Has America Lost Its American Mind?
The deepest questions raised by this book go beyond the merely antiquarian. In the end, the Declaration of Independence was more than just a summing up of extant beliefs, principles, and attitudes. And it was more than just an “expression of the American mind” as it existed in 1776.
Initially, as we saw in chapter 11, the Declaration served to unite colonial Patriots and inspired many to fight and some to die in a brutal war for independence. But during the years of the early republic and beyond, it was held up and celebrated by Americans as a symbol of what America stood for and aspired to be. The Declaration’s principles defined America’s identity and her national destiny.
This was certainly Abraham Lincoln’s position. Lincoln called the Declaration the “electric cord” that “links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together.” Even recent immigrants to America who were not yet citizens and who had no blood connection to the founding generation felt its current, according to Lincoln:
When they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, … and so they are.
The Declaration’s “electric cord” inspired not only American citizens and recent immigrants to the United States, but its words could be felt “in the minds of all men everywhere.”1 That recent immigrants would feel the power of the Declaration is not surprising. They chose to come to America because of the freedom promised by the Declaration. But what of those Americans whose ancestors were brought to America as slaves and held in chattel bondage? What to the slave could the Declaration possibly mean?
Again, it was Lincoln who understood what the Declaration meant to all Americans, especially in the light of slavery. Responding to the claim of Senator Stephen Douglas and Chief Justice Roger Taney that the signers of the Declaration of Independence did not “intend to include negroes, by the fact that they did not at once, actually place them on an equality with the whites,” Lincoln charged the pair with doing violence “to the plain unmistakable language of the Declaration.” He captured both the intent and meaning of the Declaration’s signers with cascading logic. The following passage, previously cited, bears repeating:
I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal—equal in “certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This they said, and this meant. 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 free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by 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.2
Frederick Douglass, the former slave and leading abolitionist, saw the meaning of the Declaration of Independence in the same way as did Lincoln. He believed that the Declaration was “the ringbolt to the chain” of America’s “destiny,” and he described its moral principles as “saving principles.” Douglass challenged the American people to “stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.”3
The Declaration’s promise of liberty and justice to all meant everything to the man who had once been held in chattel bondage as another man’s property. It provided all Americans, including slaves, with a moral and political standard by which to judge the actions of government officials past, present, and future. It declared certain moral and political principles to be true—true for all men and women everywhere. Such a proposition assumed that reason is capable of knowing what is true and false, right and wrong, just and unjust. Thus, the revolutionary generation did not consider their principles to be mere opinions, equal in status to all other opinions. They viewed the Declaration’s moral and political truths as grounded in an unchanging nature—absolute, certain, universal, and timeless. As Abraham Lincoln once said of the Declaration’s principles: they are “the definitions and axioms of free society.”4
And what of the Declaration’s fate in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?
Beginning in the late 1830s, as new philosophic ideas began to seep into America from Europe, some Americans—most notably Southern slaveholders and their Northern allies—began to openly challenge whether the Declaration’s self-evident truths were actually true. The two best-known criticisms of the Declaration were spoken by Northerners. In 1854, John Pettit, a Democratic senator from Indiana, famously announced during the debate on the Kansas-Nebraska Act that the Declaration’s first self-evident truth, holding that “all men are created equal,” was not a self-evident truth at all, but instead “is nothing more to me than a self-evident lie.”5 Two years after Pettit’s speech in defense of allowing the extension of slavery into the Kansas Territory, Rufus Choate, the great intellectual voice of the American Whig Party, referred to the Declaration’s self-evident truths as little more than “the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right.”6
Why had some antebellum Americans lost confidence in or simply rejected what Lincoln once called America’s “ancient faith”?7
Beginning in the late 1830s, proslavery intellectuals in the South began to rethink the nature and meaning of their “peculiar institution” in response to the rise of the abolitionist movement in the North, which based its moral philosophy on the principles of the Declaration.8 A new breed of Southern intellectual was no longer willing to treat slavery as a “necessary evil” in the face of abolitionist attacks. They now promoted it as a “positive good,” which meant they were forced to rethink their relationship to America’s revolutionary tradition, and, more particularly, to the moral principles that informed it. Eventually, proslavery thinkers came to realize that the greatest intellectual obstacle to promoting slavery in the United States was the Declaration of Independence and its psychic hold on the minds of ordinary Americans, including patriotic Southerners.
This realization put Southern intellectuals in a difficult spot. Like most Americans, they were proud of what their fathers and grandfathers had accomplished in 1776. But now, the Declaration was being used to condemn their way of life. Philosophically, this moment was the Southerners’ Rubicon: they had to make a choice between slavery and the Declaration, and they chose slavery. Proslavery writers began to openly challenge the Declaration’s understanding of truth, nature, and reason, as well as its four substantive truth claims about equality, rights, consent, and revolution, and they also turned against the political, social, and economic institutions of a free society.
At the philosophic heart of the Southerners’ rejection of the Declaration was their rejection of “nature” for “history” as the standard of justice and right. Proslavery writers repudiated the Enlightenment proposition that there are absolute moral truths grounded in an unchanging nature that transcend time and place. Moral truth, they claimed, was discovered by studying real men as they live in actual political communities, and not by studying the abstraction “man” in a hypothetical state of nature. Following the methods of the nineteenth-century German Historical School, Southern intellectuals replaced the idea of an unchanging human nature as the standard of right with the idea of the historical process as the standard of right. Proslavery intellectuals were the first to introduce in America the philosophy of historicism, which advanced the idea that truth (especially moral and political truth) is historically relative to one’s own cultural horizon.
Many Southern intellectuals adopted a philosophy of history worked out by the most influential German thinker of the first half of the nineteenth century, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Proslavery writers embraced the Hegelian claim that history is necessarily unfolding toward higher levels of rationality, progress, freedom, and civilization.9 The first-known mention of Hegel in Southern literature occurred in 1832, when Jesse Burton Harrison, who had just returned from Germany, where he is thought to have attended Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history, wrote in the Southern Review on the “philosophical mind of Hegel.”10 Southern intellectuals over the course of the next three decades drank deep from the well of German philosophy and history.
