Will the United States be dedicated to the principles of the Declaration of Independence?

1. Will the United States be dedicated to the principles of the Declaration of Independence? The History of the application of an idea

2. The Context of the Civil War • The issue between the North and the South: will slavery be permitted to extend into the territories? • The Republican position: the Federal Congress has the power to prevent slavery in the territories • The Northern Democrat position (Stephen Douglas’s position): each territory should be able to vote up or down on whether it wants slavery in the territories; the Federal Congress should not (and does not have the power) to take a position on the issue • The Southern Democratic position: slaves are property; like all property, slaveholders have a right to their property (it is illegal for the government to prevent the holding of property) • The Dred Scott decision: slavery cannot be prevented in the territories (essentially makes the republican party platform illegal)

3. Lincoln’s Justification for the Republican Position • The founders, in accepting the existence of slavery in the southern states, made a compromise with a “necessary evil.” • But, while accepting its existence, they did everything possible to prevent its extension, i.e. the Northwest Ordinance • As such, they saw it as within the power of the Federal Congress to prevent the extension of slavery • Moreover, they did everything possible not to include the word “slave” in the Constitution so as not to blight this document. • They did all of this because they meant exactly what they said in the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal and that they are endowed with inalienable rights. • They accepted slavery because they could not yet get rid of it, but sought to get rid of it as circumstances permitted. • This means: “The assertion of that principle [DI], at that time, was the word, “fitly spoken” which has proved an “apple of gold” to us. The Union and the Constitution, are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it. The picture was made, not to conceal, or destroy the apple; but to adorn, and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple—not the apple for the picture.” Lincoln, “Fragment: The Constitution and the Union.”

4. Lincoln’s Assessment of the Southern Position • The South had migrated from a position according to which they too saw slavery as a “necessary evil” to a position according to which slavery was a “positive good.” • As such, they couldn’t help but begin to reject the principles of the DI as a “self-evident lie.” • “Holding, as they do, that slavery is morally right, and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national recognition of it, as a legal right, and a social blessing. Nor can we justifiably withhold this, on any ground save our conviction that slavery is wrong. If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality—its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension—its enlargement. All they ask, we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask, they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong.” Lincoln, “Address at Cooper Institute” • The North must hold firm to the principle that slavery can be prevented from extending into the territories based upon its conviction that slavery is wrong.

5. Lincoln’s Assessment of the Abolitionists: or Why Not John Brown? • The Abolitionists also thought slavery wrong but their thinking it wrong made them want to seek its immediate abolition. • By contrast, the Republican position was to continue to allow it in the Southern states and even in some territories where it had been allowed by things like the Missouri Compromise in the past. • Isn’t Lincoln morally weak and culpable for not seeking its immediate abolition? • Lincoln would say two things in response: • It’s politically infeasible to get rid of it in the South immediately • There is a positive good in the Southern states deciding on their own, deciding democratically, to get rid of slavery rather than being forced to get rid of it.

6. Lincoln’s Assessment of the Northern Democratic Position • Why not accept then Stephen Douglass’s position that the territories should be able to decide for themselves whether to have slavery? This seems most democratic after all. • Lincoln’s response is that slavery is a moral wrong which people should never be merely given the choice of instituting. • If compelling circumstances exist and force us to accept the existence of slavery, then accept it we must. • But to allow people merely to vote to accept slavery would be akin to allowing people to vote to accept murder. On principle, people should not be allowed democratically to decide whether slavery should exist in the territories. The DI says this is something outside the realm of democratic politics. One cannot merely vote away someone’s rights; their rights are inalienable.

7. Fitzhugh’s Defense of “that peculiar institution” • About at least some views in the South, Lincoln was right; far from merely accepting slavery as a “necessary evil,” the South had come to embrace it as a “positive good.” • In fact, Fitzhugh says: “Looking to theory, to the examples of the ancient Republics, and to England under the Plantagenets, we shall find that Southern institutions are far the best now existing in the world.” • This is so, Fitzhugh argues, because whereas the North leaves its laboring class to fend for itself in “liberty,” the South takes care of its laboring class, providing them with food and shelter. • Because of this view, he does not agree with the Declaration of Independence. • He also does not agree with it because it is part of modern philosophy and “All modern philosophy converges to a single point—the overthrow of all government, the substitution of the untrammeled ‘Sovereignty of the Individual’ for the Sovereignty of Society, and the inauguration of anarchy. First domestic slavery, next religious institutions, then separate property, the political government, and finally, family government and family relations, are to be swept away.”

8. The Seneca Falls Declaration: Further Extension of the DI • “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…” • Models itself explicitly on the Declaration of Independence. • Reasons that the rights of man should also extend to the rights of woman. • Was it just a matter of time, given the principles of the DI, that women would be given the same rights as men? • Does the extension of the Declaration of Independence include an issue such as gay marriage?

9. Martin Luther King: “Letter from A Birmingham Jail” • Whereas Lincoln argued that so long as one makes clear the moral principle that slavery is wrong, one does not need (and one should not) agitate immediately. • King, in this letter, calls for more immediate agitation. He chastises the “white moderate” who keeps asking the blacks in the South to wait. Instead, he calls for immediate action. “I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth of time.” • King argues that actualizing racial equality in the South calls for the creation of “creative tension” which will “bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.” “Like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must likewise be exposed, with all of the tension its exposing creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.” • Further actualization of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.