Abraham Lincoln, the great champion of free labor, understood that the labor part goes with the freedom part.
To what David Harsanyi and Charlie Cooke have said, let me just add the wise words of Abraham Lincoln in a series of letters to his stepbrother, John D. Johnston. Here is Lincoln in December 1848, when Johnston was 38 years old, widowed, and had seven children to support; Lincoln refused to give him money except as a match to wages Johnston earned himself:
Your request for eighty dollars, I do not think it best, to comply with now. At the various times when I have helped you a little, you have said to me “We can get along very well now” but in a very short time I find you in the same difficulty again. Now this can only happen by some defect in your conduct. What that defect is I think I know. You are not lazy, and still you are an idler. I doubt whether since I saw you, you have done a good whole day’s work in any one day. You do not very much dislike to work; and still you do not work much, merely because it does not seem to you that you could get much for it. This habit of uselessly wasting time, is the whole difficulty; and it is vastly important to you, and still more so to your children that you should break this habit. It is more important to them, because they have longer to live, and can keep out of an idle habit before they are in it; easier than they can get out after they are in.
You are now in need of some ready money; and what I propose is, that you shall go to work, “tooth and nails” for some body who will give you money [for] it. Let father and your boys take charge of things at home — prepare for a crop, and make the crop; and you go to work for the best money wages, or in discharge of any debt you owe, that you can get. And to secure you a fair reward for your labor, I now promise you, that for every dollar you will, between this and the first of next May, get for your own labor, either in money, or in your own indebtedness, I will then give you one other dollar. By this, if you hire yourself at ten dolla[rs] a month, from me you will get ten more, making twenty dollars a month for your work. In this, I do not mean you shall go off to St. Louis, or the lead mines, or the gold mines, in Calif[ornia,] but I [mean for you to go at it for the best wages you] can get close to home [in] Coles county. Now if you will do this, you will soon be out of debt, and what is better, you will have a habit that will keep you from getting in debt again. But if I should now clear you out, next year you will be just as deep in as ever. You say you would almost give your place in Heaven for $70 or $80. Then you value your place in Heaven very cheaply for I am sure you can with the offer I make you get the seventy or eighty dollars for four or five months work. You say if I furnish you the money you will deed me the land, and, if you dont pay the money back, you will deliver possession. Nonsense! If you cant now live with the land, how will you then live without it? You have always been [kind] to me, and I do not now mean to be unkind to you. On the contrary, if you will but follow my advice, you will find it worth more than eight times eighty dollars to you.
Three years later, in November 1851, Lincoln advised Johnston against selling family farmland to move from Illinois to Missouri:
I learned that you are anxious to sell the land where you live, and move to Missouri. . . . Such a notion is utterly foolish. What can you do in Missouri, better than here? Is the land any richer? Can you there, any more than here, raise corn, & wheat & oats, without work? Will any body there, any more than here, do your work for you? If you intend to go to work, there is no better place than right where you are; if you do not intend to go to work, you can not get along any where. Squirming & crawling about from place to place can do no good. You have raised no crop this year, and what you really want is to sell the land, get the money and spend it—part with the land you have, and my life upon it, you will never after, own a spot big enough to bury you in. Half you will get for the land, you spend in moving to Missouri, and the other half you will eat and drink, and wear out, & no foot of land will be bought. Now I feel it is my duty to have no hand in such a piece of foolery . . . The Eastern forty acres I intend to keep for Mother while she lives — if you will not cultivate it . . .
Now do not misunderstand this letter. I do not write it in any unkindness. I write it in order, if possible, to get you to face the truth — which truth is, you are destitute because you have idled away all your time. Your thousand pretences for not getting along better, are all non-sense — they deceive no body but yourself. Go to work is the only cure for your case. (Emphasis Lincoln’s in both letters).
(Unspoken here is why it was possible for a farmer to live off the unpaid labor of others in Missouri in 1851, but not in Illinois). In the end, Johnston was determined to relocate, and Lincoln could only insist that Johnston not make off with money needed to support Lincoln’s stepmother (Johnston’s mother) after the death of their father. Johnston moved to Arkansas, failed at farming there, and had to come back to Illinois, where he died in 1854.
Lincoln, the great champion of free labor, understood that the labor part goes with the freedom part. Even the Homestead Act that he signed in 1862, on its face one of the greatest giveaways in American history, simply privatized undeveloped government-held land that could be cultivated only if the settlers undertook back-breaking farm work with no government safety net if they failed. Lincoln himself hated farm work — his father often chastised him in his childhood for reading instead of working — but once he was old enough, he took any menial work he could find until he was able to make it as a lawyer (having self-taught himself Blackstone’s Commentaries). “Go to work is the only cure for your case,” indeed.