Consider the views of the Reverend James Warley Miles of Charleston, South Carolina, the South’s leading Hegelian. In a speech delivered to the graduating class of the College of Charleston on the topic “God in History,” Miles applied Hegel’s universal history, as outlined in Lectures on the Philosophy of History, to the situation of the South. By studying the “the conflicting phases of human history,” one could see “the manifestation and embodiment of Supreme [i.e., God’s] Thought,” the “working out” of a “determinate plan in history,” and the “progressive stream of civilization.” Following Hegel’s lead, Miles traced the revelation and history of freedom to its discovery first by the Greeks and Romans (i.e., freedom for some), then its expansion to all believers as spiritual freedom through the Germanic Christian world, and, then, finally, to its highest expression in the antebellum American South. Miles told his audience of graduating seniors, “the stream of humanity has always manifested its capacity for the development of higher civilization as it flowed westward from its Asiatic home—thus indicating a gradual unfolding of the divine plan or idea of man.” For Miles, man should not be studied as “merely one of a collection of individual human beings, he is a member of the organic body of humanity.” Miles’s Hegelian philosophy of history studied “humanity as an organic whole, possessing one intelligence, allotted in different phases and degrees to nations as to individuals” in order to see “the idea of man which is being realized in human history.” And like his German teacher, Miles believed that “man can only develop all of his capacities in the organism of the state.”11 He also believed that civilization was reaching its apex in the American South, and that the slave plantation (and not Hegel’s Prussian monarchy) represented a new kind of state superior to all others. It is hard to imagine a philosophy or worldview more antithetical to the principles of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence.
Hegel’s ideas even trickled down from the ivory towers of Southern intellectuals into the halls of the United States Congress. Speaking in the House of Representatives in 1860, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II of Mississippi saw fit to read on the House floor “from Hegel’s Philosophy of History,” which he described as “an imperishable monument of human genius.” Lamar quoted Hegel to the effect that the institution of chattel slavery was, with regard to the enslavement of black Africans, a forward-looking and civilizing institution that was riding the crest of history. Lamar concluded his reading of Hegel with this thought from the German philosopher that spoke to the status of slavery in America: “But thus existing in a State, slavery is itself a phase of advance from the merely isolated sensual existence—a phase of education—a mode of becoming participant in a higher morality and the culture connected with it.”12 American slavery, Lamar went on to claim, is the vanguard of history’s unfolding progress and civilization. In fact, the institution of slavery represented what Southern intellectuals might have called the “end of history.”13
How did proslavery thinkers use and apply the new ideas imported from Germany to critique the Declaration of Independence and to defend slavery? The proslavery critique of the Declaration and the natural-rights philosophy first began in the late 1830s. In 1838, William Harper of South Carolina attacked America’s revolutionary heritage and the Declaration of Independence with its “well-sounding but unmeaning verbiage of natural equality and inalienable rights.” For the most part, Harper did not believe in the doctrine of individual natural rights. He and his proslavery colleagues did not view rights as timeless and placeless abstractions attached to hypothetical and isolated individuals in a state of nature, who themselves possessed a universal and fixed nature. Rights, he argued, were derived not from nature but from history, tradition, and “the conventions of society.” A new generation of Southern thinkers viewed rights as particular manifestations of concrete human relationships attached to actual political communities. Each political society had its own unique history and development, which meant that each would define rights in its own way. Rights did not and could not stand outside or above history; they grew out of the historical process. Not surprisingly, then, Harper in his “Memoir on Slavery” viewed the Declaration’s truth claims as “palpably false” and “sophistical.”14
The institution of American slavery was, by contrast, grounded in historical reality, which is why Harper thought it the “principal cause of civilization.” Without slavery, he continued, “there could be no accumulation of property, no providence for the future, no taste for comforts or elegancies, which are the characteristics and essentials of civilization.” Slavery was good for society, Harper claimed, precisely because it was grounded in “convention” rather than in “natural right.” Historically speaking, the “progress of knowledge” and all “progress in moral virtue” had been dependent on slavery, which, over time, would lead society (including the enslaved) to ever-higher levels of “civil freedom.” For Harper and his proslavery colleagues, history was moving irreversibly forward and upward:
There have existed in various ages, and we now see existing in the world, people in every stage of civilization, from the most barbarous to the most refined. Man, as I have said, is not born to civilization. He is born rude and ignorant. But it will be, I suppose, admitted that it is the design of his Creator that he should attain to civilization: That religion should be known, that the comforts and elegancies of life should be enjoyed, that letters and arts should be cultivated, in short, that there should be the greatest possible development of moral and intellectual excellence…. But as I have said, so far as reason or universal experience instruct us, the institution of slavery is an essential process in emerging from savage life. It must then produce good, and promote the designs of the Creator.
Harper was convinced that slavery was the best possible condition for the enslaved. It brought those held in servitude into the forward stream of history, thereby contributing to their moral and political improvement. Harper thus accepted Hegel’s view that history is the unfolding of God’s mind on earth, and that slavery was the only institution that would prepare enslaved Africans for freedom: “Thus, if in the adorable providence of God, at a time and in a manner which we can neither foresee nor conjecture, they are to be rendered capable of freedom and to enjoy it, they would be prepared for it in the best and most effectual, because in the most natural and gradual manner.”15
Following in Harper’s footsteps, South Carolina governor James Henry Hammond, in his Letter to an English Abolitionist, likewise rejected the idea that there is such a thing as “abstract moral truth,” “abstract liberty,” “‘abstract’ notions of right and wrong,” or “natural” rights. He could think of no “single moral truth universally acknowledged,” and he was confident that the Declaration’s view of liberty and justice was “the merest phantasy that ever amused the imagination.” True rights “are real” and “not ideal,” he argued, which meant they grow out of the “wisdom of ages” and “prescriptive use” and are the by-products of “our relations with one another.”16 The traditional rights of Englishmen, for instance, were just that—rights that grew out of a particular Anglo-American experience.
Governor Hammond summed up the new Southern view of rights in an extraordinary essay, written in 1847 but never published, titled “Laws of Nature—Natural Rights—Slavery.”17 Hammond’s purpose in writing the essay was to respond to frequent abolitionist claims that the moral principles of the Declaration of Independence forbade slavery, that slavery was contrary to the “Law of Nature,” and that all human beings have a “Natural Right to freedom.” The problem with the philosophic and legal tradition associated with the concept of moral laws and rights of nature, according to Hammond, was that its proponents had never really “told us very distinctly what these Laws and Rights are.” He conceded that natural philosophers such as Isaac Newton had discovered and demonstrated the scientific laws of nature, but the South Carolinian could not see how those laws had any “bearing on the Rights of Man.” If, for instance, man is subject to the scientific laws of procreation, then why should he not have an unbounded right to fulfill all sexual desires whenever he wants? But such a claim, Hammond noted, was absurd. This example proved, he argued, that some “Natural Rights may justly be curtailed,” and this was precisely what both free and slave societies do—they curtail the “natural liberty” of their citizens all the time. Hammond’s point was this: the differences between how slaveholders and abolitionists viewed man’s rights were ultimately one of degree only and not of kind. All societies curtail man’s rights and liberties, which meant that it was simply an issue of “expediency” in distinguishing the liberties and laws of the free North and the slave South.
