Yesterday was Juneteenth, a holiday celebrating the end of slavery. So perhaps you should check out the Lincoln-Douglas debates. These are collected in several books, but the one I use is Paul Angle’s Created Equal? The Complete Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 (University of Chicago Press, 1958).
As I mentioned last week, the Lincoln-Douglas debates began when former Congressman Abraham Lincoln fended off the possibility that Democrat Stephen A. Douglas might be given the Republican nomination, in honor of his attacks on the fraudulent pro-slavery “Lecompton Constitution” for Kansas. Once Lincoln had secured the endorsement of the state Republican Party, he and Douglas went around the state of Illinois, holding seven formal debates. The debates focused primarily on the extension of slavery into the Western territories owned by the United States—not on slavery where it existed in the South. Lincoln correctly understood that the federal government had no authority to interfere with slavery where it already existed. But he emphatically denied that the Constitution required the federal government to allow slavery in the new territories that would become states.
This was troublesome to many because if those territories became states, the precarious balance between slave-state and free-state representation in the Senate would collapse, and with that collapse would come the possibility that slavery might be abolished, perhaps by a constitutional amendment. This fear was another primary target of Lincoln’s—it was based, he argued, on a belief that slavery was right and good. And that was what he attacked. The proper orientation should be toward putting slavery in “the course of ultimate extinction.”
Throughout the debates Lincoln referred time and time again to the Declaration of Independence. It was not just a rhetorical device to be used during Fourth of July speeches. No, it was true; it was even a binding law. Lincoln’s rhetoric was profound and moving, but it was always employed in the service of a precise, thorough, sometimes even tedious, logic. The best example of this is the Cooper Union speech of 1860 (not part of the debates), in which he destroys the idea that the Constitution forbids Congress from interfering with slavery in the territories—does so with almost exhausting logic—and always with reference to the principles of the Declaration.
Some southerners were willing to come out and simply denounce the Declaration. John Calhoun said there was “not a word of truth in it.” But Stephen Douglas wouldn’t go that far. He merely argued that the “all men” of the Declaration did not include black men. “I believe that the Declaration of Independence, in the words ‘all men are created equal,’ was intended to allude only to the people of the United States, to men of European birth or descent, being white men, that they were created equal…but the signers of that paper did not intend to include the Indian or the negro in that declaration, for if they had would they not have been bound to abolish slavery in every state and colony from that day?” This, of course, was precisely the logic that Roger Taney embraced in the Dred Scott decision—and that many black leaders have also embraced, including, alas, Justice Thurgood Marshall.
Lincoln disagreed. This, he said, was a “new proposition that no human being ever thought of three years ago…[and it has] an evil tendency, if not an evil design…a tendency to dehumanize the negro—to take away from him the right of ever striving to be a man.” The Declaration was the very essence of Americanism, and he decried the tendency from the 1830s to the 1860s to denigrate its principles.
I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop. If one mans says it does not mean a negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man? If that Declaration is not the truth, let us go to get the statute book, in which we find it and tear it out! Who is so bold as to do it! If it is not true let us tear it out!
Douglas argued that “this government was established on the white basis. It was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and never should be administered by any except white men.... [This is based on] the fact that he is a negro, belonging to a race incapable of self government and for that very reason ought not to be on an equality with white men.” In a campaign before audiences who expected their politicians to be overtly racist, this was not nearly as shocking as it is today; indeed, Lincoln careful to avoid challenging the voters’ racism. He pushed only an anti-slavery view—openly opposing the political equality of black people—Frederick Douglass later said that when first became president, Lincoln was simply a racist, but that he later came to drop his racial prejudices. In 1858, Lincoln said
I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists…. I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races. There is a physical difference which in my judgment will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as [Stephen] Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong, having the superior position…. [B]ut I hold that notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence…. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas that he is not my equal in many respects—certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.
But what about the fact that the framers of the Declaration allowed slavery to continue? “Let me remind him,” said Douglas, “that when Thomas Jefferson wrote that document, he was the owner, and so continued until his death, of a large number of slaves…. [T]hey all continued to hold their negroes as slaves during the Revolutionary War…. [W]hen you say that the Declaration of Independence includes the negro, you charge the signers of it with hypocrisy.” But Lincoln replied that
the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not mean to declare all men equal in all respects…. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for a free society which should be familiar to all: constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, of all colors, everywhere.
That might be all fine, said Douglas, but the people of the territories should be allowed to decide for themselves how to run their own states. In a forecast of the arguments over the Vietnam and Middle Eastern conflicts, Douglas embraced a moral relativism whereby he declared that he didn’t care whether slavery was voted up or voted down—that was for the people to decide. This, he said, was the principle of “popular sovereignty.” But Lincoln argued that while the people have the right to decide things democratically, that is not a fundamental principle; it is based on the more fundamental principle that all men are created equal. Democracy is an instrument for protecting freedom—not a fundamental political maxim. The people do not have the right to vote to take away another man’s freedom. Rights come first, democracy only second, and when the two conflict, rights must prevail. That, at least, is what the Declaration of Independence says.
The Lincoln-Douglas debates were once part of every student’s education in America. No longer. Today, even liberals—even alleged libertarians!—attack Lincoln, even rising to the absurdity of claiming that he hated attacked slavery only in order to seize power, or only because he hated blacks. Simply reading the debates is enough to show how absurd such a slander is. Lincoln was not a libertarian—he advocated various government subsidy programs, for instance—but his attacks on slavery were based on the most profound libertarian principles, and deserve to be seriously studied by all libertarians.
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