Freeman

“ To the freeman belong those services which imply trust and confidence, or require skill; which therefore command higher wages than mere animal labor, and give a sense of respectability and a feeling of self-respect. I know we are told that if we wish to see the perfection of free government, we must look elsewhere. We look; and we do indeed see the theory of democracy carried to its full extent, but we behold no practical results which we at all envy. ”

“ Hope and fear for this life or the next, mercenary bargainings, and labour of eye-service, all are at end. He is a Freeman, and free shall be the oblation of his soul and body, the reasonable, holy, and acceptable sacrifice. ”

“ The Liber homo, or FREEMAN, has existed in this country from the earliest periods, as well as of authentic as of traditionary history, entitled to that station in society as one of his constitutional rights, as being descended from free parents in contradistinction to 'villains,' which should be borne in remembrance, because the term 'FREEMAN' has been, in modern times, perverted from its constitutional signification without any statutable authority. ”

“ No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or exiled or in anyway destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor send upon him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.
40. To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice. ”

“ Scorn at length that slave-like prejudice, which would rather follow in the worshipful footprint of its right reverend master, than listen to the unbiassed judgment and opinion of a freeman! Venture to contend for your own and the peopled independence and moral freedom—you will be cordially supported by your fellow-citizens! Employ the pulpit, the confessional,* and the teacher's desk, which long have been abused for the darkening and degrading of your countrymen—for their improvement and emancipation! With and by the people you may become independent! ”

“ Let us show them all that a freeman contending for Liberty on his own ground is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth. ”

“ And according to this proper and generally received meaning of the word, a freeman is he that, in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to. ”

“ Such a subject commends itself with an absorbing interest to the labors of the statesman and the mind of the patriot, and should find a ready and zealous advocate in the bosom of every intelligent freeman who cultivates the soil of liberty, or in any way desires the glory and happiness of his fellow man. ”

“ Of this argument, it has been observed by more than one, that its force extends equally to all other laws, for a freeman is not to be exposed to punishment, or be called to any onerous service but by his own consent. ”

“ But I mention the existence of slavery only that we may remember that when we speak of freedom, freeman, democracy, and the like, we are after all speaking of the rights of a privileged class—that, whether in Athens, in Rome, or in the early Teutonic communities, there was always a large mass13 of human beings who had no share in the freedom, the victory, or the glory of their masters. ”

“ The lover of freedom, the lover of progress, the man who has eyes keen enough to discover real identity under a garb of outward unlikeness, need never shrink from tracing up the political institutions of England to their earliest shape. ”

“ There was a time when every freeman of England could raise his voice or clash his weapon in the Assembly which chose Bishops and Ealdormen and Kings, when he could boast that the laws which he obeyed were laws of his own making, and that the men who bore rule over him were rulers of his own choosing. Those days are gone, nor need we seek to call them back. The struggles of ages on the field and in the Senate have again won back for us the selfsame rights in forms better suited to our times than the barbaric freedom of our fathers. ”

“ That I would rather be a freeman among slaves, than a slave among freemen. ”

“ Could it be right, we might argue, for him to leave a work which none could do but himself, a work which he had taken on his shoulders of his own free will, for another work, however noble, which others could do as well as himself? ”

“ He is in a land where an immemorial freedom, a freedom only less eternal than the rocks that guard it, puts to shame the boasted antiquity of kingly dynasties, which, by its side, seem but as innovations of yesterday. ”

“ How has John Russell's father just muddled up forty votes out of a forty-acre field? Is not a freeman as independent as any one of these faggot voters, who dare not say their soul is their own if John Duke of Bedford tells them it is not? Is not a freeman as good as a ten-pound householder, and quite as likely to refuse a bribe? I say he is, and I challenge Lord John Russell and all his tribe, and all his fisher's "faggots," to prove that he is not. Shall we then, brother freemen, be dragged (like captives of old) chained to the tail of O'Connell? ”

“ In the seventeenth century therefore, as in the thirteenth, the forms stood ready to be again clothed with a new life, to supply the means for another revolution, again at once conservative and progressive. ”

“ These represent the three classes of mankind according to old Teutonic ideas-the noble, the simple freeman and the bondman. The kingly house, where there is one, is not a distinct class; it is simply the noblest of the noble. For, as almost everywhere else, this Teutonic nobility admits' of degrees, though it is yet harder to say in what the degrees of nobility consisted than to say in what nobility consisted itself. ”

“ But the holders of Liberal principles in modern politics need never shrink from tracing up our political history to its earliest beginnings. As far at least as our race is concerned, freedom is everywhere older than bondage ”

“ But they did according to their own will, because they kept on all the old forms of freedom; so, in after times, as the kings grew weaker and the nation grew stronger, life could be put again into the forms, and the old freedom could be won back again. ”

“ He may there gaze and feel, what none can feel but those who have seen with their own eyes, what none can feel in its fulness more than once in a lifetime, the thrill of looking for the first time face to face on freedom in its purest and most ancient form. He is there in a land where the oldest institutions of our race, institutions which may be traced up to the earliest times of which history or legend gives us any glimmering, still live on in2 their primæval freshness. ”

“ As the continuity of our national life is to many so hard a lesson to master, so the continuity of our political life, and the way in which we have so often fallen back on the very earliest principles of our race, is a lesson which many find specially hard. ”

