
I would be hard-pressed to define the character of the United States without emphasizing the word freedom. Expressions such as "home of the free," "beacon of liberty," and "crucible of freedom" have been indelibly etched onto the American psyche. Despite widespread recognition that freedom is in some way linked to the American soul, accord extends little further. Even the nation's two founding documents reveal tensions at the heart of our self- proclaimed virtue. From the time of the Declaration of Independence to the ratification of the Constitution, the term "freedom" was used to bridge a wide chasm separating competing conceptions. Under one conception, a person's freedom rested on self-evident and inalienable rights, while integral to the other, freedom was synonymous with an individual's liberty of contract. Blind faith appears the most promising way to span the chasm between these alternatives, but where faith fails, ambiguity has succeeded. Freedom has become a slogan full of sound and fury, which, rather than signifying nothing, may now, perhaps, signify everything.
One of freedom's allures is that it promises the impossible: a world without constraints holding us back from our desires. However, we cannot seriously begin to discuss freedom without placing limits upon it. Although this does violence to freedom's promise, we know freedom can never be absolute. The laws of nature pull us toward our death against our will. Likewise, the laws of man pull us toward our 1040 forms each April 15.