Equality, Justice, and the American Revolution

Editor's Note

Editor’s Note: In this seminal essay, Harry V. Jaffa responds to Melvin E. Bradford’s arguments (contra Lincoln) that equality as a principle has no place in the American political tradition. For an introduction to the lively debate between Jaffa and Bradford, and its enduring relevance today, see here.

“Let us have no foolishness indeed,” writes Professor Bradford, in his reply to “Equality as a Conservative Principle,” echoing my echo of Willmoore Kendall:

Equality as a moral or political imperative, pursued as an end in itself — Equality, with the capital “E” — is the antonym of every legitimate conservative principle.

In The Federalist, No. 51, Madison writes that “Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.” But what is justice? Let me enter into the record of our differences a passage from the Nicomachean Ethics which I would hope Professor Bradford might accept as canonical. In Book V, Chapter 3⁸ both the unjust man and the unjust action are said to be unequal. Every action admitting more or less, says Aristotle, admits also of a mean, which is the equal. “If then,” he continues, “the unjust is the unequal, the just is the equal.”

Aristotle divides justice into two kinds. The one, the justice that is in exchanges. The other, the justice that is in distributions either of honors or profits. As an example of the first kind, consider an exchange of shoes for grain. Somehow the quantity of shoes exchanged for a quantity of grain must be made equal. A common measure is needed, such as money. The shoes and the grain should then both be valued by the same amount of money. If they are so valued — things equal to the same thing being equal to each other — then the transaction may be said to be just. As an example of the second kind of justice, consider the honors or prizes awarded at the end of a race. The first place prize should go to the first place finisher, and the second place prize to the second place finisher. Or, 1/1 equals 2/2. The first kind of justice — in exchanges — is an equality of number: ten dollars worth of shoes equals ten dollars worth of grain. The second kind of justice–in distributions — is an equality of proportions. In both cases, however, the justice is a species of the equal.

Equality is a conservative principle because justice is conservative, and equality is the principle of justice. Where exchanges are just — that is, where one party does not overreach the other — and where distributions are just — that is, where rewards are proportioned to merit — men tend to become friends. Where the opposite is the case, they tend to become enemies. In Book V of the Politics⁴ Aristotle declares that the most general or universal cause of stasis (faction or sedition) is inequality. Inequality — whether numerical or proportional — tends to disrupt and destroy political communities, and equality tends towards their harmony and their preservation. Equality as the ground of justice is then both good in itself and good for its consequences.

In the course of my praise of equality I had referred to a New Conservatism, properly so called, as being identical with the Old Liberalism, which was in my view the Liberalism of the Founding Fathers of the American regime. For the Liberalism of the Founders, in my understanding, was not merely that of locally disaffected British Whigs. Once the separation from the

British crown was decided upon, they set out to build a new and more radically just political order than had existed in practice in any antecedent model. It was indeed intended to be the novus ordo seclorum, the new order of the ages, announced on the great seal of the United States. It was to decide, as Hamilton announced in the first Federalist, whether “societies of men [might be] capable of establishing good government [by] reflection and choice,” or whether mankind was forever destined “to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” From the perspective of the American founding, all previous governments, including that of Great Britain, however excellent some of their features, did not embody that reasonableness implied in the human capacity for “reflection and choice.”

But the American founding was intended to do just that. The rule of priests and kings, and of priestly kings, and the legal privileges of heredity orders generally, were regarded by our Founders as elements of unjust inequality in all European constitutions, including the British. The forbidding of the issuance of patents of nobility, either by the States or by the United States, the prohibition of any religious test for office, the absence of any property qualification for office, in the Constitution of 1787, all attest the revolutionary thrust against inequality. So does the prohibition of slavery in the great Northwest Ordinance, which was adopted by the old Congress, even as the Constitution was being drafted. Professor Bradford plays upon our present familiarity with many of these things, to inform us that “the Declaration of Independence is not very revolutionary at all. Nor the Revolution itself. Nor the Constitution.” But this is to read history backwards, to pretend that the man was never a child, or that something was never new because it is no longer so!

I have observed many times that the independence of the United States was accomplished by a Declaration that constituted a political act without parallel in the history of the world. Professor Bradford opposes this thesis in writing that only a relativist or historicist could argue that American conservatism should be an utterly unique phenomenon, without antecedents which predate 1776, and unconnected with the mainstream of English and European thought and practice known to our forefathers in colonial times.

