I don't doubt you regarding the Constitution, but note that America isn't ruled by a document, but men have trespassed and enforced it's provisions. Lysander Spooner advanced the view that the Constitution had failed to secure the rights of Americans, even prior to the Civil War, and it is hard to fault his analysis, because immediately after that war the US became a corporation, and by and large, gradually and all at once, the provisions of the Constitution have increasingly been ignored, transgressed, and overturned.

In truth that freedom humanity enjoyed before that is literally inconceivable, unknown to us today, even in America. The words expressed don't have the same meanings today, the experience potential isn't at all the same. The transcontinental railroad enabled the buffalo hunters to eradicate their abundant herds, the Carolina Parakeet became extinct, as did the Passenger Pigeon. That abundance underlay freedom, something that is incomprehensible to us to day, who cannot walk up to a tree fluttering with an infestation of tasty pigeons, and knock our dinner out of the tree with a stick.

The world has changed, and that has changed the freedom humanity could even understand.

We may still spout off more here, but MacGregor was born after this change in the world, and he and I both lack that fuller sense of freedom that once existed.