What Freedom Feels Like

A lecture by Michael Amico, read on the upper level of the Waldoboro Custom House, on the occasion of the 250th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 2026

When we ask, at a moment when the United States is once again celebrating its founding in freedom from British rule, what freedom means, I hear the voice of local lobsterman Larry York. On the upper level of Open House of History, his words accompany images from his workday projected across a life-sized drawing of him, self-possessing yet approachable. Describing a day on the water, he says:

“I get a clarity when I go out there. It's like when my feet hit the boat, all my problems are left behind. Now I have a job to do, and I get out there, and it's like a freedom. It's like nobody can get me."

Most of us know something of that feeling. We may have found it in our own work—building a house, making art, tending a garden, living with a partner, raising a family, walking in the woods, or simply standing alone beside the ocean. It is the feeling that, for a moment, your life belongs to you. You are capable. You are present. You are not merely reacting to the demands of others but acting from a place that feels genuinely your own.

This is the feeling of freedom.

We often speak of freedom as a a constitutional principle or a political right—especially at moments of national celebration. Those ideas matter. But in order for them to organize our institutions and shape our public life, before freedom can even become an idea, it must first be experienced. Freedom begins in the world as a way of feeling.

Long before children can define freedom, justice, equality, or democracy, they learn what feels welcoming or oppressive, trustworthy or dangerous, worthy of care or neglect. These recurring ways of feeling gradually become embodied in customs, religions, economies, governments, works of art, and eventually in the language of ideals themselves.

Over time, people become bound together by shared emotional orientations. They are an emotional body before they become a political one. It is only because people already feel themselves to be a “we" that they can later declare, “We hold these truths to be self-evident," or write, “We the People." Politics, like religion and commonly held beliefs, grow out of shared ways of feeling.

How exactly emotions become customs and political ideals, organize institutions and economies, is a much larger historical question. Today I want to first ask: What does freedom itself feel like?

Freedom is not a single emotion but a constellation of emotional states. It is the feeling of having room to make something of yourself. It is the impulse to resist domination. It is the capacity to imagine other ways of living. It is the willingness to open yourself to a life larger than your own.

We often notice the actions these feelings produce—building, organizing, performing, surrendering—but less often the emotional currents that animate them. Those currents keep open a space of possibility in which we continually discover who we are and who we might become. And that, I want to suggest, is the work of freedom.

Today I want to think about the four recurring emotional dimensions of freedom: drive, resistance, play, and letting go. They are not rigid categories but enduring states of feeling that appear across different times, places, and ways of life. Through them we can begin to feel the history of freedom for ourselves.

The first way freedom appears is as a drive to make something of yourself. Not simply to earn a living, but to shape the world through your own experience, judgment, labor, and skill. A farm. A business. A boat. A work of art. A family. They bring satisfaction and an ongoing feeling of potential.

Think of clearing a field, hauling lobster traps, finishing a painting, or sharing a meal at the end of a day's work. In those moments, the world has been changed, however slightly, through what you have done. You experience yourself as competent, able to leave your mark. You feel loose and achieved.

Institutions and education can nurture that sense of competence, but they do not create it. It begins with the feeling that your life is not wholly determined by circumstance, inheritance, or someone else's authority. You stand before the world exhilarated, as someone who can act within it and transform it. This is the hope Thomas Paine captured when he wrote that the American people possessed the "power to begin the world over again."

That emotional possibility drew generations of people to Maine. Some came seeking land to farm. Others came to work the sea or log the forests or build businesses. Still others sought artistic solitude or simply the chance to live differently. Again and again, they were drawn by the possibility of making something for themselves. The feeling of freedom was partly in not having every aspect of one's life directed by another person.

That did not make life easy. As historian Jasper Stahl observed, for much of the nineteenth century the settler's "feeling for the good earth" was "the strongest single emotion in his experience." Yet Maine's earth was often rocky and uneven. Long winters and isolation made survival difficult. Even so, people found freedom in the work itself—in clearing land, building homes, raising families, harvesting the sea, and gradually shaping a place they could call their own. Patriotism grew less from abstract loyalty to a nation than from a sense of place, an attachment to a landscape that embodied the possibility of a future.

Maine's geography reinforced the specificity of that feeling. Difficult terrain, a demanding climate, and scattered settlements required neighbors to depend upon one another. Individual freedom was sustained through patience, cooperation, fortitude, and practical knowledge. People discovered who they could become not only through their own work but through working alongside others.

This was a life worth defending, but not automatically through armed rebellion. Many of Waldoboro's early German settlers, for example, resisted joining the Revolutionary movement not because they loved the British crown, but because they feared losing the stability that allowed them to survive. Their first concern was preserving a way of life.