Hammond then asked a simple but important question: “What then are [the moral laws of nature] and how are we to ascertain them?” He began by making a fundamental distinction between what he called “Absolute Rights” and “Relative Rights.” He associated the notion of absolute rights with John Locke and the Declaration of Independence. For Hammond, absolute rights were pure abstractions disconnected from reality; they were deduced from Locke’s hypothetical state of nature where man is governed by the law of nature, the existence of which is asserted but never demonstrated or proven. The problem with this view, according to Hammond, was that no such state ever existed, which meant the idea of “natural” rights is a fiction deduced from a fiction. In fact, he did not think that man has, “strictly speaking, any [natural] Rights at all.” The defenders of the natural-rights tradition failed, Hammond claimed, “to convey a perfect idea” of natural rights as “a possession certain, complete and universal.” The idea of individual, natural rights as “absolute,” “inherent,” and “inalienable” was groundless; it was nothing more than “an affair of words, ideal, incomprehensible, only suited for metaphysical dialecticians.” The idea of absolute rights, which Hammond equated with “Natural Liberty” and the “power of doing what one sees fit without any restraint but that imposed by the Laws of Nature,” was both a fraud and dangerous. Indeed, he considered the argument for natural rights as built on a “Super-natural” foundation. Such rights never existed anywhere, including in those societies that claim to found their political institutions on the moral laws and rights of nature.
What, then, was the true source of rights? Hammond began with what he considered to be empirically observable: true rights are grounded in “the Regulations of Civil Government and human association.” They are strictly conventional or man-made. Rights grow out of the actions and interactions of individuals in civil association and are subsequently institutionalized over time by governments. From the moment an individual is born, “he exists as one among many of his kind who at once impose upon him Laws from which he has no possible escape.” Every political community has its own unique history, and each has defined and granted various rights and liberties differently. The rights of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, Yankees, and Southerners were all by-products of the unique histories particular to each place. As such, rights are little more than “Privileges,” which the government “permits” individuals “to enjoy, limit and withdraw at their good pleasure.” The most important of man’s politically created rights “is the enjoyment of Civil Liberty,” which varies organically “with times, races, and ever-changing circumstances.” The sphere of civil liberty has been “gradually and slowly” evolving and expanding over time in the English-speaking world.
Hammond believed that the most advanced understanding of rights and civil liberty (i.e., the one then existing in the American South as applied to free citizens) “consists in permitting each member of Society to act as he sees fit, except so far as he is restrained by Laws [enacted] for the benefit of Society at large.” The rights and privileges granted by government to particular individuals or denied to them must be consistent “with the Will of the Community,” which is “for the most part expressed through the Government it has instituted.” Hammond took the “Will of the Community” and common good, or the public welfare, as the primary unit of moral and political good—which meant that the government must determine who should and should not be extended the privileges of civil liberty. If his view on the origin and nature of rights were correct, then the issue of rights relative to slavery is this: “whether its existence is in conformity with the ascertained will of the community where it is found.” The standard is whether slavery is or is not compatible “with the welfare and happiness of such a community.” The slave therefore can have no right derived from “Nature” to be free, “unless his freedom would advance the interests of the Society.”
At a deeper level, Hammond claimed that rights are, as he put it, “Relative”—by which he meant historically relative. The source of man’s “real moral knowledge” about rights, according to Hammond, can be seen only by looking “to facts established by the history of mankind and to the will of God as revealed in the Scriptures.” God’s unfolding plan for man reveals itself through “the actual history of man in every stage of his existence,” and so therefore men “must be content to build, if we would rear a fabric that may stand the test of Time, and prove worthy to receive the improvements which this slow and silent but ceaseless Innovator is ever making under the wise direction of the Ruler of the Universe, in all human institutions.” History or time, for Hammond, was moving man forward and upward toward ever-higher levels of progress, civilization, and rationality. By studying the design in events, he concluded that the institution of slavery was the mechanism that had propelled Southern society to the vanguard of civilization. Hammond’s “Innovator” here seems remarkably similar to what Hegel referred to as the “cunning of reason,” which used unwitting individuals or institutions to advance civilization without their having any rational foreknowledge of those ends.18 Finally, Hammond rested the “System” of slavery on “the revealed Will of God—on custom—on utility—on the happiness of the greatest number—in one word on Law.” This was the foundation—indeed, the only foundation—on which society can “progress” and on which there could be any “improvement in human affairs.” For Hammond, the arc of history was synonymous with the revelation and unfolding of God’s will through “primæval Time.” Hammond accepted Hegel’s belief that human history is the unfolding of God’s mind on earth.
