Harry V. Jaffa Quotes

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Now there's a little story to that. Chief Justice Taney, in the Dred Scott decision—which said that the Missouri Compromise restriction of slavery in 1820 and any other one, was unconstitutional—said that there was no power in the Congress to forbid slavery in the territories. And he added as a kind of obiter dictum that the only power of Congress over slavery in the territories was the power coupled with the duty of protecting the owner and his rights. Now the seven states of the Deep South interpreted that to mean that the police power of the federal government had to guarantee the integrity of the property of any slave owner going into any United States territory.

Harry V. Jaffa
No, on the contrary, the Constitution exists to protect that right. The important point is that the Constitution exists to protect individual liberty and individual property. In fact, the most important of all of the rights, really the foundation of all rights, are the rights to private property. But the right to private property is a right for each individual human being to own himself.

Harry V. Jaffa
Well, Lincoln, in his July 4th Special Message to the Congress, 1861, said that the people of the South were a law-abiding people, and they would not have undertaken to do what they were now doing if it hadn't been for the invention of an ingenious sophism, according to which a state could secede from the Union without the permission of the Union or of any other state.

Harry V. Jaffa
This, by the way, was a demand for the greatest increase of federal power prior to the New Deal, maybe even since the New Deal. The greatest demand for an increase in federal power was made by the Southern states in 1860. And the majority in the convention refused to adopt this, and they refused to adopt it because nobody could be elected dogcatcher in a free state who supported a federal police power over slavery in the territories.

Harry V. Jaffa
We have these inalienable rights, and in the exercise of these same inalienable rights, we agree with each other to form civil governments. And Madison has an essay on sovereignty, which is a sort of simplified repetition of John Locke's argument in the second chapter of the Second Treatise.

Harry V. Jaffa
Madison, by the way, had opposed both the bank and tariffs when Hamilton was Secretary of Treasury. He signed into law the Second Bank of the United States, and endorsed the tariff, said that it has been ratified by the people in subsequent elections, so he reversed his position on that.

Harry V. Jaffa
Now, Lincoln' position was consistent throughout the debates. A great deal is said—Dr. DiLorenzo says it, but it's been said countless times before—that Lincoln used racist language in the debates. That's not true. Now what Lincoln argued for in the debates was the recognition of the natural rights of black people, when Douglas said that if the people of Nebraska are good enough to govern themselves, they certainly are good enough to govern a few miserable Negroes. And Lincoln replied by saying, 'I doubt not that the people of Nebraska are as good as the average of people elsewhere, what I say is that no man is good enough to govern another without his consent'.

Harry V. Jaffa
But bear this in mind: if this demand had been acceded to, that meant that every territory in the United States which would become a state—and remember, there were then 33 states and there would be 50 states eventually—but every other state would become a slave state. Because if one slave owner went to North Dakota with his slave, the federal police power would follow him to make sure that he could hold that slave securely in that place.

Harry V. Jaffa
The motto of the United States is 'e pluribus unum', or 'from many, one'. Originally, this referred to the one union formed from the many states. It became the motto of the country because we had to fight a great civil war to prevent the manyness of the states from destroying the oneness of the union. What led manyness nearly to destroy oneness was the presence of slavery in many of the states. The diversity that tolerated the difference between slavery and freedom had become intolerable. A crisis had been reached in which, according to the greatest American, the house divided had to cease being divided. It had to become either all free or all slave.

Harry V. Jaffa
If "safeguards of individual liberty" do not have "any intrinsic worth," then neither does individual liberty. And if individual liberty has no intrinsic worth, neither does individual life. It is impossible to imagine a more complete denial of President Bush's proclamation of the sanctity of human life, or of his assertion of an "essential human dignity attached to all persons by virtue of their very existence." This is not only legal positivism, it is nihilism. It is not only a denial of any moral foundation of constitutionalism, it is a denial of any moral foundation of political community.

Harry V. Jaffa
George W. Bush has said he wants to change things in Washington. On this President's Day, we find him attempting this change in a most profound way. President Bush is to be commended for his recent Proclamation of National Sanctity of Human Life Day, in which he reminds his fellow citizens of the true principles of free government. But those principles today are usually ignored, or scorned. By taking up the challenge of defending these principles, President Bush aligns himself with the greatest President of our nation's history.

Harry V. Jaffa
The President's proclamation is a mighty blow against the legal positivism that infects our legal establishment, and the moral relativism that pervades our society. But this can only be the beginning of a far greater struggle than that against the physical danger of terrorism. It means taking up once again the burden Lincoln bore, in reasserting the truth of the Declaration, against the "positive good" theory of slavery, and against the still more deadly theory that majorities, and not the difference between right and wrong, should decide the future of slavery.

Harry V. Jaffa
Well, it's not clear how persuasive this argument was in Illinois, but it was persuasive in Mississippi and Alabama and Florida and South Carolina, which said, 'Well, Lincoln's right. This man Douglas is denying us our Constitutional rights'. And as a result of that, it was Lincoln's cleverness in the debates which split the Democratic convention in 1860, and this is what in fact elected Abraham Lincoln. But it was the rebellion against Douglas, not against Lincoln, which precipitated the whole secessionist movement.

Harry V. Jaffa
South Carolina cites, loosely, but with substantial accuracy, some of the language of the original Declaration. That Declaration does say that it is the right of the people to abolish any form of government that becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established. But South Carolina does not repeat the preceding language in the earlier document: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal'.

