Discuss what happens when competing ideas about American freedom are evident.

There have not been many instances when competing ideas
about American freedom presented itself.  One example would be at the Constitutional
Convention.  Delegates were decidedly on two different planes regarding American
freedom.  The delegates that favored a vision of freedom that emphasized the central
government having power were called the Federalists.  They believed that freedom meant
living in a setting where government could be seen to resolve problems as they arose and
that freedom is not very effective when lawlessness and a lack of control results.  This
is can be contrasted with the competing vision of freedom that presented itself at the
Constitutional Convention in the form of the antifederalists.  These believers in
freedom saw it as something that individuals needed to have in order to check the
encroachment of the federal government.  In this particular context, the issue of
competing ideas about American freedom were negotiated through the presence of the Bill
of Rights in the new Constitution.

Another, more dour
instance, where competing ideas about American freedom arose during the Civil War.  This
time, the competing visions of American freedom held the North advocating one of two
positions on freedom.  The first was that freedom can only be recognized in a coherent
and unified nation.  Keeping the Union together was the critical element to a national
expression of freedom.  The second, and more tangential articulation of freedom at the
start of the war, was the idea that American freedom should apply to all of its
citizens, and in this was the abolition of slavery.  The Northern position of freedom
was contrasted with the Southern vision of freedom in which slavery was seen as an
extension of one's own traditions and expressions, with which federal government should
not interfere.  Slavery was seen as a tradition, something that Southerners did and its
presence represented an expression of freedom that did not need to be interfered with
from the North.  Compromises on both competing issues of freedom failed and the result
was that there was an attempt to break America into two nations, setting the stage for
the Civil War. In both of these, we see that different approaches can be taken when
there are competing ideas about American freedom evident.