That instinct remains recognizable today. Mainers often welcome advice, but they resist when decisions seem detached from local knowledge or imposed by distant authorities, when they feel their control slipping. Freedom begins not with rebellion for its own sake but with the feeling that the people who know a place most intimately should be the ones shaping its future. Hence the strong centripetal feeling of community loyalty in Maine.

But what happens when someone else begins directing your life for you?

Sometimes domination is obvious: imprisonment, enslavement, conquest. More often it is quieter. Someone else decides what counts as valuable. Someone else measures your worth, defines your identity, tells you how to think and feel, what to believe, or what kind of future you should pursue. Tries to fix or save you. Before we can name these experiences politically, we usually feel them. We feel that something essential to our own sense of self is slipping away, and at the same time, we feel the desire to preserve the capacity to govern our own life. This is freedom's second emotional dimension: resistance.

Throughout Maine's early history, this struggle centered repeatedly on land. Settlers believed that clearing forests, building homes, planting fields, and laying out roads gave them a rightful claim to a place. The great proprietors believed that ownership rested on deeds, grants, and inherited legal authority. These were not merely competing legal arguments. They reflected competing understandings of where value came from. Was value created through labor or secured through title? How should they be ranked? And how did people feel about that? Did payment and paper really constitute making something of one’s own?

This conflict left a lasting mark on American literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne drew upon the history of Henry Knox, the great Maine proprietor, most involved in Waldoboro’s history, when writing The House of the Seven Gables. The novel is haunted by inherited wealth, uneasy possession, and the lingering guilt surrounding land in Maine taken from those who first lived on it and worked it.

That emotional conflict has never disappeared. It returns whenever financial value and lived value diverge—when a place is understood primarily as an investment or a vacation by some and as a home, workplace, and community by others. Those who live and work there may no longer be called witches or squatters, but they can still be dismissed as riff raff, people standing in the way of development. Lack of investment in these full time residents of Maine and their communities has slowly eroded the freedom to figure out who they can become and make something of themselves.

The desire for self-government shaped Maine in other central ways as well. Many residents came to believe that distant authorities in Massachusetts neither understood nor adequately protected the realities of life here, particularly during the War of 1812. The movement toward statehood reflected the conviction, the feeling once again, that decisions should be made by people whose lives were rooted in the place itself.

Yet Waldoboro reminds us that resistance has never been demarcated along clean lines. Unlike neighboring towns whose very names—Liberty, Freedom, and Union—proclaimed revolutionary sympathies, Waldoboro remained politically divided. In 1783 it was the only nearby town to vote against barring British Loyalists from returning after the Revolution.

That decision reflected local realities as much as political principle. Trade with Britain remained vital to the town's economy, for people making something of themselves here. These realities were also emotional. Waldoboro's large German population included cultural ties to the Hessian soldiers who had fought for Britain. Economic survival, ethnic identity, and local relationships all shaped how freedom was felt.

English and German residents often differed sharply, telling each other what to do and how to live. Yet they had to cooperate and depend on each other to build the town to its economic heights. What united these different groups was a shared desire to preserve their ability to direct their life, and the life of the community, themselves.

Perhaps this emotional consolidation of individual and group identities survives in what people often describe as Maine's “toughness,” not least in Waldoboro and neighboring town. We hear it in the familiar phrase, "Get off my land." It may sound like unnecessary gruffness or an unwillingness to talk. But it’s the surface expression of something more complicated. Land here is not merely property. It is where people have invested their labor and relationships. It houses their past and future. When that feels threatened—whether by governments, corporations, markets, or regulations that seem disconnected from realities on the ground—people make an emotional stand to reassert their ability to make do in the world.

During the late eighteenth-century protests against Maine's great proprietors, some settlers disguised themselves as Indigenous people. Known as White Indians, they confronted, sometimes quite violently, surveyors, land agents, and officials sent to enforce proprietary claims. These performances were never merely practical disguises. They were emotional acts. By taking on another identity, settlers imagined themselves standing outside established authority. They felt themselves pushed from the land, much as native people had been. They were dismissed by the powerful elite for their supposed idleness and intemperance, seen as more dangerous than the apparently hopeless native people.

The actions of the White Indians cannot be separated from the larger dispossession of native people and land. Yet rather than ranking one group's suffering against another's, these highly performative modes of resistance show how feelings of loss and displacement can become shared. Beneath them lay a recurring conflict between those seeking to consolidate wealth and authority and those trying to live from the land through their own labor. It was within that conflict that freedom was felt to be at stake.

By assuming another, very foreign, identity, these settlers interrupted ordinary social roles and identities. They created dramatic space in which people could ask who ought to hold authority and how. Their performances were frightening, but they loosened, if only temporarily, the fixed relationship between ruler and ruled, superior and subordinate, and released another more playful agency.