Harry V. Jaffa
That all men are created equal does not mean that human beings are the same, or equal, in size, strength, beauty, virtue, or intelligence. There are obviously great differences in individual aptitudes and talents in sports, music, mathematics, speaking, and writing. They are also unequal in the virtues, among them courage, temperance, and justice. But as Jefferson once said, the fact that Sir Isaac Newton may be the most intelligent of living human beings does not give him any right whatever to my person or my property.

Harry V. Jaffa
No result of the Civil War was more fundamental than the authoritative assertion of the inclusion of human beings of any color and any ethnicity in the proposition of human equality. A consensus in favor of the colorblind Constitution is provided by the logic of reality and the logic of history.

Harry V. Jaffa
So that was the basic issue. Once the ballots had been decided, Lincoln said the only recourse must be through future elections in which the minority can try to become the majority; but there can be no right to reject the results of an election conducted under the rules of the Constitution.

Harry V. Jaffa
But what happened then? The majority of the delegates to that convention wanted to nominate Stephen A. Douglas as the Democratic candidate for the presidency. The Democratic Party had the two-thirds rule, which they continued to have until 1936, as a matter of fact. I think only in '36 did they change it to a simple majority; Franklin D. Roosevelt's first nomination had to be two-thirds.

Harry V. Jaffa
Lincoln, as we know, supported that Act as part of the Compromise of 1850. But in his inaugural address he mentioned several respects in which that law should be modified so that it would be consistent, at least, with the principles of civil liberty. But that was the temper of the country.

Harry V. Jaffa
I myself believe in free trade and would be glad it could be implemented whenever possible. But in the actual conflict that led to the Civil War, we had two obstacles to free trade, and I ask you to think which one of them was the greater obstacle. One was the tariff, and the other was slavery.

Harry V. Jaffa
And Lincoln said that by your own argument, if the local regulations are not forthcoming, you must support the federal enforcement; if you don't, you're taking the same position as the abolitionists, who denied any obligation to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law.

Harry V. Jaffa
We see here the essence of the southern understanding of equality, why it was so highly prized, and why so resolutely defended. Every white man can be proud of himself, can consider himself an aristocrat, not because of his virtues or accomplishments, but simply because he is not black! By rejecting the principle that all men are created equal, by keeping 'the degenerate sons of Ham' under foot, and under the lash, one need never do anything to become important, like members of the royal family. It is not without reason that Lincoln compared slavery to the divine right of kings! Calhoun demanded equality no less than Lincoln. But his equality required a 'cornerstone' of slavery.

Harry V. Jaffa
When people speak about the results of the 1860 Presidential election, it's usually given out that Lincoln had, I think, 39 percent of the popular vote in that election. But, of course, there were 10 states in the South who formed part of the ten or the eleven states of the Confederacy, in which no Republican electors were on the ballots. And since we know that at least 100,000 men from those states came north to join the Union Army, there were at least 100,000 votes that weren't counted.

Harry V. Jaffa
And it's important to understand the sequence of events, and the ideas that accompanied that sequence of events that led up to the Civil War. The subtitle of my new book is Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War, and I believe I've discussed the question of the nature of secession and the role of secession in that crisis, I believe, more thoroughly than I think it's ever been discussed before.

Harry V. Jaffa
That the equality of human souls in the sight of God ought to be translated into a political structure of equal political rights has come to be regarded as the most authentic interpretation of the Gospel itself. Slavery, and the imposition of all arbitrary forms of inequality of man by man, has come to be seen as demeaning to the souls of God's creation.

Harry V. Jaffa
Jefferson Davis is categorical in pronouncing four million Americans, and all their descendants for all future time, to be 'the degenerate sons of Ham', fit only to be slaves. This implies that Negroes were descended from the Canaanites. But the Canaanites were not black! Neither were the great majority of the many millions of slaves in the ancient world. We mention these facts as conclusively refuting Davis' thesis, even if there is someone not under legal constraint who is inclined to accept the lunatic notion that anyone today can be justly enslaved because of the episode described in the ninth chapter of Genesis.

Harry V. Jaffa
John C. Calhoun was the philosopher-king of the old south, the spiritual mentor of Stephens, Davis, and most of the political leaders of the Confederacy. Bradford and McClellan, following Willmoore Kendall, are obsessed with the utterly false notion that Lincoln was somehow responsible for the permissive egalitarianism of the contemporary welfare state. But equality as such was no less important to Calhoun than to Lincoln. It was just a different kind of equality.

Harry V. Jaffa
The subculture of American Negroes is perhaps the most deeply rooted of all American subcultures, since most black Americans are descended from ancestors who were on the North American continent long before those of the great majority of white Americans. And the blood of many of them is, in truth, mingled with that of the great white families of the colonial and Revolutionary periods. The achievements of this subculture, both in slavery and in freedom, are among the most exalted in human record. It is doubted whether any expression of the human spirit transcends the Negro spiritual.

Harry V. Jaffa
That moral order, we know, encompasses, beside the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, many other rights, as for example the right to the free exercise of religion, to freedom of speech and of the press, and to freedom of association. These are rights antecedent to the political process-rights that do not depend upon majority will-rights that majorities may not violate. They are all features of the moral "laws of nature and of nature's God." Clearly, the implications of the President's endorsement of the idea of a moral order, antecedent to all positive law, including the law of the Constitution, go far beyond the debate over abortion.

Harry V. Jaffa
Now, Lincoln said to Douglas, if you accept that Taney's opinion that slavery is expressly affirmed in the Constitution is true, then you are under an obligation to give the slave owners the implementation of this right.

Harry V. Jaffa