Throughout the antebellum era, southern defenders of slavery relied on this concept of negative liberty to deny the power of the national government to interfere with their right to own slaves and take them into the territories. “That perfect liberty they sigh for,” said Lincoln in 1854, is “the liberty of making slaves of other people.”5 Secession was the most extreme form of negative liberty, which therefore became treason in the eyes of most northerners, including Lincoln.