Another figure who was no fan of the Declaration of Independence and its self-evident truths was John C. Calhoun, the spiritual and political leader of proslavery intellectuals in the South. In his 1848 Senate speech “On the Oregon Bill,” the South Carolina senator appealed to those who possess a “philosophical turn of mind” in order to see the “remote and recondite causes” of America’s impending political crisis, which he traced back to the core principles of the Declaration of Independence. Calhoun considered the Declaration’s claim that “all men are created equal” to be logically, syntactically, and morally false. There is “not a word of truth in it,” he argued. In fact, the opposite was closer to the truth. First, the Bible teaches that only Adam and Eve were “created,” while the rest of mankind was born, but even this, he held, is a falsehood because only infants and not men are born. Second, man’s social reality teaches him that whether children are created or born, they are subject to the rule of their parents and are therefore never free, and they are born into radically different social conditions, which means they are never equal. The world is therefore defined by subjection and inequality. To the extent that equality and liberty are good for man, they are the products of a historical process; they are the “noble and highest reward bestowed on mental and moral development, combined with favorable circumstances.” Men are not born with liberty and equality, nor are they “entitled” to them by nature, according to Calhoun. Instead, liberty and equality “are high prizes to be won, and are in their most perfect state, not only the highest reward that can be bestowed on our race, but the most difficult to be won.” The arc of history (at least in some places) is evolving toward a higher state of civilization, which Calhoun identified with the South and chattel slavery. In the end, he believed that it was Jefferson’s error to have placed in the heart of America’s founding document self-evident falsehoods that did not recognize the “subordinate relation of the black to the white race in the South.” From there it was a short step to the position that slavery, rather than being “an evil” was actually “a good—a positive good.”19
Likewise, George Fitzhugh, the antebellum Southern intellectual with the most theoretical bent, believed that since the time of the Revolution America had been in the grips of what he called the “false philosophy of the age,” which mistakenly “treats of men only as separate monads or individuals.” The symbol of this false philosophy was embodied in the Declaration of Independence, the “truths” of which he described, in a chapter on “Southern Thought,” as both “absurd” and “dangerous.”20 He described Thomas Jefferson, in “The Reformation—The Right of Private Judgment,” as the “genius of innovation, the architect of ruin, and the inaugurator of anarchy.” Writing on the Declaration of Independence, he said that it was based on “abstract principles” that bore no relationship to reality or history and that were therefore at “war with all government, all subordination, all order.” The Declaration was written by men whose “minds were heated and blinded” by a “false philosophy” that originated with John Locke. Drunk on Enlightenment ideals, the “human mind” during the eighteenth century “became extremely presumptuous, and undertook to form governments on exact philosophical principles, just as men make clocks, watches or mills.” The result was that America’s revolutionary founders “confounded the moral with the physical world, and this was not strange, because they had begun to doubt whether there was any other than a physical world. Society seemed to them a thing whose movement and action could be controlled with as much certainty as the motion of a spinning wheel, provided it was organized on proper principles.” The most important philosophic abstraction rejected by Fitzhugh was the notion that all men were created equal and free. Nothing, he argued, could be further from the truth: “Men are not ‘born entitled to equal rights!’” Mocking Jefferson’s famous last letter in 1826 to Roger Weightman, in which the Virginian had written that men were not born “with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God,” Fitzhugh declared that it “would be far nearer the truth to say, ‘that some were born with saddles on their backs, and others booted and spurred to ride them,’—and the riding does them good. They need the reins, the bit and the spur.” In his chapter on “Southern Thought,” Fitzhugh encouraged Southern intellectuals to “build up an entire new system of ethical philosophy” and a “new political science, whose leading and distinctive principle will be, ‘the world is too little governed.’”21
Proslavery intellectuals understood that their critique of the Declaration and the natural-rights philosophy had implications for their political philosophy. Albert Taylor Bledsoe, a professor of mathematics at the University of Virginia and one of the South’s most influential thinkers, argued in Liberty and Slavery: or, Slavery in the Light of Moral and Political Philosophy that in any conflict between the “inalienable rights of men” and the common or general good of society, the decision must not be made with “the aid of abstractions alone.” What was needed instead, he claimed, was “a little good sense and practical sagacity,” or pragmatic reasoning. Of one thing, though, Bledsoe was certain: “that the rights of the individual are subordinate to those of the community.” Duties precede rights, he argued, and “it is the duty, and consequently, the right, of society to make such laws as the general good demands.”22
One of the most fascinating aspects of antebellum Southern thought—one almost entirely neglected by modern scholars—was its embrace of socialism as not only compatible with plantation slavery but as its ultimate fulfillment. Many proslavery writers in the American South were, in effect, pre-Marxian socialists. Their critique of capitalism was virtually indistinguishable from Marx’s, and they saw the plantation system as the only practical way in which to successfully implement the socialist ideal. Proslavery writers opposed the moral philosophy at the heart of capitalism (e.g., self-interest, natural rights, and individualism), the political principles of laissez-faire (e.g., the separation of economy and state), and the economic mechanisms at the heart of a market society (e.g., division of labor and competition), and they supported plantation socialism as the cure to all the ills associated with capitalism and a free society. Competition and free labor in capitalist nations had the intended effect, argued William Harper, of decreasing the worker’s wages and increasing the capitalist’s profits.23 Readers of Fitzhugh and Marx would have a difficult time distinguishing the following passage taken from Fitzhugh’s 1856 essay on “Centralization and Socialism” with the Communist Manifesto published eight years earlier:
The complaint is universal that modern improvements, while they lessen the labor required to create wealth, and are vastly increasing its aggregate amount, beget continually its more unequal distribution. They are, as yet, but engines in the hands of the rich and the skillful to oppress the laboring class…. Every day sends forth its new swarms of paupers, whilst every month begets its millionaire. Capital becomes more powerful as it is wielded in larger masses, and as it grows stronger it becomes more oppressive and exacting. The wealthy capitalist soon learns to look on them as mere human machines representing so much physical and industrial power.24
Proslavery writers rejected the old liberalism’s individualism for a new kind of plantation collectivism. Explicitly comparing men to ants and bees, Southern intellectuals viewed man as inherently collective and deterministic by nature. According to Fitzhugh, by “observing and studying the habitudes of the bees and the ants, of flocking birds and gregarious animals, we must become satisfied that our social habits and sympathetic feelings are involuntary, a part of our nature, and necessary to our healthful and natural existence.” In A Series of Lectures on the Science of Government, Intended to Prepare the Student for the Study of the Constitution of the United States (1845), the first systematic “study of political science” published in the South, Virginia’s Nathaniel Beverley Tucker claimed that “man is emphatically a social animal” and that “water is no more necessary to the fishes of the deep, than society is to man.” Tucker assumed, unlike the revolutionary generation, that men naturally live in and identify with “clustering groups” from which they develop “a sort of collective personality.”25 Individuals and their rights were inseparable from and defined by society and government.
Southern antebellum writers such as Fitzhugh and Tucker typically viewed society as a natural organism, and they began with society or the collective (not with individuals) as the primary unit of moral and political value. As Fitzhugh put it in his Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society, society trumps the individual: “Society is the being—he one of the members of that being. He has no rights whatever, as opposed to the interests of society; and that society may very properly make any use of him that will redound to the public good. Whatever rights he has are subordinate to the good of the whole; and he has never ceded rights to it, for he was born its slave, and had no rights to cede.”26 No member of the founding generation would have written that rights are “subordinate to the good of the whole,” that man was born a slave to society without prior rights defined by his nature as a man. Fitzhugh rejects entirely the founding generation’s conception of individual, natural rights.
