They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. –Benjamin Franklin
The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty. –Abraham Lincoln
‘Liberty’ was no vague term with our revolutionary fore-bearers. It had not yet acquired the fuzzy overtones of economic choice that has accrued since then (think: capitalism = democracy). To the Americans of 1776 ‘Liberty’ meant, first, freedom under laws of their own making; and, second, the right to do anything that did not harm another.
The proper way to secure liberty to posterity was to set up a representative government, limited in scope by a statement of natural rights with which no government may meddle. Consequently, every state constitution included both a ‘Rule of Law’ and a ‘Bill of Rights.’ The first, Virginia’s, was drafted by George Mason and adopted by the Virginia convention on 12 June 1776.
This Virginia Declaration of Rights is one of the great liberty documents of all time. It parented not only all other American bills of rights, but the French ‘Declaration’ of 1789 and, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948 by the General Assembly of the United Nations.
Virginia begins by asserting, ‘that all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot…deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursing and obtaining happiness and safety.’
Certain clauses of the Virginia Declaration came down from the Magna Carta of 1215 – the right to a jury trial, the right not to be deprived of liberty except by the law of the land or the judgment of one’s peers. Other clauses are derived from the Petition of Rights with which Charles I was confronted in 1628: that a man cannot be compelled to give evidence against himself, that standing armies in peace time should be avoided as dangerous to liberty, ‘and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to and governed by the civil power.’
The prohibition of excessive bail and of cruel and unusual punishments was derived from the English ‘Bill of Rights’ of 1689. Still others were developments from principles merely hinted at before such as freedom of the press and religious liberty.
These ‘Rights’ were valid not only as derived from American and English experience, but because they were based on the ancient theory of natural law. These ‘unchangeable, unwritten laws of Heaven,’ as Sophocles called them in the Antigone, twenty-one centuries before became the basis of the American constitutional system.
The other states followed Virginia in their bills of rights. Pennsylvania had stronger statements than Virginia on religious liberty, added freedom of speech to Virginia’s freedom of the press, protected conscientious objectors to military service, and gave immigrants ‘of good character’ the right to buy land and to become citizens. The Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, declaring ‘all men are born free and equal,’ was construed by the courts of that commonwealth as freeing all slaves from bondage. And a separation of powers between the legislative, executive and judicial departments was enjoined, ‘to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.’
It was BECAUSE our forefathers were immersed in ‘politics’ and in ‘compromise’ and because they were educated in political thinking and were thus able to learn from and borrow the ‘best’ from what had become before and because they sought ‘common ground’ upon which to build a nation rooted in ‘The Bill of Rights’ and ‘The Rule of Law’ that we, today, enjoy their legacy of liberty. This ‘BECAUSE’ gives me great pause as I strive to discern how I will cast my votes in November.
Searcher-Seeker 
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