As the journey of America approaches mile marker year 250, it may help to remind ourselves, when we started this trip, where were we going?

The answer isn’t hard, and it clearly was no secret. Our goal was emblazoned in large letters across the masthead of our founding document. That objective, our ideal, the destination for which America was founded, is summed up in the term “independence.”

It is a criminal misread of history to suggest that the objective for which Americans pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor was a desire to redraw jurisdictional lines on a map. The “independence“ sought by Americans was not even originally assumed to require breaking away from Britain or its King.

The Revolutionary War was a reluctant side-consequence, declared only when it was obvious that neither Parliament nor King George would give Americans the independence they sought. “Independence” here meant “personal freedom of conscience,” and it was the reason America’s original colonists braved treacherous oceans to arrive on an isolated continent, face potentially hostile neighbors, so they could live in an unforgiving and untamed wilderness.

The Era of Enlightenment had produced a generation of humans not content with feudal and authoritarian overlords, the kind that had governed mankind from the beginning of time. America was to be where your thoughts, your aspirations, your labors and life goals would be controlled by no force other than your own free will.

All forms of “Do this! Why? Because people in power tell you to!“ were branded as tyranny. It is no exaggeration to say America’s founders envisioned a society where the answer to “why did he do that?“ is always “because he damn well pleased.“

But do not confuse this with a belief in libertine lifestyles. Here, our Founders believed in Natural Law. If I step off a cliff, no amount of “free will” stops my fall to the bottom. Some laws must exist in this free society because certain acts have “natural“ consequences. Your rights end at my nose . . . and killing me, maiming me, enslaving me, stealing my treasure, or defrauding me are not within your natural rights.

How do we decide what nature demands? That would be a question of science, used here in its original Greek to indicate a pursuit of truth. Our Founders hoped many truths would be “self-evident.“ But where there was disagreement, they relied on a Biblical principle known as the “law of witnesses.“

Truth would be determined, when in dispute, by placing a question (or a person who espoused a set of answers) before many “witnesses,“ who would then vote. America would have few laws, and those only when necessary, “in the eyes of the people.“

Against this vision for a “free society” would be arrayed every malignant force conceivable. Lust and greed, leading to murder, deception and crime for profit, are obvious opponents. As is conceit and the desire to put oneself above another by fiat rather than by merit.

We didn’t just imagine a “free society” and then arrive there. A quarter century after helping author America’s Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, then a candidate for President, wrote to Benjamin Rush, “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

Here, at mile marker 250, perhaps we, as a Nation, should renew Jefferson’s vow. Last time I checked, forms of tyranny over the minds of men still abound.