Anticipating Marx’s famous slogan—“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”—Fitzhugh claimed that the plantation system holds “all property in common” and divides “the profits, not according to each man’s input and labor, but according to each man’s wants.” Plantation socialism, he continued, provides “for each slave, in old age and in infancy, in sickness and in health, not according to his labor, but according to his wants.”27 The kind of “free society” built into the principles of the Declaration, he wrote, is an unmitigated “failure” and must be replaced by “domestic slavery,” which he called “the oldest, the best and the most common form of Socialism.” In fact, a “Southern farm,” he continued, “is the beau ideal of Communism.”28
A Virginian, Edmund Ruffin, wrote in his treatise on The Political Economy of Slavery that “so far as their facts and reasoning go, and in their main doctrines, the socialists are right.” The system of domestic slavery, he wrote, perfects the socialist ideal by elevating “one directing mind, and one controlling will”—that is, the mind and will of the master—over each plantation collective. He continued: “Our system of domestic slavery offers in use, and to the greatest profit for all parties in the association, the realization of all that is sound and valuable in the socialists’ theories and doctrines…. Thus, in the institution of domestic slavery, and in that only, are most completely realized the dreams and sanguine hopes of the socialist school of philanthropists.”29 In sum, proslavery Southerners rejected what they called the “abstract” and “false” freedom philosophy enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, which, as we have seen, meant that they rejected the founders’ understanding of truth—truth as absolute, certain, transhistorical, and universal—as well as the particular moral, political, social, and economic principles that issue from the Declaration: equality, freedom, rights, individualism, limited government, laissez-faire, and capitalism. In place of the founders’ liberalism, proslavery thinkers substituted a new philosophy grounded in new principles. They accepted the historicist principle that truth is relative to time and place, and they developed a moral and political philosophy based on self-sacrifice, duty, collectivism, paternalism, central planning, and socialism.
The Union army destroyed the Confederacy, slavery, and plantation socialism, but many of the core ideas held by proslavery intellectuals in the 1840s and 1850s were given a second life (albeit in new forms) by progressive intellectuals in the decades after 1865. It would not, of course, be the first time in history that the loser on the battlefield nonetheless imposed on its conqueror “the yoke of its own thought.”30 How did this philosophic inversion come about?
Between 1865 and 1914, two generations of young Americans (mostly northerners) went off to study in Europe, primarily at German universities, where they were introduced to the ideas of the German Historical School and German philosophy.31 Within a generation after the Civil War, American intellectuals, particularly in the North, came to reject not only the Declaration’s self-evident truths but the very idea of “truth” itself—truth as absolute, certain, universal, and permanent. Richard T. Ely, one of America’s best-known postbellum economists, recalled that during his graduate student days in Germany he was first introduced (echoing James Hammond) to the “idea of relativity as opposed to absolutism.”32 The moral and political principles of the old liberalism, or the founders’ liberalism, disappeared almost overnight from American universities. Within a generation, the ideas of Kant, Hegel, Marx, and eventually Nietzsche replaced those of Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, and Adam Smith on America’s college campuses.33 From the Germans, young American graduate students gained an increased respect for the role of the state in promoting social, political, and economic reform.
William James and John Dewey, America’s two most influential philosophers at the fin-de-siècle, took the trendiest European ideas and translated them into an American-style philosophy known as pragmatism. What was most distinctive and consequential about their philosophy was that it not only rejected the moral and political philosophy of the old liberalism but, more fundamentally, it rejected the eighteenth-century Enlightenment understanding of truth as knowable, certain, and absolute. In the pragmatists’ world, there are no entities with fixed identities that can be known with certainty by the human mind, no laws of logic, no objectivity, and, ultimately, no truth. James and Dewey rejected the traditional view held by the American revolutionary founders that truth denotes a relationship between an idea or a proposition and the facts of reality.34
William James was the first major American philosopher to reject the founders’ view of truth. He mocked what he called the “old-fashioned” view that there is a relationship between man’s consciousness and reality, that “truth means essentially an inert static relation” between a thinking mind and an object. Instead, he argued, truth is accessed and known when it provides a “cash-value” by satisfying one’s needs, urges, and wishes. True beliefs are those that are useful to the believer. Truth is determined by its function, and it is verified when the application of an idea delivers the desired result. Men experiment until they get what they want, and the method of getting what you want provides the standard of truth. James put it this way: “Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.” There is no objective, absolute truth for James that is timeless and placeless; his “account of truth is an account of truths in the plural,” of truth as “made,” “expedient,” “temporary,” “relative,” “mutable,” and “provisional.” Truth, according to James, is “plastic” and subjective.35 The founders’ truths were true to them—but to no one else.
John Dewey went a step further than James and transformed the latter’s view of truth from a form of personal or individual subjectivism into a form of social or group subjectivism. For Dewey, truth is made and determined by groups of people, and, in a democratic country like that of the United States, it should be determined by the will of the majority. The “prima facie meaning of truth,” he wrote, “is acceptance of the beliefs that are current, that are authoritative, in a given community or organization.” Dewey advocated turning the idea of “Truth as a noun singular and absolute” to the idea of a lowercase “truth” understood as a “noun common and distributive.” In other words, truth is a “social virtue, meeting a demand growing out of intercourse, not a logical, much less an epistemological, relation.” Truth means accepting as valid the consensus opinions of the community; it means “designating things in terms that observe the conventions of proper social intercourse.” A falsehood for Dewey is a claim or proposition that is “contrary to social demands.” His standard of truth as it applies to individual moral behavior is determined “according to current prescription.” To know the truth about a particular matter is “to observe social prescription.” Dewey’s socially constructivist understanding of truth held up that which is “socially prescribed” as the standard by which to define “the rightful, the authoritative, definition of the object.” By contrast, individuals who hold “private” opinions different from “current convention” should be treated as holding “illicit—anti-social” views.36 Pragmatic truth is that which is developed and adopted by communities of men and women to serve their collective needs.
For the pragmatists, there is no absolute, universal, eternal, certain truth that can be discovered and understood by the human mind. Pragmatic truth is that which is accepted by and works for the group. By Dewey’s standard, then, Athens was right to execute Socrates.
The new conception of truth developed in America by James, Dewey, and other postbellum American philosophers was subsequently broadened in the early twentieth century and applied to various academic disciplines such as history, political science, philosophy, literary criticism, psychology, sociology, anthropology, jurisprudence, and economics. This new conception of truth was transfused into the bloodstream of American academic life in the form of historicism, which says that all past ideas are embedded within a context—be it a social, political, economic, religious, linguistic, or psychological context—and, in effect, dissolvable into circumstance, and moral relativism, which says that moral principles and judgment are relative to time, place, and, ultimately, to each and every person.
