Let freedom ring

Did you know that the so-named Liberty Bell represents a call to end slavery? Originally the Pennsylvania State House Bell, mounted the year of Betsy Ross’s birth, 1752, was re-named on the eve of her death in 1836. Abolitionists asked : “May not the emancipationists in Philadelphia, hope to live to hear the same bell rung, when liberty shall in fact be proclaimed to all the inhabitants of this favored land? Hitherto, the bell has not obeyed the inscription; and its peals have been a mockery, while one sixth of ‘all inhabitants’ are in abject slavery.” Thus the statehouse bell became the Liberty Bell, and began life anew. And regarding slavery, Thomas Jefferson at age 77, considered slavery’s expansion a terrible problem. He wrote: “Like a firebell in the night, this question awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the union. ... I regret that I am now do die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons. ...”