But I never said or implied that the principles of the American Revolution were “without antecedents.” No one would insist more than I that the colonies had enjoyed a learning process, of nearly two centuries, in constitutionalism and the rule of law. Some of the ideas incorporated into the Declaration — including the connection between equality and justice — had a history of more than two thousand years. But the rooting of constitutionalism, and the rule of law in a doctrine of universal human rights, in the political act of a people declaring independence, is unique and unprecedented. Professor Bradford denies that the Declaration is revolutionary — or that it is unique — because he denies that it contains a declaration of universal human rights. And, I admit, if there were no such declaration, then the Declaration would cease to be everything I have claimed for it. Our debate turns upon what it is we find in the famous second paragraph. Professor Bradford, like WilImoore Kendall — and indeed like Chief Justice Taney in the case of Dred Scott — expends a great deal of ingenuity in pretending that the words do not mean what they plainly do mean.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Because of the rights here affirmed — but only because of them — the American people are said to have a right to resist any attempt”to reduce them under absolute despotism.” Professor Bradford thinks that white Americans had the right to resist despotism, because somehow such a right had become prescriptive under British tradition. Leaving aside the question of how such a tradition could have originated, we merely insist that that is not what the Declaration says. It says that all men have a right to resist despotism, and because all Americans are men, all Americans have this right. The right to resist despotism, that is, the right not to be slaves, is possessed equally by every human being on the face of the earth. That some might not have the capacity to make good this right, lacking either the power or the inclination, is nothing to the purpose. The form of the proposition contained in the second paragraph implies by unbreakable necessity, that unless the rights mentioned are possessed by everyone, they are possessed by no one. That is what the Signers said, and that, I am convinced, is what they meant.

The proposition that all men are created equal is, on the most elementary level, a principle of political obligation. It occurs in a context in which men are withdrawing their allegiance from an authority that has lost its legitimacy, and are transferring that allegiance to a new repository of legitimate authority. It is a principle for distinguishing when it is that men are, and when they are not, under a duty to obey. For any- one to argue, as does Professor Bradford, that the Signers of the Declaration did not understand their principles to apply to all men — in particular that they did not apply to Negro slaves — it would be necessary for him to find evidence that they (or anyone of the Revolutionary generation who had deliberately subscribed to the principles of the Declaration) considered that slaves had a duty to obey. That slaves may have been under a necessity to obey — or that the Signers or anyone else considered it expedient to place them under such a necessity — is nothing to the purpose.

Abraham Lincoln, and many others, argued that in some sense American slavery was a necessity, imposed by circumstances, on both masters and slaves. Whether or not such an argument was disingenuous we need not enter into here. What is relevant is that such an argument in no way contradicts the opinion that the rights set forth in the second paragraph of the Declaration are universal rights. To say that white men have such rights, but that black men did not, would indeed have been inconsistent with the language of the Declaration. Professor Bradford is on common ground with the Marxist and Black Power historians of recent years, who have all along maintained that the Declaration was a bourgeois or racist document, never intended to be understood in the universalistic sense in which it is expressed. None of them has produced any such evidence of inconsistency as I have demanded, nor have they tried to show why any other evidence ought to be acceptable. I shall look forward to seeing whether Professor Bradford can supply this defect in his brief.

Professor Bradford’s polemic against what he is pleased to call “the heresy of equality” occurs on at least two levels. On the one hand, he denies that there is any politically relevant sense in which it can be said with any truth that all men are created equal. On the other hand, he denies that the Signers of the Declaration meant it in any of the politically relevant senses attributed to it by Jefferson or the arch-heretic, Abraham Lincoln. Professor Bradford launches his attack by denying that there is any difference between what I had called the Old Liberalism — which demands equality of opportunity (which Professor Bradford correctly identifies with equality of rights) — and the New Liberalism, which demands equality of results. “Contrary to most Liberals, new and old,” he writes,

it is nothing less than sophistry to distinguish between equality of opportunity (equal starts in the “race of life”) and equality of condition (equal results). For only those who are equal can take equal advantage of a given circumstance. And there is no man equal to any other, except perhaps in the special and politically untranslatable, understanding of the Deity, Not intellectually or physically or economically or even morally. Not equal! Such is, of course, the genuinely self-evident proposition. [Emphasis by Bradford.]

