American history often evokes a strange mix of familiarity and disillusionment. On one hand, the rhetoric of “freedom” and “equality” is ever-present and compelling; on the other, one quickly realizes that such freedom has never been equally accessible to all. This contradiction is not incidental—it is structural, embedded in the very foundation of the nation’s history.
In July 2023, a six-hour layover at Xiamen Airport became an unexpectedly joyful moment of reading history.
Eric Foner’s The Story of American Freedom is not a history book to be casually skimmed or read at a distance. It is a work that demands engagement, interrogation, and deep reflection. Foner compels us to confront the uncomfortable truth that “freedom”—so loudly proclaimed in American political culture—is at once the most resonant ideal and the most elusive promise. His work offers a sweeping yet nuanced account of how this central American value has been continually redefined, contested, and even weaponized.
What stands out most in Foner’s narrative is the evolving and multifaceted nature of the concept of freedom. While it is often treated as an inalienable right, the book makes clear that freedom in the American context has always been a product of conflict, shaped by historical contingencies and collective struggle. From the colonists’ revolt against British taxation, to the abolitionists’ battle against the economic foundation of slavery, to the labor movements, women’s suffrage, the civil rights era, and LGBTQ+ activism—each generation has had to fight for its version of freedom. Far from being static, freedom emerges in this narrative as an ongoing process—an idea forged in sweat, blood, and political confrontation.
Thomas Jefferson’s epitaph offers a symbolic entry point into this paradox. He chose to commemorate himself as the author of the Declaration of Independence, the drafter of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and the founder of the University of Virginia—but not as a U.S. president. Education and liberty were, in his mind, his most important legacies. Yet this very “spokesman of liberty” owned over 650 enslaved people. Jefferson understood that slavery was immoral and unsustainable, yet he continued to uphold it. To call him a hypocrite is not inaccurate, but perhaps it is more revealing to understand him as a man tragically aware of his complicity, trapped by the structures and privileges of his time.
Reading this book, one is inevitably led to ask: how could slavery endure for so long in a nation that so fervently championed liberty? The answer, Foner argues, lies in the foundational role of property rights within American constitutional logic. Enslaved people were considered property—the most valuable form of wealth for many Southern elites. Their version of “freedom” perversely included the right to enslave others. This is the cruel irony of American liberalism: the same ideals that inspired emancipation also underwrote the perpetuation of bondage.
This dynamic is not merely abstract. Consider President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. It did not apply to slaveholding states that remained loyal to the Union and was as much a strategic military measure as it was a moral stance. Initially, the Civil War was not fought to end slavery, but to preserve the Union. Lincoln understood that moral clarity alone was insufficient; the real engine of abolition was a convergence of political necessity, military strategy, and grassroots resistance.
Foner’s methodology adds yet another layer of significance. By emphasizing a “bottom-up” perspective, he disrupts the conventional focus on elite statesmen and military heroes. In his narrative, the voiceless—workers, women, enslaved people, immigrants, queer communities—gain agency and narrative presence. This shift not only democratizes the historical record, but also reveals the contested and participatory nature of American freedom. History, Foner reminds us, is not simply the legacy of presidents and generals—it is the cumulative result of voices shouted and silenced, of names remembered and forgotten.
Freedom, then, is never a blank check. Every inch of progress has been bought through conflict, sacrifice, and struggle. The United States became the complex, contradictory superpower it is today not because its ideals never faltered, but precisely because it has been repeatedly forced to confront, revise, and suffer through the meaning of those ideals. This process is not clean or comforting. Rather, it is often disturbing, slow, and painful. But therein lies the promise of what Foner calls “realistic idealism”—an engagement with ideals that does not deny contradiction, but grows through it.
Returning to the foundational question—why is slavery evil?—we may be tempted to quote “all men are created equal.” Yet Foner pushes us further: unless we are willing to confront the moral failures embedded in our history, then ideals are little more than ornamental rhetoric. Understanding history does not mean absolving the past, but acknowledging that human societies have always advanced by both proclaiming lofty ideals and stitching the ruptures those ideals have left behind.
When I finished the book, the image that lingered was not of a triumphant president, but of Jefferson—wearing a powdered wig and walking alone across the lawn of Monticello—silently grappling with a question he could never resolve: If we claim that every person has the right to pursue happiness, then what does it mean that I own the lives of others?
The Story of American Freedom offers no easy answers. What it does provide is a space—and a reason—to keep asking the hardest questions. And perhaps, in the space between ideals and contradictions, we find the most honest version of what freedom might truly mean.