Speaking of the Enlightenment political philosophy associated with the Declaration of Independence, Dewey mocked the founders’ liberalism because it lacked what he called “historic relativity.” According to the new truth of historicism, what was true in the eighteenth century was irrelevant and passé in the twentieth. Dewey summed up the fundamental defect of eighteenth-century philosophy with a not-so-subtle critique of the Declaration of Independence. He rejected the founders’
conception of the individual as something given, complete in itself, and of liberty as a ready-made possession of the individual, only needing the removal of external restrictions in order to manifest itself. The individual of earlier liberalism was a Newtonian atom having only external time and space relations to other individuals, save in that each social atom was equipped with inherent freedom. These ideas … formed part of a philosophy, and of a philosophy in which the particular ideas of individuality and freedom were asserted to be absolute and eternal truths; good for all times and all places.
But for Dewey and his generation, the traditional definition of truth was no longer tenable. It had been replaced with what he called “historic” or “temporal relativity” or what soon came to be just relativism—moral and cultural. This doctrine became a virtual self-evident truth of the modern world. The idea of absolute and permanent truth was not only a self-evident lie for Dewey, it was, in his word, “evil.”37 He told early twentieth-century Americans that the “ideas of Locke embodied in the Declaration of Independence were congenial to our pioneer conditions that gave individuals the opportunity to carve their own careers.”38 The problem with such principles, however, is that America’s frontier conditions were gone, and the “truths” that applied to those conditions could no longer be true under the new social conditions of an urbanized and industrialized society. That which inhibited or prevented the coming into being of the new twentieth-century truths must be undermined, denounced, and ultimately held up as reactionary and as a “false philosophy.”
The new liberalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rejected all of the metaphysical, epistemological, moral, and political principles of the Declaration of Independence and the classical liberal tradition. The proponents of the new liberalism revolted against what they saw as the “quest for certainty” and the “formalism,” “absolutism,” and “rigidity” of the founders’ liberalism. They rejected the claim that nature is lawful and intelligible, that man’s reason is capable of discovering and knowing objective moral laws, that morally sovereign individuals have unalienable rights (particularly the rights to property and to the pursuit of happiness), that the sole purpose of government is the protection of man’s natural rights, and that government should be strictly separated from economics and education.
In particular, the new liberals reserved their greatest contempt for the moral philosophy that was implicit in the Declaration but that was never explicitly defended—namely, a moral philosophy of rational self-interest and individualism. The intellectual leaders of the new liberalism understood (as did the proslavery intellectuals) that to dismantle individualism, limited government, and capitalism, they first had to destroy the underlying epistemological and moral principles of the Declaration—principles to which ordinary Americans were dedicated as a symbol of their ancient faith. Specifically, the founders’ old-fashioned notions of “truth” and “rights” had to go. Then and only then could progressives reconstruct America on a new philosophic foundation and build entirely new political, social, and economic institutions.39
Woodrow Wilson—president of Princeton University, governor of New Jersey, and president of the United States—had quite a bit to say about the Declaration of Independence. Wilson’s primary interpretative task was to historicize the Declaration, to denigrate it as little more than a document of its time. In 1907, during his tenure as president of Princeton, he delivered a Fourth of July oration on “The Author and Signers of the Declaration,” in which he claimed that the signers of the Declaration “did not attempt to dictate the aims and objects of any generation but their own.” Wilson was here suggesting that American revolutionaries did not think their principles were timelessly true, nor did they think, by his account, any generation beyond their own was beholden to them. This is because “each generation must,” Wilson argued, “form its own conception of what liberty is.” Thus the great question for twentieth-century Americans was, according to Wilson: Do Americans still accept the Declaration’s moral and political principles as true—absolutely, universally, and timelessly? “Does the doctrine of the Declaration of Independence still live in our principles of action, in the things we do, in the purposes we applaud, in the measures we approve?” His answer was no. This is why Wilson believed that every July Fourth “should be a time for examining our standards, our purposes, for determining afresh what principles, what forms of power we think most likely to effect our safety and happiness.” The fact is, he continued, that Americans “have come to a new age and a new attitude towards questions of government, … to new definitions of constitutional power, new conceptions of legislative object, new schemes of individual corporate regulation.”40
Most importantly, Wilson and his fellow progressives rejected the founding generation’s moral and political principles. Whereas the revolutionary generation treated the individual as an “integer,” Wilson assumed the individual to be a mere “fraction” of a collective whole. And whereas the revolutionary generation was “deeply jealous of too much law,” Wilson and the progressives were “in love with law” as an “instrument of reconstruction and control.” The coercive power of the state must be used to transform men from integers to fractions. For those recalcitrant individuals who resisted this process, imprisonment was the only solution. As Wilson put it: “One really responsible man in jail, one real originator of the schemes and transactions which are contrary to public interest legally lodged in the penitentiary would be worth more than a thousand corporations mulcted in fines, if reform is to be genuine and permanent.”41
Several years later, in an “Address to the Jefferson Club of Los Angeles,” Wilson went further in historicizing the Declaration. He interpreted the Declaration’s ringing words “We hold these truths to be self-evident” and the four truths that followed as mere rhetoric meant only to give flash to the historically contingent list of grievances against George III. But such grievances obviously had no relevance to 1911; therefore the Declaration’s self-evident truths were also irrelevant. The business of any “true Jeffersonian is to translate the terms of those abstract portions of the Declaration of Independence into the language and the problems of his own day.” For Wilson, the purpose of government was to address the socioeconomic problems of the present, which he and his progressive allies took to be the inequality generated by the private-property order and the self-interested behavior generated by the rise of free-market capitalism. To dismantle America’s system of political laissez-faire meant that progressive intellectuals had to undermine the founding generation’s view of human nature as fixed. From this perspective, Wilson encouraged his audience to write a new declaration of independence, one that created a “new set of counts in the indictment” and made a “new statement of the things you mean to set right.” He meant to declare independence from the core principles of the old liberalism of the Enlightenment—natural rights, individualism, and limited government. The power of government must now be viewed not as a necessary evil, as it was by the founders, but as a positive good.42
The political future of the new liberalism found its voice in the thought of Herbert Croly. Croly was, with Dewey, one of the two great intellectual godfathers of the modern liberal project. He was the founding editor of The New Republic magazine, but his most enduring legacy was his political treatise The Promise of American Life, published in 1909. The book was a systematic attack on the limited-government political philosophy of the old liberalism. Croly held the founders’ liberalism responsible for virtually all of the social problems of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. The Declaration’s natural-rights philosophy was, according to Croly, the root cause of laissez-faire capitalism, and capitalism was the cause of all inequality, poverty, and social injustice. He thought the principles of the Declaration and Jeffersonian republicanism—natural rights, individualism, decentralization, limited government, strict constitutional construction, and laissez-faire—were outdated, bankrupt, and unjust: “Reform is both meaningless and powerless unless the Jeffersonian principle of non-interference is abandoned.”43
Like Dewey, Croly argued for a complete reconstruction of America’s political system. His political philosophy explicitly extolled both nationalism and socialism, and it sought to unite the two ideologies in one. The road from plantation socialism to national socialism was short. “The national public interest has to be affirmed by positive and aggressive action,” which he meant to be “flagrantly socialistic both in its methods and its objects.” His call for a form of national socialism demanded that all Americans “shall love and wish to serve their fellow-countrymen, and it will demand specifically that in the service of their fellow-countrymen, they shall reorganize their country’s economic, political, and social institutions and ideas.” Such a transformation cannot be achieved unless there is “systematic authoritative transformation of the private interest of the individual into a disinterested devotion to a special object,” by which he meant the state. Like Wilson, Croly declared that his brand of national socialism was “equivalent to a new Declaration of Independence.” And for this new declaration to become the nation’s modern faith, Croly argued that a new kind of schooling would be required, one that would employ “severe coercive measures, but what schooling does not?”44 Clearly, Croly’s declaration was not your founding father’s Declaration.
