"Liberty! --Electric Word!"

One of the highlights of my Independence Day this month was pure serendipity. I was reading Uncle Tom's Cabin in the car as we made our way to our 4th of July celebrations and got to the point where George and Eliza are preparing for the last leg of their journey to Canada and freedom. This passage was appropriate and electrifying:

"Their night was now far spent, and the morning star of liberty rose fair before them. Liberty!--electric word! What is it? Is there anything more in it than a name,--a rhetorical flourish? Why, men and women of America, does your heart's blood thrill at that word, for which your fathers bled, and your braver mothers were willing that their noblest and best should die?

"Is there anything in it glorious and dear for a nation, that is not also glorious and dear for a man? What is freedom to a nation, but freedom to the individuals in it? What is freedom to that young man who sits there, with his arms folded over his broad chest, the tint of African blood in his cheek, its dark fires in his eye,--what is freedom to George Harris? To your fathers, freedom was the right of a nation to be a nation. To him, it is the right of a man to be a man, and not a brute; the right to call the wife of his bosom his wife, and to protect her from lawless violence; the right to protect and educate his child; the right to have a home of his own, a religion of his own, a character of his own, unsubject to the will of another...."