Masters and overseers can marshal them for battle by the same authority and habit of obedience with which they are marshalled to labor.” It was true, admitted the Jackson Mississippian, that “such a step would revolutionize our whole industrial system” and perhaps lead to universal emancipation, “a dire calamity to both the negro and the white race.” But if we lose the war we lose slavery anyway, for “Yankee success is death to the institution. It is better for us to use the negroes for our defense than that the Yankees should use them against us.” Indeed, “we can make them fight better than the Yankees are able to do. “We are forced by the necessity of our condition,” they declared, “to take a step which is revolting to every sentiment of pride, and to every principle that governed our institutions before the war.” The enemy was “stealing our slaves and converting them into soldiers. The resulting potential for class conflict threatened the social fabric of this brave new republic.” Some craftsmen suffered debasement of their skills as the division of labor and power-driven machinery eroded the traditional handicraft methods of production and transformed them from self-employed artisans to wage laborers. In the process many women experienced a change in roles from producers to consumers with a consequent transition in status. The manufacture of cloth, clothing, leather goods, tools, and other products shifted from home to shop and from shop to factory. As the population began to move from farm to city, farmers increasingly specialized in the production of crops for the market rather than for home consumption. While both rich and poor enjoyed rising incomes, their inequality of wealth widened significantly. “Although per capita income doubled during the half-century, not all sectors of society shared equally in this abundance. The remedy lies not in removal of restraint but in achievement of the capacity to read and write.” He suffers not the absence of a negative liberty-freedom from-but of a positive liberty-freedom to read and write. But an illiterate person suffers from a denial of positive liberty he is unable to enjoy the freedom to write or read whatever he chooses, not because some authority prevents him from doings so but because he cannot read or write anything. Freedom of the press is generally viewed as a negative liberty-freedom from interference with what a writer writes or a reader reads. It is not necessarily incompatible with negative liberty, but has a different focus or emphasis.
Positive liberty can best be understood as freedom to. Negative liberty, therefore, can be described as freedom from. A law requiring motorcyclists to wear a helmet would be, under this definition, to prevent them from enjoying the freedom to go bareheaded if they wish. It can be defined as the absence of restraint, a freedom from interference by outside authority with individual thought or behavior. “This was a transformation from what the late Isaiah Berlin described as “Negative Liberty” to “Positive Liberty.”4 The idea of negative liberty is perhaps more familiar.
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