Similar performances appeared throughout early America. The Green Mountain Boys in Vermont, the Whiskey Rebels in Pennsylvania, participants in the Boston Tea Party—all relied on disguises, theatrical rituals, invented identities, and public spectacle. Again and again, people experimented with feeling of freedom by imagining a different relationship to power and status.

This brings us to freedom's third emotional dimension: play.

We may consider play as inconsequential. Historically, it is something much more significant. Just as it does in children’s development, play opens space for new things to be said, heard, felt, and imagined. It loosens habits that otherwise seem permanent. Through humor, role-playing, music, dance, and even practical jokes, people prod assertions of power and discover that every social order is, in some sense, a human creation—and therefore capable of being remade.

Laughter has long carried this power. To laugh together is not simply to mock another person or deride authority. It is to recognize that no institution, custom, or hierarchy is absolute. Every presumption or claim to permanence can, for a moment, be popped and deflated. We exaggerate the habits of others, adopt different voices, play the fool or the Indian, stage reversals of status, and test social boundaries. Community theater, music, and public celebration continue this tradition. Even the rowdiness of celebratory social events, such as on the 4th of July, serve this purpose: opening temporary spaces in which people can feel together life’s greater cohesion and potential.

America itself has always been, in part, a performance, trying to figure out who it is and who it can become. From holiday celebrations to town meetings, from civic rituals to buildings like this Custom House, which was built to embody national belonging in a town far from the centers of political power, Americans have repeatedly staged their aspirations before achieving them, rehearsing the republic into being.

That suggests something broader. Play introduces possibilities before they can become realities. And that dependence on imagination is intrinsic to freedom. Before we can feel who we might become, we have to put space around who we think we are. Before we can build a different society, we must first imagine different ways of being together. Before political change becomes possible, people experiment emotionally with new identities and new relationships. Every revolution begins, at least in part, as an act of imaginative play of who people can become, with the wild energy of crossing into unknown territory.

Without that crossing, allowing ourselves to be carried by something larger than ourselves, freedom remains incomplete. And this is freedom's fourth emotional dimension: letting go.

Perhaps you have stood at the edge of the ocean, climbed a mountain, or watched the surging of a river. Perhaps you have fallen in love, become absorbed in a work of art, or lost yourself in music. You feel the force. You become receptive. You surrender to the emotional currents and are carried away.

We often call such moments spiritual, but they are not confined to religion. Similarly, the great revival movements that swept through the United States, including Maine, during the early nineteenth century cannot be reduced to doctrinal disputes. They were emotional events. People were moved, awakened, transformed, born again.

The remarkable growth of Baptist and Methodist churches reflected this experience. Many of those drawn to these movements were also active in resisting established political and economic hierarchies, including the Liberty Men who opposed the great proprietors. Americans increasingly understood faith as something requiring a personal response rather than simple obedience to inherited authority. There would be no nationally established church. God could speak directly through ordinary people.

In revival meetings, people might erupt in emotion or break down in tears, confess fears, acknowledge their dependence on others, and surrender themselves to forces beyond themselves. They were in sympathy with the unknown, swept along by the quick-changing currents of an ocean of emotion. It was freeing. They could discover their own calling. They could become a different person.

These moments reveal a vast openness—a recognition that we belong to a world larger than ourselves. Such freedom makes room not only for exhilaration, even ecstasy, but also for immense fear and deep doubt.

Freedom does not eliminate conflict. To be free is to discover that people value different things. What feels meaningful to one person may not feel meaningful to another. The rules that seem obvious or just to you may not serve everyone equally.

Should land be used primarily to generate wealth or to sustain a way of life? While markets are unavoidable if communities are to survive, should they determine the future of every place? Are we here chiefly to serve visitors, investors, and distant consumers, or to deepen our relationships with one another and with the place we call home? Even those who agree on preserving a place and community may disagree about what preservation requires. Should we prioritize the needs of people living here today or those who will inherit this place generations from now? Who benefits from our decisions? Who bears their costs? By what measure do we judge value or harm? Productivity? Profit? Beauty? Who gets to decide?

These are not questions that freedom resolves. They are the questions that freedom keeps opens. Freedom increases the flow and exchange of feelings and ideas. It keeps us open to surprise. Freedom claims and makes space.

Which brings me back to Larry York's words: “I get a clarity when I go out there. It's like when my feet hit the boat, all my problems are left behind. Now I have a job to do, and I get out there, and it's like a freedom. It's like nobody can get me."

Perhaps you know that feeling yourself—in work, in art, on the water, in the woods, in worship, in song, in conversation, in being with another person, or simply in moments when your life feels fully your own. Our freedom to figure out who we are and who we might become keeps history going.

Claiming and making space, generating the grace and generosity needed to be free together. Perhaps that is what the Latin roots of liberty and liberality remind us: genuine freedom carries with it generosity, the willingness to make room for others to become who they, too, might yet be, to be free.