Ideas have consequences, and the ideas of James, Dewey, Wilson, and Croly were bound to seep into other academic disciplines in the years that followed.45 By the early 1920s, America’s leading academic scholars believed that the principles of the Declaration of Independence were outdated and irrelevant in the context of the modern world. In 1922, the Progressive historian Carl Becker published his classic The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Ideas, a book that summed up the sentiments of his age and ours: “To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false is essentially a meaningless question.”46 That is because Becker’s generation no longer believed that the Declaration’s self-evident truths were true. Early twentieth-century Progressives no longer accepted the traditional epistemic understanding of “truth.” The search by American revolutionaries for transhistorical truths was, according to Becker, nothing more than an attempt to rationalize underlying social, economic, and psychological needs:
When honest men are impelled to withdraw their allegiance to the established law or custom of the community, still more when they are persuaded that such law or custom is too iniquitous to be longer tolerated, they seek for some principle more generally valid, some “law” of higher authority, than the established law or custom of the community. To this higher law or more generally valid principle they then appeal in justification of actions which the community condemns as immoral or criminal…. To them it is “true” because it brings their actions into harmony with a rightly ordered universe, and enable them to think of themselves as having chosen the nobler part.
For Becker’s generation, it was an all but established fact that nineteenth-century philosophers such as Hegel, Bentham, Marx, and Nietzsche (never mind the proslavery Southern thinkers) had successfully dismantled the idea of natural rights as a concept founded “upon a superficial knowledge of history”47—in Bentham’s phrase, “nonsense upon stilts.”48 The triumph in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of historicism over natural-rights philosophy was predicated, according to Becker, on its having encountered the Enlightenment natural-rights philosophy “on its own ground, and refuted it from its own premises.” The new historic-rights philosophy admitted “that rights were founded in nature,” but it did so by identifying “nature with history.” It then “affirmed that the institutions of any nation were properly but an expression of the life of the people, no more than the crystallization of its tradition, the cumulative deposit of its experience, the résumé of its history.”49
Becker’s view of history as the foundation of rights was viewed as the cutting edge of sophistication throughout much of the twentieth century. Ironically, his twentieth-century students were apparently unaware of the similarities between their teacher’s view of the Declaration and that of the proslavery thinkers. Nor did they consider the possibility that the identification of nature with history is logically impossible as it attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable: that is, the permanent with the impermanent. Ultimately, Becker’s truth claim collapses on itself.
It should not surprise us to learn, then, that the age in which we now live is said to be self-consciously “post-truth,” which means a post-fact, post-reality world. In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries chose “post-truth” as its international word of the year, which it defines as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”50 Truth is not possible in a post-truth society because reason is said to be impotent to know what is true or false, right or wrong, good or evil, just or unjust, free or unfree. In other words, there is no basis in objective reality or in reason for moral truth claims qua truth. Reason cannot distinguish between the truth and falsity of different moral claims, which of course means that it cannot distinguish between freedom and slavery. This post-truth philosophy holds that moral values and moral judgment are simply social conventions derived from subrational or nonrational forces, whether historical, economic, cultural, or psychological. Ultimately, relativism says that the fundamental law of each system of cultural values is grounded in nothing more than arbitrary human will—the will to assert and uphold authority over all other wills. The logical consequence of this teaching is that there can be no meaningful difference between free and slave or just and unjust societies. And if truth is unknowable, then the freedom of thought and speech necessary to pursue truth are irrelevant and meaningless.
We now live in a world wrought by the unidentified, unacknowledged union of proslavery and progressive thought. This union was consummated by their shared contempt for the animating principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Enlightenment. At the most fundamental level, proslavery and progressive intellectuals rejected the Enlightenment understanding of truth as the recognition of the objective relationship between an idea and the facts of reality. They rejected the possibility that there could be transhistorical truths grounded in an unchanging nature. By contrast, as historicists, they assumed that “truth” was relative to time and place, that each generation or community must discover and implement its own truths, and that truth must evolve toward higher levels of consciousness, social organization, and civilization. Proslavery and progressive intellectuals also rejected the moral, political, and economic principles of the old liberalism. Down the line they all opposed individualism, natural rights, limited government, and free-market capitalism. In varying forms, they stood for altruism (defined by Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism and sociology, as the idea that one must sacrifice one’s own interests for the sake of others); for the “common good” as the primary unit of moral and political value; for the use of coercive power against those who refuse to submit; and for socialism as the highest form of social organization. In these ways and in many more, proslavery and progressive intellectuals share a common intellectual heritage.