“ He became one of that gens for all practical, political, historical, purposes. It is only the physiologist who could deny his right to his new position. The nature of the process is well expressed by a phrase of our own law. When the nation--the word itself keeps about it the remembrance of birth as the groundwork of every thing--adopts a new citizen, that is, a new child of the state, he is said to be naturalized. That is, a legal process puts him in the same position, and gives him the same rights, as a man who is a citizen and a son by birth. ”

“ And to this pleasure, the pleasure of inflicting pain and slaughter, he did not scruple to sacrifice the rights of other men, and to guard his enjoyment by ruthless laws at which even in that rough age men shuddered. ”

“ We may comfort ourselves too by further thinking that right and freedom are powers which have an awkward way, when they have taken the inch, of going on to take the ell. The wise men whose wisdom consists in living politically from hand to mouth, are again crying out against "re-opening the Eastern question." In sailing along the shores, in scanning their history in past and present times, we feel how deep a truth was casually uttered in the shallow sneer 380 which called that question "eternal." ”

“ The great lesson for you in the future is to prove that we were right; to prove that you were worthy of liberty. We simply ask you, in the name of your friends, in the name of our country, to show by your good conduct, and by efforts to improve your condition, that you were worthy of freedom; to prove to all the world, even to your old [261] masters and mistresses, that it was a sin against God to hold you in Slavery, and that you are worthy to have your names enrolled among the freemen of the United States of America. [Great cheering.]
"We want you to respect yourselves ”

“ The last reign which is looked back to as to a time of good government becomes the standard of good government, and it is agreed between king and people, between contending races or parties, that things shall be as they were in the days of the model ruler. ”

“ The great lesson of history is that the nature of man, at any rate of civilized European man, is the same in all times and places, and that there is no time or place whose experience may not supply us with some teaching. But free states naturally supply the best lessons for free states. The difference in scale between the free states of various ages is after all only an accidental difference which does not go to the root of the matter. ”

“ I will tell you, sir, what will be the practical operation of this. It will be this: When a slave has escaped from the master, and taken a refuge in a free state, and that master comes to recapture him and take him back to the state from which he fled, the slave will cry out, ‘I do not know the man; I never saw him in my life; I am a free man.’ He will say any thing and do any thing to preserve to himself that freedom of which is for a moment in possession. He will assert most confidently before the judge that he is a free man. ”

“ What is the freedom of the most free? ”

“ We now have a whole system of political morality, a whole code of precepts for the guidance of public men, which will not be found in any page of either the Statute or the Common Law, but which are in practice held hardly less sacred than any principle embodied in the Great Charter or in the Petition of Right. ”

“ I came a humble petitioner, with no other claims than those which the oppressed have to the sympathy of freemen who have the power to help, with the claim which the unfortunate has to the happy, and the downtrodden has to the protection of eternal justice and of human rights. In a word, I have no other claims than those which the oppressed principle of freedom has to the aid of victorious liberty. ”

“ They at least sinned for the human motive of their own pelf; it is something for which no human motive can be found when men rejoice in [Pg 170] the sorrows of the helpless lands which, after a glimpse of the light of freedom, were again thrust down into the night of bondage which that short glimpse of light has made more black. ”

“ And, as the old state of things gradually came back again, as men began to feel that the demesnes of the Crown were not the private possession of the reigning King, but were the true possession of the people—that is, as the Terra Regis again came back to its old state of folkland—it was felt to be unreasonable to shut out the Sovereign from a natural right which belonged to every one of his subjects. ”

“ Much depends upon us for the help of our color—more than many are aware. If we are lazy and idle the enemies of freedom spread it as a cause why we ought not to be free, and say we are better in a state of servitude, and that giving us our liberty would be an injury to us; and by such conduct we strengthen the bands of oppression and keep many in bondage who are more worthy than ourselves, I entreat you to consider the obligations we lie under to help forward the cause of 'freedom. ”

“ What is it [to] be born free and equal, and not to live? What is the value of any political freedom, but as a means to moral freedom? Is it a freedom to be slaves or a freedom to be free, of which we boast? ”

“ Look to history, and when your heart saddens at the fact that liberty never yet was lasting in any corner of the world, and in any age, you will find the key of it in the gloomy truth that all who were yet free regarded liberty as their privilege, instead of regarding it as a principle. ”

“ We are freemen, sprung from a noble stock of freemen, able to boast as noble a line of ancestry as ever graced this earth;—we have burning in our bosoms the spirit of freemen—live in an age of enlightened freedom, and in a country blessed with its privileges—under a government that has pledged itself to protect us in the enjoyment of our peculiar domestic institutions in peace, and undisturbed. ”

“ Man's freedom, with him, is an element not to be taken into consideration, because it does not exist. But the truth is, that human freedom is not only a factor, but a variable factor, the value of which changes with every variety of human condition. In the savage condition it obeys organization and circumstances, and has little effect on social condition. But as civilization advances, the power of freedom to react208 on organization and circumstance increases, varying however again, according to the force and inspiration of the ideas by which it is guided. ”

“ Call rather those who do these things for certain small ends slaves on a small scale, and the others, as they deserve, slaves on a grand scale—This also I grant.—And does freedom seem to you to be something independent and self-governing?—Of course.—When, therefore, it is in another's power to put hindrances in a man's way and subject him to compulsion, say confidently that this man is not free. ”

“ In this capital of a nation so boastful of its freedom, the common air is vocal with the accents of liberty. Many of the colored people can read. Who knows but some of them have read the Declaration of American Independence; and, in their blindness and simplicity of mind, applied its immortal truths to themselves? “All men are created equal!” and among their “inalienable rights” “are life, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of happiness!” ”