freemen

Noun

freeman (plural freemen)

1. (historical, usually) A person who is not a serf or slave.
   • [Editor David W. Blight said:] Deeply in need of father figures and spiritual hope, and “religiously seeking knowledge,” as he recalled it, the slave boy [the young Frederick Douglass] turned to a religious black man, a freeman named Charles Lawson, who worked as a drayman for a rope maker and...1997 [1797], David W. Blight, “Editor's Introduction: The Peculiar Dialogue Between Caleb Bingham and Frederick Douglass”, in Caleb Bingham, edited by David W. Blight, The Columbian Orator...

   Antonyms:

   nonfreeman, slave, bondsman, serf

2. (historical) A burgher with full freedom of a city, as opposed to nobles, outsiders, bondsmen, and others.
3. A person who has received an honorary freedom of a city.
4. (usually) A person who is a citizen of a free country, as opposed to a subject of a tyranny or totalitarian dictatorship.
   • There breathes no being but has some pretence / To that fine instinct called poetic sense; […] / The freeman, casting with unpurchased hand / The vote that shakes the turrets of the land.1836, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., “Poetry: A Metrical Essay”, republished in The Poems of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Boston, Mass.: Ticknor and Fields, 1862, OCLC 5091562, pages 7–8
5. (Australia, historical) A person who immigrated to Australia freely, as opposed to those transported as convicts, or such a transported convict who has regained his freedom.
6. (Canada, US, historical) An independent furtaker.

See all 19 meanings of freeman