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‘Freedom’, it has been observed, is like apple pie and motherhood—everyone is for it. Just as everyone is against what is sometimes asserted as its opposite: slavery. But what does ‘freedom’ mean? The historical study of slavery shows that liberation in the form of manumission never propelled former slaves to the freedom enjoyed by slaveholders. As the American Judge, Joseph Lumpkin, put it in 1853:
The act of manumission confers no other right but that of freedom from the dominion of the master, and the limited liberty of locomotion; it does not and cannot confer citizenship, nor any of the powers, civil or political, incident to citizenship.