We have already seen that Professor Bradford maintains that neither the Declaration, the Revolution, itself, or the Constitution are (“contrary to Professor Jaffa”) very revolutionary.. They became revolutionary, he says, “Only [because of] Mr. Lincoln and those who gave him support, both in his day and in the following century.” This is Bradford’s expression of Kendall’s thesis, that Abraham Lincoln had somehow “derailed” an American political tradition that had not heretofore worshipped the golden calf of equality. Yet Bradford, like Kendall, is doing little more than paraphrase Senator John C. Calhoun, in his great speech on the Oregon Bill, in the Senate, June 27, 1848. All the essentials are there, only with this difference: the arch-heretic is Jefferson instead of Lincoln!

In his speech, Calhoun calls “the most false and dangerous of all political errors” a proposition which, he said, “had become an axiom in the minds of a vast many on both sides of the Atlantic,” a proposition which is “repeated daily from tongue to tongue, as an established and incontrovertible truth.” This is the proposition that “all men are born free and equal,” a proposition which occurs in this precise form, not in the Declaration of Independence, but in the Massachusetts Bill of Rights (1780). But the doctrine it embodies was endemic to political public opinion in the revolutionary generation, as I have demonstrated by citing its variant expressions in seven of the original state constitutions, in “Equality as a Conservative Principle.”

Calhoun refutes this dangerous falsehood by declaring that men are not born, that on the contrary only infants are born! And infants are so far from being either free or equal, that they are in a condition of perfectly unfree dependence. He then takes up the proposition in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.” This form of expression, he says, “though less dangerous, is not less erroneous.” Calhoun does not explain why it is less dangerous, but we may suppose that to call all men by nature free, is more directly subversive of slavery than to call them equal. Calhoun then continues as follows:

All men are not created. According to the Bible, only two — a man and a woman — ever were — and of these one was pronounced subordinate to the other. All others have come into the world by being born, and in no sense, as I have shown, either free or equal.

Now Calhoun knew that he was here merely taking words in their wrong sense. He knew that when Jefferson had penned his immortal lines — for the universal approval of his patriot fellow-citizens — he was making assertions, not about particular individuals in any particular state of individual or social development, but about the entire human race, seen in the light of the Creation. He was distinguishing man, as man had been distinguished in philosophic discourse even before Socrates, from the beast on the one hand, and from God or the gods on the other. Indeed, he was distinguishing man, as man had been distinguished in the first chapter of Genesis, when God gave him dominion over all the brute creation, while subject to Himself. Jefferson was laying down a premise by which despotic rule might in certain cases be regarded as natural and legitimate: the case of man ruling beast, or God ruling man. But by this same premise it was seen that man does not differ from man, as man differs from beast, or as man differs from God. As Jefferson rephrased the same thought fifty years later, shortly before his death, some men are not born with saddles on their backs, and others, booted and spurred, to ride them! Legitimate government does not then arise directly from nature; and therefore it does arise from consent. As the citizens of Malden, Massachusetts declared, in their instructions to their representatives in the Continental Congress, May 27, 1776, “we can never be willingly subject to any other King than he who, being possessed of infinite wisdom, goodness, and rectitude, is alone fit to possess unlimited power.” It is in this eminently reasonable sense that the proposition that all men are created equal is to be understood. And so it was understood, until the serpent of slavery, tempted some Americans to understand it differently.

Professor Bradford has declared with strident emphasis, that no man is equal to any other, intellectually, physically, or morally. In his speech on the Dred Scott decision,” Abraham Lincoln also asserted that the Signers of Declaration did not intend to say that men were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity. And where Professor Bradford agrees with Abraham Lincoln we have, I suspect, a good practical definition of self-evident truth. But why cannot Professor Bradford understand that equality of rights is perfectly consistent with inequality of ability? Indeed, why cannot he understand that equality of rights is the only ground upon which inequality of ability can properly manifest itself?

