In 1795, the year before his death, he wrote three poems favourable to the election of Mr Heron, the Whig candidate. In the first poem he said:
The independent commoner
Shall be the man for a’ that.
Mrs Riddell, writing of Burns after his death, said: ‘His features were stamped with the hardy character of independence.’
He was a democrat whose democracy was based on the rock of independence and a character that ‘preserved the dignity of man with soul erect.’
Burns saw both sides of the ideal of freedom. He hated tyrants, and he despised those who tamely submitted to tyranny. The inscription on the Altar to Independence, erected by Mr Heron at Kerroughtree, written by Burns, reads:
Thou of an independent mind,
With soul resolv’d, with soul resign’d;
Prepar’d Power’s proudest frown to brave,
Who wilt not be, nor have a slave;
Virtue alone who dost revere,
Thy own reproach alone dost fear—
Approach this shrine, and worship here.
The man of whom Burns approved was ‘one who wilt not be nor have a slave.’
In ‘Lines Inscribed in a Lady’s Pocket Almanac’ he says:
Deal Freedom’s sacred treasures free as air,
Till Slave and Despot be but things that were.
In the ‘Lines on the Commemoration of Rodney’s Victory’ he wrote: