The argument was available

Step 1 of 4

This path starts with a law code rather than an argument, because a code records what a society had already decided to allow before anyone stood up to dispute it. Massachusetts writes down its liberties nine years after Winthrop told the fleet they were bound in covenant, and the same court that claimed that covenant sets out here what a magistrate may and may not do to a man’s body. Read it as a reader of law rather than of conscience. Watch how a liberty is phrased, as a limit on an official with a remedy attached, and watch what the phrasing does when the subject changes from a freeman to someone held. Everything after this in the walk is somebody arguing against what is written here, in the colony’s own language. None of it is a new idea. It is a refusal of an old one.

Step 2 of 4

Fifty nine years later a sitting judge prints a single sheet at his own expense and argues against the practice from the premise the colony was founded on. The headnote gives you that argument. What a path can tell you is what happened to it. This was not a private conviction or a diary entry found afterwards. It was printed, it circulated in Boston, and it was answered in print within the year by a man defending the trade. The law did not move. Sewall went on sitting as a judge in a colony that went on holding people for most of another century. Watch the tone rather than the doctrine. He writes as a man who expects to be answered by neighbors reading the same scripture he reads, which is what makes what followed a decision rather than an oversight.

Step 3 of 4

Seventy six years pass and the argument is no longer one man’s sheet. It is the drafting table. Mason’s articles are being written to be adopted, quoted and copied, and the Convention reads the first one closely enough to see what it would do if it were left alone. Notice what kind of refusal this is. In 1641 the contradiction sits in two clauses of one code. In 1700 it is met with a pamphlet in reply. Here it is met by drafting. Read the first article twice, once as it sounds and once as a lawyer would use it, and let the headnote tell you which words were added. Then read the fifteen that follow and notice how little qualifying any of them needed.

Step 4 of 4

Ten weeks before Virginia adopts those articles, a woman running a farm in Braintree writes to her husband in Congress and puts the objection in a sentence. She has no vote, no seat and no printer. She is not writing a tract. She is asking one man to think about laws he is about to help write, and in the same letter she doubts whether a passion for liberty can be equally strong in people accustomed to depriving others of theirs, and tests it against doing to others as you would be done by. That is the test Sewall used seventy six years earlier, reaching the same place by the same route. Watch where it lands: in a private letter, to one man, ten weeks before a convention sat down over the wording of its first article.