Let us consider again the case of an exchange of shoes for grain. Should such an exchange be governed by the relative I.Q.’s, or moral reputation, or color, or the physical strength, of the buyer and the seller? Or should it be governed by the equal money value of the shoes and the grain? At bottom, an exchange of shoes for grain is an exchange between a shoemaker and a grain-grower. But what qualities of the shoemaker and the grain-grower are relevant to a just exchange, except those manifest in the shoes and the grain? Now good shoes should bring more money — and hence more grain — than poorly made shoes. But the good shoemaker can be known only by his shoes. To return less to the shoemaker for his labor, not because of the quality of the shoes, but because he is black (or, for that matter, because she is female), is manifestly unequal and hence unjust.

Professor Bradford has made the extraordinary assertion, that it is sophistry to distinguish equality of opportunity from equality of results. He observes that “only those who are equal can take equal advantage of a given circumstance.” I confess myself unable to assign any intelligible meaning to this assertion. Does he mean that a fair start in a race is advantageous only to someone who is fast enough to win it? But this is nonsense. The purpose of the race is to find out who is the fastest, and this can be done only if the start of the race is fair. I think it useful here to distinguish an open race from a handicap race. Only an open race is a true race — that is, only a race in which every runner has a chance to compete, can reveal who it is who can run the fastest. And a true race is one in which everyone starts from the same line at the same time, and runs the same distance. Moreover, it is one in which none of the runners are hobbled, and none are given packs to carry. Or, alternatively, if hobbles or packs are part of the race, then everyone must be hobbled or burdened in exactly the same way. But it is precisely when everyone starts together in a fair race, that they do not end together.

According to Professor Bradford, the “hue and cry over equality of opportunity and equal rights leads, a fortiori, to a final demand for equality of condition.” But is it not evident; indeed, is it not self-evident, that the truth is the exact opposite? In a fair race, the natural inequalities of the runners emerge in the results, and these inequalities are expressed in the order of the finish. The only equality which we see — or wish to see — in the result, is the proportional equality of unequal prizes for unequal finishers.

Now what is a handicap race? A handicap race is one designed to overcome the natural inequality of equal chance with the fastest runner. The handicapper does this by assigning a longer distance (or a later start) to the fast runner, and a shorter distance (or an earlier start) to the slow runner, and in theory, a perfectly handicapped race would be one in which everyone finished together. In practice, a perfectly handicapped race introduces the greatest amount of uncertainty into the outcome. Both theoretically and practically, handicapping overcomes natural ability in favor of equality of results. But Professor Bradford’s prescriptive rights, in particular the prescriptive right of a master to own slaves, as against the equal natural rights he opposes, bring about a handicapped society. That they do produce a spurious “equality of results,” is the testimony of the supreme spokesman for the old South.

In Calhoun’s Oregon speech, speaking in defense of that social order which, Professor Bradford would have us believe, was a partnership in every virtue and all perfection, the Senator declared that

With us [of the South] the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals, if honest and industrious; and hence have a position and pride of character of which neither poverty nor misfortune can deprive them.

What a confession of moral blindness is this! All whites are assigned upper class status (if honest and industrious!), with pride of position and character assigned to them, without regard to their inequality of achievement or excellence. And all blacks are assigned lower class status (however honest or industrious) simply because they are black (free blacks not being distinguished from slaves.) All distinctions of virtue or intelligence are, in the decisive respect, assimilated to the single distinction of color. All intrinsically important human qualities are debased and degraded fromthe honors due to them, by the distinction of color alone. And except for the inequality resulting from color, the • antebellum South, according to its most distinguished spokesman, produced the most perfect equality of results, in the race of life, that the world has ever seen!

Professor Bradford’s case against the “heresy of equality,” rests upon both logical and historical grounds. That is, he regards it both as false in itself, and false as a doctrine ascribed to the Founding Fathers. He denies that the doctrine of equal human rights can properly be found in the Declaration of Independence. To find it there is, he maintains, to misread. the Declaration. Professor Bradford’s argument is a theme with many variations, and it is sometimes difficult to detect the theme within the variation. But his case as a historical scholar — as distinct from a political philosopher — comes down to this. When the Declaration reads “all men are created equal,” we are not to understand “men” to refer to individual human beings, but only to human beings in their collective capacity, acting politically within civil society as members of a “people.”

We are now prepared to ask [writes Professor Bradford) what Mr. Jefferson and his sensible friends meant by “all men” and “created equal.” Meant together — as a group….

