AMERICAN FREEDOM IS A VERY RELATIVE TERM

Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution (New York: Viking, 2013) ("Years later, one of the militiamen who participated in the events of that day [i.e., the Battle of Lexington] insisted that it wasn't the Tea Act or the Boston Port Bill or any of the Coercive Acts that made them take up arms against the regulars: no, it was much simpler than that. 'We always had been free, and we meant to be free always.' the veteran remembered. '[Those redcoats] didn't mean we should.' It was a sense of freedom strengthened by the knowledge that to the west and north, and to the east in Maine, lay a wilderness that their children could one day go to as their forefathers had done when they first sailed for the New World. Nothing like this was available to the future generations of Europe. It was a sense of promise that made the militiamen's resolve to oppose these troops all the more powerful." But to say that a love of democratic ideals had inspired these country people to take up arms against the regulars is to misrepresent the reality of the revolutionary movement. Freedom was for these militiamen a very relative term. As for their Puritan ancestors, it applied only to those who were just like them. Enslaved African Americans, Indians, women, Catholics, and especially British loyalists were not worthy to the same freedoms they enjoyed. It did not seen a contradiction to these men that standing among them that night was the thirty-four-year-old enslaved African American Prince Estabrook, owned by town selectman and justice of the peace Benjamin Estabrook." "While [British General] Gage had honored the civil liberties of the patriots, the patriots had refused to respect the rights of those with whom they did not agree, and loyalists had been sometimes brutally suppressed throughout Massachusetts. The Revolution, if it was to succeed, would do so not because the patriots had right on their side but because they--rather than Gage and the loyalists--had the power to intimidate those around them into doing what they wanted. As one of Gage's officers observed, 'The argument which the rebels employ to oblige everyone to do what they wish, is to threaten to announce them to the people as Enemies of Liberty, and everyone bends.' Not since the Salem witch trial had New Englanders lived with such certainty and fear, depending on which side of the issue they found themselves." Id. at 120-121.  Is it not still the case that if you want to politically undermine a person, a group, or an point of view, one of the most common American tactics is by labeling such persons and points of view as 'unAmerican' or 'unpatriotic'? Or in the case of corporate politics, labeling the person as 'disgruntalled'?  Americans are entitled to freedom of thought, freedom of expression, free to pursue their happiness provided, of course, their thoughts, expression and idea of happiness is the same as their neighbors. "It was not for [John Quincy Adams] to spout purple platitudes about men like Joseph Warren who had died so that they could all be free. It was up to him, who as a seven-year-old boy had watched and wept beside his thirty-year-old mother, to continue what the doctor had helped to begin." "'My life must be militant to its close,' he wrote, and on that evening in June 1843, as he turned to walk to to the home he had inherited from his father, he was still spoiling for a fight." Id. at 295.).