In September 1862, Abraham Lincoln promulgated the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that all persons held as slaves in rebel lands as of Jan. 1, 1863, would be “then, thenceforward, and forever free.” From that point forward, the Union Army became a force for human freedom, emancipating enslaved Americans everywhere it went. In one stroke, Lincoln shifted the Union war cause: from preserving the Union to giving it “a new birth of freedom.”
Americans who profess fidelity to our core creed — that “all men are created equal” — can see the wisdom and correctness in Lincoln’s embrace of emancipation. He was expanding the reach of the Revolution’s most powerful idea to yet more Americans.
The United States, with all of its flaws and self-limitations, has set its hand to the plow of perhaps the most important work in history: that of advancing the cause of human freedom, of wresting power out of the hands of the few who seek to restrain that freedom, ensuring its enjoyment by all.
This July, 250 years removed from the proclamation of that core American creed and 163 years from Lincoln’s decision to press for a fuller embrace of it, it is right to ask: what is the state of America’s commitment to human freedom?
By any reasonable measure, the cause of freedom appears to be troubled.
Our federal government has DOGE’d its way out of perhaps the greatest ongoing humanitarian mission of any nation by dismantling USAID. It pushed millions of Americans off reliable and affordable healthcare services. It allowed the spread of diseases previously held at bay through a vigorous vaccine program. It committed crimes on the high seas off the coast of Venezuela while walking away from the fight for freedom in Ukraine. It threatened neighbors with annexation, imposed a retrograde tariff program and launched an unconstitutional war, triggering a global energy crisis.
It allowed the President to treat the public treasuries as his personal expense account and permitted him a level of grift and corruption that is historic in both kind and scope. It restricted voting rights for millions and threatens to restrict them for millions more. It suppressed protesters’ rights, ripped children out of the hands of their parents, targeted critics with malicious prosecution and spilled American blood in American streets.
Here in New Hampshire, we have our own experience with misrule.
Our government in Concord tried — again — to regulate bathroom usage. It tried — again —to keep students from learning about some hard histories and to ban books. It carved out more than $50 million for a school voucher program, all the while refusing to meet its court-directed Constitutional obligation for public school funding. It fought to weaken local control of property tax funds through statewide open enrollment in New Hampshire schools.
In celebration of the efforts to weaken public education, the Republican chair of the House Education Policy Committee said the quiet part out loud: “when we have segregated schools we can add all the fun stuff.”
When the words “we” and “segregated” are used in the same sentence, the intent is clear. And it is not new.
Pressing this global, national and local curtailment of freedom is a familiar force: a powerful superminority of interests blaming others for our collective anxiety as a distraction, while they feed their insatiable greed.
Those charged with the work of securing and expanding freedom may be leading us into a spiraling descent of unfreedom.
And yet, there is a way out, a way to restore and renew our shared freedom. It does not run first through the state house in Concord or Congress or the White House. It runs first through the true seat of power in any place dedicated to the cause of freedom: the hearts and minds of the people. It begins with each individual person accepting the responsibility of self-government, of embracing a commitment to human freedom as sacred, as the cause for which the Republic itself was dedicated.
What does this mean, practically speaking? It means recommitting ourselves to the rule of law above all else. It means supporting and demanding a justice system where the least and the greatest are equals. It means accepting the responsibility to be well-informed in our reasoning and decision-making, rather than swayed by unmoored passion. And it means casting out of our hearts any notion that the rights and responsibilities of a free people are conditional upon a person’s or a group’s religion, race, ethnicity, language, sexual orientation or background. These are not alien concepts. They are at the core of the American creed.
As Thomas Paine said in “Common Sense,” “We have the power to begin the world over again.” We engage that work, embracing our responsibilities as well as our rights, by putting our shoulder to that plow once more.
Kenneth Nivison is a historian and a candidate for the New Hampshire House of Representatives from Pembroke.