Professor Bradford, be it noted, thought Jefferson’s friends were sensible. What they meant as a group (the emphasis is Bradford’s) must be sensible, because of the friends. Jefferson’s well-known strictures against slavery make it impossible for Professor Bradford ever to regard him as a sensible individual. However, one can only wonder why those sensible friends were so agreeable to having the non-sensible Jefferson draft the Declaration in the first place.

The exordium, of the Declaration begins . . . with an argument from history and with a definition of the voice addressing “the powers of the earth!” It is a “people,” a “we” that are estranged from `another ‘”we.” The peroration reads the same: “we,” the “free and independent states,” are united in our will to separation. . . No contemporary liberal, new or: old, can make use of that framework or take the customary liberties with what is contained by the construction. Nor coming to it by the path have marked, may they, in honesty, see in “created equal” what they devoutly wish to find. “We,” in that second sentence, signifies the colonials as the citizenry of the distinct colonies, not as individuals, but rather in their corporate capacity. Therefore, the following “all men” — created equal in their right to expect from any government to which they might submit freedom from corporate bondage … [hence] equal as one free state is as free as another. Nothing is maintained concerning theabilities or situations of individual persons….

We have quoted at length here, because we wished there to be no doubt that any assertions we make concerning Professor Bradford’s text, are solidly grounded in that text. We observe, first of all, that Professor Bradford and I do not differ at all, concerning the proposition that when the Signers of the Declaration speak of “one people” or “we” or “these united colonies,” they were referring to themselves, and those whom they represented, in a corporate or collective, or political capacity. Indeed, I suspect that I go further than Professor Bradford, since I am convinced that “one people” meant just that, and that the several “peoples” of the several colonies or states, were already formed into one single people. And I hold — with Presidents Jackson and Lincoln — that the several states also were formed into one indissoluble union. But how in the world can the expression “men” be synonymous with “people”? Consider the text: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. . .”

The first “We” is indeed the colonials, or the former colonials, citizens of the formerly distinct (but now united) colonies. But why are “we” endowed with “certain unalienable rights”? According to Professor Bradford, it is because they possessed those rights as colonials. But why should they possess those rights when they are no longer colonials? Rights granted by civil society are rights which can be taken away by civil society. But the Declaration here is most explicit. The rights of which it speaks are sot civil or political rights, rights resulting from human or positive law. They are ^–rights with which they had been “endowed by their Creator.” Unless therefore Professor Bradford believes that the Creator endowed colonial Americans with rights with which he had not endowed other human beings, then the “men” in the phrase “all men are created equal” must be a more comprehensive category than the men in the “we” who hold these truths.

It is also a rule of interpretation for arch aic documents that the meaning of words or phrases is to be sought in the light of contemporary usage. In Calhoun’s Oregon speech, he assumed as a matter of course that “all men are born free and equal,” and “all men are created equal” were mere variations of expression for the same fundamental idea. The former was, as we have noted, taken from the Massachusetts Bill of Rights. Article I of that document reads in full as follows.

All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and inalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties: that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.”

Can anyone doubt that the “men” referred to here are individuals, not societies of men in any collective sense? Instead of being “endowed by their Creator” with certain rights, they are born with them. And the rights with which they are born, are said to be “natural, essential, and unalienable,” the three terms clearly being synonymous. But Professor Bradford’s reading, as we have seen, regards the rights which the collective “we” declares, to be rights held only “in their corporate capacity.” Such rights are ineluctably civil or political, they could not possibly be called “natural” or “essential,” any more than they could be called “unalienable.”

But we may, I think, settle the matter beyond cavil. In the very Preamble of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights, we find the following:

The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals; it is a social compact by which the whole people covenants with the each citizen and each citizen with the whole people that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.

Since the Massachusetts Bill of Rights was adopted in 1780, I submit further these lines from the Virginia Bill of Rights, adopted less than a month before the Declaration of Independence.

That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights [inherent being synonymous with natural, essential, and unalienable], of which when they enter into a state of society, they cannot by any compact deprive or divest their posterity….

Can there then be any reasonable doubt, can there indeed be any possible doubt, that for the revolutionary generation, human beings, as human beings, as men, had rights antecedent to, and independent of, civil society? Or that civil society, properly so called (that is, legitimate civil society), resulted from an agreement among men possessed of such rights? Can there then be any doubt that when the Declaration speaks of “all men” being created equal, it does indeed then refer to individuals?

This record is not, contrary to Professor Bradford, an invention of liberals, new or old. Had John C. Calhoun, when he delivered his Oregon speech in 1848, had the slightest suspicion that this interpretation of the Declaration was a perversity of abolitionist propaganda, he would certainly have been as forward as Professor Bradford in pointing it out. Yet in the peroration of that speech he declared that

We now begin to experience the danger of admitting so great an error to have a place in the declaration of our independence . . . It had strong hold on the mind of Mr. Jefferson, the author of that document [Calhoun did not see the difference between Jefferson and his sensible friends], which caused him to take an utterly false view of the subordinate relation of the black to the white race in the South; and to hold in consequence, that the latter, though utterly unqualified to possess liberty, were as fully entitled to both liberty and equality as the former; and that to deprive them of it was unjust and immoral.

Clearly, it never occurred for a moment to Calhoun that the “men” in “all men are created equal” did not refer to Negroes, however erroneous he may have believed the proposition to have been. We see then that the American Civil War resulted from a new revolution, a revolution in opinion in the South. That revolution denied the axiomatic premise of the older, better Revolution, which had declared — and meant — that all men are created equal.

Professor Bradford has a great many things to say about Abraham Lincoln, none of them complimentary. His remarks cover a spectrum that ranges all the way from the nonsensical to the absurd. As a specimen, we cite one which even he felt constrained to put into the small print of the end notes. After observing a comparison of Lincoln to Bismarck and Lenin by Edmund Wilson, he adds:

Another useful analogue (a firm higher law man, and no legalist or historicist) is Adolf Hitler. For he writes in Mein Kampf that “human rights break state rights,” calls for illegal as well as legal instruments in “wars of rebellion against enslavement within and without,” observes that all governments by oppression plead the law, and concludes, “I believe that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator … fighting for the Lord’s work.”

I think that if Professor Bradford had searched long enough he might have found a documented quotation from Hitler, in which he had said that some of his best friends were Jews. Such a quotation would have had exactly the same significance as the one presented above.

Professor Bradford does not like Lincoln’s attachment to higher law doctrine. In particular, he does not like the fusion, in Lincoln’s rhetoric, of higher law drawn from both the natural law, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, and from the divine law, as found in the Bible. Let us concede that Lincoln was the greatest master of this rhetorical fusion. But it is utterly misleading to suppose that it was his invention, or that it was more characteristic of him than of any one of a large number of his contemporaries, North or South.

According to Professor Bradford, the House Divided speech — with which Lincoln opened the campaign for Douglas’ Senate seat in 1853 — “was, beyond any question, a Puritan declaration of war.” It was so, says Bradford, because, quoting the words of Lincoln’s “one-time friend, Alexander Stephens,” it “put the institution of nearly one-half the states under the ban of public opinion and national condemnation.” Bradford continues:

Of course the central motif of the House Divided speech . . . echoes the Bible (Mark 3:25) : Christ speaking of the undivided hosts of Satan. Lincoln’s authority is thus, by association, elevated to the level of the hieratic. But he added something to that mixture. The myth that slavery will either be set on its way to extinction … or else all states will eventually become slave states establishes a false dilemma. . . Thus he participates in what Richard Hofstadter calls the “paranoid style” in politics.

Later on, Bradford adds, in words which he italicized for emphasis: For houses are always divided, in some fashion or another.”

Thus Lincoln, invoking the higher law, natural and divine, against slavery, demanding that the house be undivided, was introducing a revolutionary, gnostic, antinomian morality, as the ground of politics. He was thus assuring that politics would forever after be a crusade against sin, the sin to be defined, not by priests, but by egalitarian, ideological politicians.

Since Bradford has introduced Alexander Stephens as a witness against Lincoln, it would be particularly instructive to see how Stephens’ views of the crisis of the divided house compared with Lincoln’s. In December, 1860, shortly after South Carolina had adopted its Ordinance of Secession, Lincoln wrote to Stephens, saying

that you think slavery is right, and should be extended, and we think it is wrong, and should be restricted. That, I suppose, is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us.

