free state
1
6.9
- noun
- /fri steɪt/
- Archaic
:
estado libre
- Illinois was a Free State, no slavery.
Rest assured, Calhoun is already on record is arguing if California becomes a Free State, the South shall bolt the Union.
- Rest assured, Calhoun is already on record is arguing if California becomes a Free State, the South shall bolt the Union.
Examples
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And Congress had the incentive (at least in the cases of OH, IN, MI, and WI) to balance the number of slave and free states.
Blog text (17) -
Rest assured, Calhoun is already on record is arguing if California becomes a Free State, the South shall bolt the Union.
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California was once the most conservative Free State in the country.
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The 2nd Amendment to the Constitution of the United States: A free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
Blog text (17) -
Thus, they were more politically inclined to support the Republican Party, which opposed the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the policies of the Pierce administration, the extension of slavery into free territory, and supported the admission of Kansas as a free state?
Academic text (1994) -
John Brown: 1855: pro-slavery militias wage a campaign of vicious attacks against settlements in the free state of Kansas, often aided by allies among the law enforcement authorities.
Blog text (17) -
Domestic hostile societies include large pockets of the federal and military establishment; societies within the American Redoubt itself who won't want to live in a "free state"; and potentially large swaths of the population on both coasts.
Blog text (17) -
This 1870 document records a child in the family as having been born around 1863 in Illinois, suggesting that they may have been in this free state before Emancipation—but there's no mention of the multiple documents for this same person indicating that she was born in Kentucky, which was a slave state at the time.
Blog text (12) -
Before the Civil War, Ohio was considered a free state where slavery was not allowed.
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During the debates, representatives discussed whether new territories would enter the Union as a free state or a slave state.
Antonyms
- NSFW
3
7.9
A southern United States state where the law allowed people to own other people before the American Civil War
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'a state where slavery was prohibited' is directly and compositionally derived from 'free' (not enslaved) + 'state' (political entity), so a B1 learner who knows both words can infer that it denotes a state that is 'free' from slavery. The specific historical timeframe (pre–Civil War U.S.) is contextual detail, but the core lexical meaning is transparent and follows a common cross-linguistic pattern of adjective + noun composition.
Etymology
The phrase free state comes from the United States before the American Civil War and simply meant a state where slavery was not allowed, so people there were legally free rather than enslaved.