ABSTRACT
So, what is this thing called freedom? In 1865, General Oliver O. Howard, commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, asked an audience of newly freed slaves, “But what did freedom mean? It is necessary to define it for it is apt to be misunderstood.”1 William Riker writes, “The word ‘freedom’ must be defined. And volumes have been written on this subject without conspicuous success on reaching agreement.”2 Orlando Patterson begins his book Freedom in the Making of Western Culture with the observation that “Freedom, like love and beauty, is one of those values better experienced than defined.”3 Finally, John Hope Franklin, in From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, writes,
It must never be overlooked that the concept of freedom that emerged in the modern world bordered on licentiousness and created a situation that approached anarchy. As W. E. B. Du Bois has pointed out, it was the freedom to destroy freedom, the freedom of some to exploit the rights of others. It was, indeed, a concept of freedom with little or no social responsibility. If, then, a man was determined to be free, who was there to tell him that he was not entitled to enslave others.4
