1 “Property,” The National Gazette, March 29, 1792: “Conscience is the most sacred of all property; other property depending in part on positive law, the exercise of that, being a natural and unalienable right.”

2 Hobbes’s solution to the problem of Hobbesian liberty, of course, was subjection to the sovereign, which was a deliberate rejection of Acts 5:29 conscientiousness. This observation is reinforced by the deliberate secularization of the Ten Commandments in Leviathan, chapters 27–32, which are announced as responding to the danger that “he that presumes to break the Law upon his own, or anothers Dream, or pretended Vision, or upon other Fancy of the power of Invisible Spirits, than is permitted by the Commonwealth, leaveth the Law of Nature, which is a certain offence, and follloweth the imagery of his own, or another private mans brain, which he can never know whether it signifieth any thing, or nothing, nor whether he that tells his Dream, say true, or lye, which if every private man have leave to do (as they must by the Law of Nature, if any one have it), there could no Law be made to hold, and so all Common-wealth would be dissolved” (ch. 27 at 156).

3 Horacio Spector, “Four Conceptions of Freedom,” Political Theory 38 (2010): 793. http://ptx.sagepub.com/content/38/6780. We will return to the substantive contrast between freedoms of speech and worship and the freedom from poverty in the end to demonstrate the distance between freedom understood as agency and freedom understood as passive experience. It is of value now to acknowledge, however, that want and fear share the unique property of being spurs to agency; that is, to banish them is to banish, for example, the need for courage, which is a proper management of fear. Freedom from such conditions or experiences will mean freedom from the ethics of care and production that are central to the human experience. Moreover, to privilege the ethics of care above the ethics of production is to guarantee diminishing returns over time.

4 Ben Peterson, “What Is True about Citizenship,” June 29, 2017. http://libertylawsite.org/w2017/06/29/whats-true-about-citizenship/.

5 James Madison, “To the Honorable the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia: A Memorial and remonstrance,” in The Mind of the Founder: Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison, edited by Marvin Meyers (Hanover: Brandeis University, University Press of New England, 1981) (Revised).

6 Jefferson’s draft opened, “Whereas Almighty God hath created the mind free, that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy author of our religion,” but builds to the climax that “truth is great and will prevail if left to herself, and that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error,… errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.” Jefferson, in sum, argues that man must stand on his own authority!

7 “Madison’s ‘Memorial and Remonstrance’: A Jewel of Republican Rhetoric”: http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2013/06/madisons-memorial-remonstrance-republican-rhetoric.html.

8 Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Volume 3. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865. Basler, 9, 376 Annotation [1] ALS, RPB. The form letter of invitation dated March 19 bears the signatures of Henry L. Pierce, Boston manufacturer, later state representative (1860–1862) and mayor of Boston (1873, 1878), and a committee of five Republicans in charge of the festival (DLC-RTL). Lincoln's reply was given wide circulation by the Republican press. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln3/1:98?rgn=div1;singlegenre=University+of+Michigan+Digital+Library+Production+Services;sort=occur;subview=detail;type=boolean;view=fulltext;q1=all+honor.

9 Seventh and Last Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Alton, Illinois, October 15, 1858; Speech at Springfield, Illinois, June 26, 1857.

10 First Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois, August 21, 1858; Speech at Bloomington, Illinois, September 4, 1858; Fifth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas, at Galesburg, Illinois, October 7, 1858; Speech at Columbus, Ohio, September 16, 1859; Eulogy on Henry Clay July 6, 1862.

11 Federalist #55.

12 Federalist #49.

13 Federalist #51.

14 Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000).

15 Therefore one must be subject, not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience. Romans 13:1-5 (RSV); Romans 13:1-5 (RSV).

16 Carl Scott’s “Five Meanings of Liberty,” National Affairs (2014): http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-five-conceptions-of-american-liberty.

17 Samuel P. Huntington, “If Not Civilizations, What? Paradigms of the Post-Cold War World,” in Foreign Affairs (November/December 1993). “The United States is becoming increasingly diverse ethnically and racially… Will the de-Westernization of the United States, if it occurs, also mean its de-Americanization? If it does and Americans cease to adhere to their liberal democratic and European-rooted political ideology, the United States as we have known it will cease to exist…”

18 “If we advert to the nature of republican government, we shall find that the censorial power is in the people over the government, and not in the government over the people.” (James Madison, Speech in Congress, November 27, 1794. PJHM 10:507–8.<AQ > Please spell out PJHM.</AQ>

19 James Madison, Records of the Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, edited by Max Farrand (New Haven: Yale University Press), July 5, 1787.

20 Madison’s Notes, July 13.

21 Joseph Addison, “Cato,” I, 1.

22 See the “Letter of Pastor Robinson to John Carver, Pilgrim,” in Plymouth Church Records, vol. I.

23 Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, III, 3. My translation.

24 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. Introduction by Stanley N. Katz, a facsimile of the first edition of 1765–69 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). While it is true that Blackstone specifically affirmed parliamentary supremacy, it may also be said that the purpose of the Commentaries altogether is to unfold English law in such a manner as to sustain the “inability of sovereignty to revert to the people.”

25 George Washington, “Circular Letter to the Governors of All the States on Disbanding the Army,” June 8, 1783.

26 “Thoughts on Government,” Works of John Adams, vol. LV (Boston: Little & Brown, 1851), 200.

27 Journals of the Continental Congress, 1775, “Jefferson’s Notes,” 1104.

28 Cf., Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973 [1958]), ch. x, 269–72: the “solution to the problem of man’s capability to govern himself.”

29 “First Inaugural,” Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler IV (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 252–53.

30 Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution (Madison: Wisconsin State Historical Society, 1981), vol. XIII.

31 Ibid., Document 198.

32 Pierre Manent, Tocqueville et la nature de la démocratie (Paris: Commentaire Juiiliard, 1982), 174 (emphasis supplied). My translation.

33 http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1941#lf1356-06_head_027.

34 http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/848#Washington_0026_1430.

35 http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/washington-george-washington-a-collection.

36 Federalist Papers, #51.