Prominent voices throughout American history have defended the Declaration’s self-evident truths as true. The most important such voice was that of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln anticipated and exposed what would become the progressive and postmodern interpretation of the Declaration in his response to the views of the preeminent antebellum relativists Stephen Douglas and Roger Taney. It seems almost certain that he would have seen Woodrow Wilson’s and Herbert Croly’s interpretation of the Declaration as fundamentally no different from those of Douglas, Taney, Fitzhugh, and Calhoun. Lincoln interpreted the Declaration’s meaning as promoting “the progressive improvement in the condition of all men everywhere.” By contrast, he attributed to Douglas and Taney (and by logical extension to Wilson and Croly) a historicist view of the Declaration, which held that it was adopted in 1776 merely “‘for the purpose of justifying the colonists in the eyes of the civilized world in withdrawing their allegiance from the British crown, and dissolving their connection with the mother country.’” And given that the revolutionaries had been successful in their Revolution, Douglas and Taney (as would Wilson and Croly) viewed the Declaration as having “no practical use now” in the late 1850s. They viewed it (as would Wilson and Croly) as “mere rubbish—old wadding left to rot on the battle-field after the victory is won.” Given the Douglas-Taney (Wilson-Croly) interpretation, the Declaration could have “no reference to the present,” Lincoln argued.51
As Americans prepared to celebrate the Fourth of July in 1857, Lincoln told his audience in Springfield, Illinois, that they could read the Declaration in one of two ways: it could be read the “old-fashioned way,” as was intended by Jefferson and the revolutionary generation, or it could be read as Douglas and Taney would have it read, to wit: “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all British subjects who were on this continent eighty-one years ago, were created equal to all British subjects born and then residing in Great Britain.” Wilson and Croly could hardly have said it any better.
Lincoln ended his comments on the meaning and objects of the Declaration by leaving the American people with one last challenge: “are you really willing that the Declaration shall be thus frittered away?—thus left no more at most, than an interesting memorial of the dead past? thus shorn of its vitality, and practical value; and left without the germ or even the suggestion of the individual rights of man in it?”52 Sadly, there was no twentieth-century Abraham Lincoln to ask that question of Wilson, Croly, and Becker.
In the end, the philosophic differences between nineteenth-century slaveholders and twentieth-century progressives—at least on the most fundamental issues concerning the nature of truth and rights—are really only differences of degree and not of kind. Once again, Lincoln seemed to anticipate the similarities between the proslavery and progressive views of the Declaration: “These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect—the supplanting the principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads, plotting against the people. They are the van-guard—the miners, and sappers—of returning despotism. We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us.”53
To his dying day, Lincoln believed that the announced moral and political principles of the Declaration were true—absolutely and permanently true—and he believed they were self-evidently true. He believed the Declaration’s moral truths were as true as “the simpler propositions of Euclid are true.” And this is why he also believed “it is now no child’s play to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation.” Jefferson, the man on whom Lincoln bestowed “all honor,” had, during a moment of grave national crisis, “the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.”54
For Lincoln, unlike for Carl Becker, the question of the truth status of the Declaration’s principles was not a meaningless question. In fact, it was the only question that mattered. And on that very question, hundreds of thousands of men had dedicated and ultimately given their lives. This is why Lincoln implored his fellow citizens to reject John Pettit’s heresy—that is, the claim that the Declaration’s self-evident truths were actually “self-evident lies”—and to return to the secular sacraments of the old republic. At a Chicago speech in 1854, Lincoln asked his audience, “What would have happened if he [Pettit] had said it in old Independence Hall?” Lincoln’s folksy answer captures what the Declaration’s truths meant to him emotionally: “The door-keeper would have taken him by the throat and stopped his rascally breath awhile, and then have hurled him into the streets.”55
Interestingly, when Becker wrote a new introduction, in 1941, to his book on the Declaration, in the face of the “incredible cynicism and brutality of Adolph Hitler’s ambitions” and an advancing Nazi state, he was forced to rethink and “reappraise the validity of half-forgotten ideas” and to once again “entertain convictions as to the substance of things not evident to the senses.” As Hitler’s military was attacking and brutalizing the people of Europe, and as his police state at home was committing genocide against its own citizens, Becker and intellectuals like him were forced to reconsider and to ultimately concede—at least for the moment—that there were and must be objective moral truths that are stateless and timeless. During this dark period of human history, Becker gained a new appreciation for the doctrine of “‘the inalienable rights of men”’—“phrases, glittering or not, that denote realities—the fundamental realities that men will always fight for rather than surrender.”56 Becker was now willing to suspend the “truth” of relativism for the truth of an objective moral reality, or at least the possibility of one. Invariably, there is always an eternal return from the Gospel of History to the Book of Nature.
Every now and then, Americans are called upon to ask whether or not the principles of the Declaration of Independence are true. It is a question, whether we like it or not, of enduring relevance. Twenty-first-century Americans will no doubt be forced to confront it. In anticipation of that day, we might consider these lines from Robert Frost’s haunting 1915 poem “The Black Cottage.” A minister, in talking to the speaker of the poem about “the principle / That all men are created free and equal,” remarks:
That’s a hard mystery of Jefferson’s.
What did he mean? Of course the easy way
Is to decide it simply isn’t true.
It may not be. I heard a fellow say so.
But never mind, the Welshman got it planted
Where it will trouble us a thousand years.57
Frost captures brilliantly the ambiguous philosophic and moral status of the Declaration in the twentieth—and now in the twenty-first—century. Since the 1830s, America’s intellectual class has followed the path laid by Harper, Calhoun, Fitzhugh, Hammond, James, Dewey, Wilson, Croly, Becker, and the like in denying the truth status of the Declaration’s principles—and yet, the American people still cling in some vague, emotional way to these principles. As Becker learned, there are times in the course of human events when we are forced to confront the possibility that the Declaration’s self-evident truths are just that—true.
In 1860, the New England abolitionist Lydia Maria Child declared in a pamphlet that the time had come for the American people “to decide whether our fathers were mistaken in considering Freedom a blessing; whether our Declaration of Independence embodies eternal principles, or is a mere ‘rhetorical flourish.’” She noted that “Slavery and Freedom” stood facing each other as “antagonistic elements,” and that “one must inevitably destroy the other.” Like Abraham Lincoln, Child knew that a house divided against itself cannot stand. She ended her pamphlet with one last question to the American people: “Which do you choose?”58
And so it is with us. We, too, have a choice. We can accept the Declaration’s freedom principles as true, or we can adopt very different moral principles. I hope that this book will inspire its readers to think anew about this fundamental choice.