Stephens, it should be remarked, was a Southern moderate. As an old Whig, he was a strong Unionist, and fought against secession in his state of Georgia as long as he could. But he went with his state when it left the Union, and became Vice President of the Confederate States of America. After the adoption of the Confederate Constitution, he propounded a defense of the new regime, which has come down in history as the “Corner Stone” speech. It has its name from precisely the same source as Lincoln’s House Divided speech. Both are built around biblical texts. Stephens certainly elevates his doctrine to the level of the hieratic, as Bradford puts it, every bit as much as Lincoln. But Stephens’ speech is more than a defense of the new regime. It is the most comprehensive Southern reply to all of Lincoln’s ,speeches, from 1854 to 1860, of any that the record of the times shows. What the speech proves, beyond doubt, is that Lincoln was perfectly accurate when he said that Stephens’ thinking slavery right, and Lincoln’s thinking it wrong, was the only substantial difference between them. In every other respect, as we shall see, Stephens was in agreement with Lincoln, and in disagreement with Professor Bradford.

Lincoln held, in virtually all his speeches between 1854 and 1860 — notably in the debates with Douglas, and in the Cooper Union speech — that the Founding Fathers had all regarded slavery as a great moral wrong. They had inherited slavery as part of their colonial legacy, and its presence among them imposed certain “necessities” which they were powerless to change. But they supposed that slavery was nonetheless “in course of ultimate extinction,” and although they gave guarantees to slavery while it should last, they did not expect it to last. Its presence was tolerable because, but only because, they expected it gradually to die out. The House was not a Divided House, in Lincoln’s sense, if the moral wrong of slavery were acknowledged, and public policy based upon that acknowledgement as a premise. What does Alexander Stephens say about this?

The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature: that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away.

We see now that Jefferson’s sensible friends were no more sensible than he! It is axiomatic for Stephens that “most of the leading statesmen” of the time, were antislavery. All of them understood “all men are created equal” to include all men, and therefore to include Negroes. It was the “general opinion of the men of that day” that slavery was a transient phenomenon. Hence general opinion agreed with Lincoln that at the Founding slavery was in course of ultimate extinction, and that the House of the Founders was not a Divided House.

Stephens does not disagree by one iota with Lincoln’s interpretation of the Founding. But he disagrees with the Founding. “Those ideas,” he writes, viz., of the Founding Fathers,

were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of the races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a government built upon it; when the “storm came and the wind blew, it fell.”

The quotation by Stephens is taken from Mark, 7:26, 27. Jesus is speaking, and says, “And every one who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house upon sand: and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against the house, and it fell; and great was the fall of it.” What was the sandy foundation? It was the doctrine that the races were equal. And what is rock which, asserts Stephens, is the truth upon which a government can stand? What is it for which lie claims, by analogy, the hieratic authority of Jesus himself?

Our new government [declared Stephens] is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not the equal to the white man. That slavery — the subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.

This our new Government [the Confederate States of America] is the first in the history of the world, based upon this great physical and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science….

We have seen Professor Bradford’s distaste for political novelty. Time and again, he has defended the cause of the Confederacy as the cause of traditional society attempting to preserve tradition against a radical break with the past, a break enforced by Lincoln’s militant, uniformitarian Unionism. But here we find a most eminent apologist for the Confederacy, its supremely articulate Vice President, in March, 1861, declaring the cause of the Confederacy to be the exact opposite of what Professor Bradford has declared it to be.

Not only does Stephens say that the Confederacy is the first government of its kind in the history of the world, but he says that it is based upon a truth that has emerged from the progress of science. Although he says that such truths are slow in their process of development, it is also the case that they cause profound upheavals where they make their appearance. The examples which Stephens himself gives span less than two centuries. The fault of the Founding Fathers was not that they were perverse, but that the progress of science had not enlightened them. Stephens’ doctrine is then not merely a commitment to novelty, but a commitment to a perpetual revolution of morals and politics, whenever the progress of science shall reveal new truths. It is the most radical denial possible, of that “funded wisdom of the ages” in which Professor Bradford would have us place our faith. It is a denial of such permanent standards as are incorporated in the natural law teaching of the Declaration of Independence.

Stephens compares the new truth about the races, to the discoveries of Galileo, Adam Smith, and Harvey. Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood, he says, was not admitted by “a single one of the medical profession living at the time,” yet now it is “universally acknowledged.” “May we not,” asks Stephens, “therefore

look forward with confidence to the ultimate universal acknowledgement of the truths upon which our system rests? It is the first government ever instituted upon principles of strict conformity to nature, and the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human society. Many governments have been founded upon the principle of certain classes; but the classes thus enslaved, were of the same race, and in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature’s laws. The negro, by nature, or by the curse of Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system.

