(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries and letters to the Editor of The Somerville Times belong solely to the authors and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville Times, its staff or publishers)

By William C. Shelton

The Senate is considering the lifetime appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. She proudly presents herself as a disciple of Antonin Scalia, and as such, an “originalist” and “textualist.”

She believes that the Constitution must be interpreted based only on the understanding of those who wrote it, and on the meaning that ordinary people of that time would have given to its language. As Ruth Bader Ginsberg said of her friend Justice Scalia, “Some very good people can have very bad ideas.”

An essential problem with this theory is that both the framers and their “ordinary” countrymen disagreed – at times violently – over the meaning of key words. Linguistic ambiguity was a way to persuade enough decision makers from antagonistic states to ratify this compromise document.

Perhaps the clearest example of this is the interrelated words “freedom,” – which appears once – and “liberty” which appears three times, including as part of the statement of the Constitution’s purpose: “…to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity….”

“Freedom” is sometimes differentiated as meaning the ability to do as one wishes, while “liberty” denotes the absence of artificial constraints. The “ordinary people” of our time use them interchangeably, and doing so has little impact on Constitutional interpretation.

Americans of the late 18^th Century had very different notions of what constituted freedom, or liberty. In one view, the pursuit of freedom is collective and involves ensuring opportunity for all of us to become and live better. In the other, freedom is individual and is achieved when others do not or cannot interfere with the individual’s pursuits.

In my view the individualistic notion ultimately understands other people as obstacles in the way of, or instruments towards, one’s freedom. The more social version ultimately understands cooperation with other people as the only means of achieving freedom. The most extreme differences in these opinions existed between the Puritans who founded New England and the Barbadian slave lords who founded the Carolinas and Georgia.

The Puritans came to this continent to found a spiritual utopia that would be a model for the world, “as a city upon a hill” in the words of Governor John Winthrop, whose Ten Hills Farm gave its name to today’s Somerville neighborhood. They were intolerant of those with differing beliefs, and harsh in enforcing norms. But they divided land on an egalitarian basis, were hostile to inherited privilege and displays of wealth, revered education, and were committed to the mutual betterment of all.

Their insistence that each community be a self-governing republic persists today in New England town meetings. Their belief in government’s capacity to make things better grew from the understanding that they were the government. For them, freedom was social.

By the mid-1600s, Barbados was known as the most brutal society on earth, ruled by a small elite of avaricious, tyrannical, and ostentatious planters. When they ran out of land, their sons and grandsons came to Charleston, spread out, and created a copy of Barbadian society.

Because they worked their slaves to death, they had to continuously import new slaves from Africa rather than increasing the population through reproduction. Thus, Charleston became North America’s primary slave port, and the region, it wealthiest. That wealth was the most concentrated in the new nation, protected by despotic laws, enforced by state-sponsored terrorism. For them, freedom was individual.

New York city’s original founders added tolerance to the more social concept of freedom. Tolerance during a time of religious wars had allowed Amsterdam to become Europe’s trade center at the time, and the Netherlands to become its wealthiest nation. The New Yorkers were responsible for the Bill of Rights.

Those who settled the Southern Appalachians added to the more individualistic concept a bitter and abiding distrust of governments and social reformers, who they viewed as infringing on personal sovereignty. They came from areas in Northern Ireland, Northern England, and the Scottish lowlands that had been in a state of war and upheaval for generations.

Pennsylvania’s German immigrants’ and Quakers’ concept of freedom tended toward that of the Yankees. The gentlemen planters of Virginia’s, Maryland’s, and Delaware’s lowlands sided with the slave lords.

These differing understandings of a seemingly simple word illuminate the philosophical motivations for the civil war and the political genealogy of what we today call “Red” and “Blue” America. So, Patrick Henry, who owned slaves throughout his adult life, could with no sense of irony proclaim, “Give me liberty or give me death.” Just as Georgia Governor Lester Maddox proclaimed that he had been “enslaved” by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Judge Barrett’s sanctimonious insistence on the primacy of the Constitution’s original text ignores the reality that those who wrote and ratified it, themselves, disagreed about its meaning. Her past products and her Republican sponsors leave no doubt as to whose version will guide her.