Liberty, or freedom, is the most stirring word in politics and the most slippery — a single word that every side claims and no two sides define alike, splitting into rival ideals (freedom from interference, freedom to govern oneself, freedom from domination) that often pull against one another, so that the same word can arm the rebel and the slaveholder, the tax-cutter and the revolutionary.
The American planters who declared that all men have a right to liberty owned other human beings. Many felt no contradiction, folding property in human beings and local self-rule into their own idea of liberty. To them, liberty meant being free to run their own affairs without a distant king interfering, and that very freedom included the right to hold slaves. The people they enslaved meant something else by the word: the simple right not to be owned. This is the trouble with liberty. Almost no one praises servitude, yet the most stirring word in politics is also the most slippery. Ask what it means to be free, and the same banner flies over opposite causes. The deepest fights in politics are not between freedom's friends and its enemies. They are quarrels over what freedom is.