Codifying Personal Freedom
The Founding generation would be astonished by the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling. Not because constitutional framers like James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin gave much thought to a woman’s decision to terminate her pregnancy. Let’s be honest, they didn’t. No, the revolutionary and visionary men who birthed a nation and designed the country’s federal constitution would be astounded by the High Court’s impudent decision because it violated the very principle they fought so hard for – the principle that expanding liberty was the ultimate aim of a righteous polity.
The American Revolution was fought to expand liberty. Thousands of colonists perished on the battlefields of Saratoga, Breed’s Hill, Trenton, Lexington and Concord precisely in order to reclaim those rights that the British Crown had withheld. Those courageous individuals recognized that they were fighting to expand a conception of liberty that King George III so cavalierly disregarded. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence was penned by Thomas Jefferson and signed by 56 patriots so as to magnify the “unalienable” rights that the “Creator” had “endowed.” Governments, Jefferson wrote, “are instituted among men” to “secure these rights;” it was inconceivable to think otherwise.
John Dickinson, one of America’s most underappreciated constitutional Founders, even drafted an early version of the Articles of Confederation in which he emphasized the significance of extending personal freedom. As a Quaker, Dickinson recognized that a Constitution is divine; it is a sacred text. But it also evolves. And the arc of that evolution, he insisted, must point towards greater freedom—the extension of rights, not the retraction of them. His sentiments resonated with an entire generation. Most newly independent Americans embraced that bedrock principle.
Madison maintained, the list of freedoms that the founding generation has identified in 1789 cannot, and should not, be static. That list is not a fixed or settled object.
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