Posted by David Post:
Jefferson, LIncoln, Wilentz, Gates, and Slavery:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_08_02-2009_08_08.shtml#1249322431
I�m with co-blogger [1]Randy Barnett on this: Sean Wilentz�
[2]recently-published essay on Lincoln, historiography, politics (and
many other things) is a magnificent piece of argumentative
scholarship, well worth reading by anyone interested in Lincoln, US
history, slavery, Thomas Jefferson, the Civil War, . . .
One issue � tangential, admittedly, to the main debates, but
interesting and important nonetheless � caught my eye. Wilentz had
some stinging criticisms of Henry Louis Gates� recent book (Lincoln
and Race and Slavery), and Gates, [3]in response, spends most of his
time (rather oddly) arguing with Wilentz not about Lincoln, but about
Jefferson. �When Thomas Jefferson wrote �All men are created equal,��
Gates writes, �he did not have African Americans in mind � or so I
claimed in Lincoln on Race and Slavery.� It�s a claim, as Wilentz
notes in his reply to Gates� response, �that scholars have been
debating . . . for some time, [and] there is a strong case to be made
for this claim, but also room for measured skepticism.�
This caught my eye, of course, because, as faithful VC readers know
(because I remind them ad nauseum), I�ve just [4]published a book
about Jefferson � probably the only book about Jefferson in the past
20 years in which the word �slavery� (or the name �Sally Hemings�)
does not appear. I thought long and hard, in the decade or so during
which I was working on the book, about that, and about what it meant.
I sometimes wondered whether there was something wrong � or possibly
even immoral � in that, the (very rough) equivalent of writing a book
about Hitler�s painting skills and passing over his murder of
millions. It gave me considerable pause. In the end, I was comfortable
with my judgment � though I had a fair bit to say about Jefferson�s
(rather complicated) views on slavery (much of which I put into [5]a
paper I presented at a symposium back in 2001 at Middlebury College on
that issue), they were simply not relevant (at least, not in any way I
could see) to the subject matter of my book, which was ultimately
about governance and law on the Internet and how Jefferson�s ideas
could illuminate those questions for us; I wasn�t writing a
comprehensive Jefferson biography but instead trying to use
Jefferson�s ideas, and any of his ideas that didn�t help me think
about the Net (and there were many) were jettisoned along the way.
But having said that, let me weigh in on the �measured skepticism�
side of this argument. I don�t believe we know, or can ever know,
exactly what Jefferson �had in mind� when he wrote the phrase �all men
are created equal.� But on the more important question � viz., what
did the phrase �all men� mean, to the author, to contemporaneous
readers, and to posterity � the document itself has one vitally
important clue. Jefferson�s original draft of the Declaration included
the following paragraph in its lengthy list of King George III�s
�abuses and usurpations� through which he had attempted to impose
�absolute Despotism� upon the Colonies:
�He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its
most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant
people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into
slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their
transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of
infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great
Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be
bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative [i.e., he has
unjustly exercised his veto powers over Colonial legislation],
suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain
this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might
want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very
people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of
which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also
obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the
liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit
against the lives of another.�
[The capitalization (�MEN,� �CHRISTIAN�) and the underlining in this
passage are all Jefferson�s own, taken from his own copy of the draft]
Much has been written by scholars about this paragraph (which, like
the anti-slavery provisions in Jefferson�s draft of the Ordinance of
1784, was deleted by Congress before final approval of the document) �
about Jefferson�s motivations for including it in the draft, about the
Congress� decision to excise it from the final Declaration, etc. But
on the textual construction point, it is deeply significant (and
possibly dispositive): �MEN� � African-Americans, obviously � were
bought and sold as part of the �execrable commerce� of slavery. And
all �men� were created equal.