Surely, Abraham Lincoln never set forth the case for an undivided house with greater assurance or conviction! Nor did Lincoln appeal to greater authority, either natural or divine, in support of his version of what the undivided house should be. Yet there is something self-contradictory in Stephens’ appeal, as there is not in Lincoln’s. Why should it have come to be known only so recently, that the Negro is fitted by nature only for slavery? Especially if the “cause” of that nature is the curse of Canaan? Whence could it have arisen, that so enlightened a generation as that of the Founding Fathers should have been so completely wrong about so fundamental a reality? For it is clear that Stephens does regard them as enlightened, in all respects except one. The many governments which, he says, were founded upon “the principles of certain classes,” is certainly meant to encompass all the unequal regimens of the old world.

The founding that began on July 4, 1776, is certainly, albeit indirectly, endorsed by Stephens, in precisely the sense in which we have endorsed it. It too must have been the “first in the history of the world,” in just the way in which we have described it above. Stephens has no quarrel — any more than did Calhoun — with a system which is radically egalitarian as far as white men are concerned. But, like Calhoun, he thinks that this egalitarianism can only be properly realized, upon the foundation of Negro slavery. From Stephens’ perspective the Revolution accomplished by the Declaration and the Constitution, was perfect in its kind. There is no question but that that Revolution represented a break with everything that went before it. But it needed one further step forward in enlightenment — the step represented by the discovery of the inferiority of the Negro race. (Never mind if this opinion is inconsistent with the idea of unknowable future scientific progress.)

The architect, in the construction of buildings, lays the foundation with proper materials. … The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race that it should be so. It is indeed in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. … The great objects of humanity are best attained when conformed to His laws and decrees, in the formation of government, as well as in all things else. Our Confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws. This stone which was first rejected by the first builders “is become the chief stone of the corner” in our new edifice.”

Thus ends the first and greatest apology for the Confederacy, made in the flush of its confidence in long life and prosperity. Stephens’ apology after the Civil War, contained in his Constitutional View of the War Between the States, is very different. The “cornerstone” sinks from sight, and States’ rights, as the ground of constitutionalism, replaces it. But I think the Corner Stone speech is the more authentic, as revealing the character of the Confederacy when it felt full confidence in its principles. The “corner stone” quotation comes from Psalms, 118:22. “The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner.” It appears however in both Matthew and Mark, where Jesus quotes it, and quotes it in such a way as to indicate that he, or his teaching, is the stone in question. Certainly Stephens yielded nothing to Lincoln, in his assumption of what Bradford calls “hieratic” authority.

We began this part of our essay by giving Professor Bradford’s quotation from Adolf Hitler, in which he shows that Hitler, like Lincoln, was a “firm higher law man.” Hitler, we saw, like Lincoln believed that “human rights” take precedence of “state rights”; and that Hitler, like Lincoln believed he was “fighting for the Lord’s work.” But we see now that Union and Confederate causes did not differ, with respect to being higher law causes. Had Hitler looked back for precedent, it is not likely that he would have looked to Abraham Lincoln. All the precedent he would have needed in the higher law sense was certainly present in Stephens’ Corner Stone speech. And in the decisive sense, that speech, like the cause it represented, would have been entirely congenial. Certainly Hitler’s doctrines of racial inequality went much beyond that of Stephens. Yet when Hitler spoke of “human rights,” he certainly did not do so in the sense of Lincoln or Jefferson. “Human rights” were for him, primarily and essentially the rights of the master race. And the Confederate States of America represented the first time in human history, that a doctrine of a master race was fully and systematically set forth as the ground of a regime. More precisely, it was the first time that such a doctrine was set forth on the authority of modern science. It was this authority that made it so persuasive, and so pernicious.

National Socialism and Marxist Communism are, as I have argued elsewhere, alternative versions of the social Darwinism that was so rife in nineteenth century thought. They are alternative foundations of the totalitarian tyrannies that have so blotted and befouled the life of man in our time. That at least one of them never took root in the United States we owe, more than to any other man, to Abraham Lincoln. Let us carry on his work, building upon that rock upon which he built his undivided house, the teaching that, with respect to the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, “all men are created equal.”