Jefferson took enormous pains later in life to preserve his early
draft, to make sure that history knew that it in his Declaration of
Independence, slavery was deemed �cruel war against human nature
itself,� that the �men� declared equal in the Preamble included those
who were �bought and sold,� and that this �execrable commerce� in
human souls violated the �most sacred rights of life and liberty.�
And then there�s the �pursuit of happiness� to which all men were
entitled, along with life and liberty. Jefferson�s use of this phrase
in the list of natural rights has long been something of a puzzle. On
the one hand, the prevailing view of the Declaration of Independence
is, as Pauline Maier writes in her exhaustive history of the document
(American Scripture), that it merely �summarized succinctly ideas
defended and explained at greater length by a long list of
seventeenth-century writers,� that the ideas it expressed were
�absolutely conventional among Americans of [Jefferson�s] time.�
Jefferson himself admitted as much; that, he said, was the whole
point. When John Adams wrote, using language more colorful than, but
in substance identical to, Prof. Maier�s, that �there is not an idea
in [the Declaration of Independence] but what had been hackneyed in
Congress for two years before,� and that the �substance of it� was
already �contained in the Declaration of Rights [enacted by] Congress
in 1774,� two years before Jefferson set to work, Jefferson responded:
�That may all be true.�
�I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas
altogether, [or] to offer no sentiment which had ever been
expressed before. . . . [T]he object of the Declaration of
Independence [was] not to find out new principles, or new
arguments, never before thought of, [or] to say things which had
never been said before; but to place before mankind the common
sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command
their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we
are compelled to take. [Not] aiming at originality of principle or
sentiment, . . . it was intended to be an expression of the
American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and
spirit called for by the occasion. All its authority rests then on
the harmonizing sentiments of the day . . .�
But at the same time, at a critical juncture in this �conventional�
document, Jefferson takes a turn to the decidedly, and fundamentally,
unconventional. �Life, liberty, and property� was the conventional
formulation; the revolutionary generation�s favorite political
philosopher, John Locke, had established that familiar trilogy almost
a century before, and Congress, in the 1774 Declaration of Rights to
which Adams refers in the quotation above, had, conventionally,
followed the Lockean outline:
�The inhabitants of the English colonies in North-America, by the
immutable laws of nature . . . have the following RIGHTS: That they
are entitled to life, liberty, and property . . .�
That, too, is how George Mason�s enormously influential Virginia
Declaration of Rights of the same year (1774) � another document with
which Jefferson, and the other delegates in Philadelphia, were
intimately familiar � put it:
�All men are by nature equally free and independent, and have
certain inherent rights, . . . namely, the enjoyment of life and
liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property . . .�
That formulation was, for obvious reasons, of considerable comfort to
the slave-owning class, for it put their �ownership� of slaves � their
�property� interest � on equal rank, in the natural order of things,
with the �life� and �liberty� of those over whom that ownership was
exercised.
But with the stroke of the pen, Jefferson took that away. Whatever
comfort one might have taken in the notion that owning other human
beings was in the natural order of things � a widespread view in the
eighteenth century � that notion was not to be found in the
Declaration of Independence.
Nobody understood all this (or explained it) better than Lincoln
himself, and he should have the last word(s). In the Fifth Debate with
Stephen Douglas in 1858, Lincoln said this:
The Judge [i.e., Douglas] has alluded to the Declaration of
Independence, and insisted that Negroes are not included in that
Declaration; and that it is a slander upon the framers of that
instrument, to suppose that Negroes were meant therein; and he asks
you: Is it possible to believe that Mr. Jefferson, who penned the
immortal paper, could have supposed himself applying the language
of that instrument to the negro race, and yet held a portion of
that race in slavery? Would he not at once have freed them? I only
have to remark upon this part of the Judge's speech, (and that,
too, very briefly, for I shall not detain myself, or you, upon that
point for any great length of time,) that I believe the entire
records of the world, from the date of the Declaration of
Independence up to within three years ago, may be searched in vain
for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the Negro was
not included in the Declaration of Independence. I think I may defy
Judge Douglas to show that he ever said so, that Washington ever
said so, that any President ever said so, that any member of
Congress ever said so, or that any living man upon the whole earth
ever said so, until the necessities of the present policy of the
Democratic party, in regard to slavery, had to invent that
affirmation. And I will remind Judge Douglas and this audience,
that while Mr. Jefferson was the owner of slaves, as undoubtedly he
was, in speaking upon this very subject, he used the strong
language that ``he trembled for his country when he remembered that
God was just;'' and I will offer the highest premium in my power to
Judge Douglas if he will show that he, in all his life, ever
uttered a sentiment at all akin to that of Jefferson.
The Declaration, Lincoln wrote in 1859, gave �liberty, not alone to
the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time,
. . . promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the
shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.� The
cause of American progress and American greatness was not the
Constitution or the Union, but �something back of these, something
entwining itself more closely about the human heart: the principle of
�Liberty to All.��
�All honor to Jefferson � to the man who, in the concrete pressure
of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the
coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely
revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men
and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all
coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very
harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression. He supposed
there was a question of God's eternal justice wrapped up in the
enslaving of any race of men, or any man, and that those who did so
braved the arm of Jehovah � that when a nation thus dared the
Almighty every friend of that nation had cause to dread His wrath.�
Taking his cue from the 25th chapter of the Book of Proverbs � �a word
fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver� � he wrote:
�The assertion of that principle, 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. So let us act, that neither
picture, or apple, shall ever be blurred, or bruised, or broken.�
Now it is undoubtedly true (as Wilentz reminds us in the essay
referred to at the top of this posting) that one always has to read
Lincoln�s words carefully, and in their proper (political) context, in
order to understand their meaning. Lincoln wrote and said many things
that were crafted primarily for the purposes of political expediency;
he wanted to claim Jefferson for his side, and whether he �actually
believed� what he wrote is impossible to fathom � but I�ll take him at
his word.
References
1. http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_07_26-2009_08_01.shtml#1248973825
2.
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=2634954a-b287-480e-9fbd-8a4663174031
3.
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=d6162b37-7844-41f8-ada1-bde7b2953eb3
4. http://tinyurl.com/jeffersonsmoose
5. http://www.temple.edu/lawschool/dpost/slavery.PDF
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