Jack Turner, III: Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

 

Exercised by claims that race no longer much matters as a bar to full participation in American society, Turner writes a lively scholarly polemic seeking “to move beyond” “simplistic debates pitting advocates of self-reliance and personal responsibility against analysts of historical inheritance, structural constraints, and inequality of opportunity.” He does no such thing, coming down firmly on the side of historicism, structuralism, and egalitarianism, building a ‘postmodernist’ version of a progressive/social-democratic intellectual history traced through the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. Turner presents their thought as an ascending dialectical interplay between individuality and social obligation, calling the final synthesis, seen in Baldwin, the culmination of “an African American democratic individualist tradition” or individualism “properly understood.” These writings are well-trodden ground; Turner’s analysis of Emerson will stand as his most valuable contribution, correcting the relative neglect of Emerson’s writings on slavery. Douglass fits most uneasily into the story—a natural-rights man without a historicist (much less postmodernist) bone in his intellectual body. The book culminates in a chapter that calls for “rhetorical jiujitsu” on behalf of the author’s democratic socialism, a tactic the book itself amply exemplifies. Readers may wonder why African-American democratic individualism speaks with such strong accents of German philosophy.

Turner stages individualism in a Hegelian-dialectical manner: “Only by being conscious of race can you be truly conscious of yourself and your world, and only by working to overcome racial injustice can you ensure that you are not complicit in it.” That is, true individualism is really a social relation or, as Hegel has it, a matter of mutual ‘recognition.’ By ‘structural’ racism, Turner means race prejudice; to this he adds inequality of wealth. Failure to see these things and act upon them constitute “a failure of democratic individualist virtue,” particularly “a failure of self-reliance.” Rhetorical jiujitsu, indeed.

He begins with what can only be a willful distortion of Tocqueville’s discussion of individualism. Accurately reporting Tocqueville’s description of “a pattern of public withdrawal,” whereby “the individualist interacts only with his family and a small social circle,” Turner then absurdly claims that Tocqueville charges “male domination and white supremacy” as the causal culprits of such behavior. As even a novice reader of Tocqueville knows, he regards individualism as a product of democracy itself, of social equality. This, however, would ruin readers’ appetites for the more radical social egalitarianism Turner desires, who calls Tocqueville’s individualist an “atomistic individualist” while reserving the valorous title of “democratic individualist” for socialists and proto-socialists.

Emerson and Thoreau, for example, “transformed these tendencies into something much finer than the individualism portrayed in Tocqueville’s Democracy.” Although Turner prudently ignores it, Emerson (paralleling his contemporary Thomas Carlyle in Britain) became among the first American writers to import German moral and political thought to the United States. Acting as a sort of cultural middleman, he defined ‘self-reliance’ in German-Romantic, anti-‘bourgeois’ terms as self-realization and ‘transcendentalism,’ abhorring prudential thought on quasi-Kantian grounds as sadly immoral timeserving. In Turner’s and Emerson’s defense, they do register Emerson’s central and sound argument against slaveholding, that it “cuts out the moral eyes” of the master, causing him to attempt to justify stealing the labor of another man. The slaveholder doubly lacks self-reliance; he does not work for himself, and he corrodes his own moral and intellectual faculties by habituating them to hypocritical sentiments and sophistic arguments. These habits in turn corrupt public life, as seen in the gag rule on anti-slavery petitions imposed by Congress in 1837. As a good quasi-Kantian, Thoreau went so far as to insist that Americans abandon commerce altogether—hopelessly entwined with slavery as it was—and go ‘back to the soil’ as yeoman farmers. Emerson couldn’t quite bring himself to go that far, preferring moral self-examination to tilling the soil. “In Emerson,” Nietzsche would later lament, “we lost a philosopher”; Turner has the opposite regret, that “Emerson seemed to value his purely philosophical pursuits more than his antislavery activities.” Or, as one might put it today, in Emerson we gained an intellectual. Turner does quite sensibly bring himself around to accept Emerson’s proposal to compensate slaveholders in exchange for emancipating their slaves. “Morally impure” though this is, “prudence is mandatory”; “if self-reliance required moral perfection it would be an unlivable ideal.” He concludes with democratic-socialist fervor, laying down two obligations: the “nonexploitation obligation,” requiring one to ensure that his “pursuit of self-reliance…does not directly abridge others’ ability to pursue self-reliance”; and the “democratic egalitarian obligation,” requiring one to “contribute to the common effort to ensure that all democratic citizens have self-reliance’s material prerequisites” (otherwise known as socialism). He rightly does not claim that Emerson advocates these principles, only that “provides the initial basis” for them.

Free of historicism, Frederick Douglass proves harder to force into Turner’s framework, although not for want of trying. Referring to Douglass’s “transracial humanism” instead of his natural rights doctrine, Turner “awakened to race” as “a historical and social force,” preferring to concentrate on Douglass’s postbellum writings on the “economic underpinnings of freedom,” particularly “the idea of fair play” enforced by “a strong central state.” After disputing Peter Myers’s natural-rights interpretation of Douglass’s thought he eventually gets round to admitting Myers is right, but laments that “this prevented Douglass from supporting the plans of Thaddeus Stevens and other Radical Republicans to confiscate rebel land and redistribute it to freedmen.” Those pesky property rights, you see. In fact, natural rights doctrine most assuredly does not prevent confiscation and redistribution of land owned by defeated enemies in a just war, as American Tories learned in the 1780s, on their way to Canada and other points British. Turner does cite Douglass’s alternative proposal: to establish a National Land and Loan Company which would sell stock and use the money to purchase Southerners’ property and then lease or sell it to former slaves. The failure of this proposal allows Turner to condemn industrial and financial interests that overbore the Radical wing of the party after Stevens’s death; this valid point sets up his next move, which is to try to squeeze a bit of socialism out of his man by citing a passage in which Douglass urges that black men be given straw to make bricks. What Douglass actually means is that black men should not be cut off from access to building materials on the basis of unjust, racially-based discrimination; Douglass remains a very good Lockean indeed by insisting on the value of work as the basis of self-help. American “political culture lacked a philosophic vocabulary of positive economic rights,” or, to put it in plainer language, there weren’t many socialists around here. Nonetheless, “it is plausible to read him as a forerunner of twentieth-century ideas of positive economic rights” because he thought “freedmen were owed the material rudiments of self-help.” This is nonsense, inasmuch as confiscation of property, homesteading, and similar policies were entirely compatible with the American regime from early on, and had none of the foundation in the historicist economic egalitarianism Turner strains to see in Douglass.

In Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, Turner finds much more congenial spirits. Ellison joined the American Communist Party in the 1930s, breaking with it in the mid-40s because it had become insufficiently Marxist and anti-bourgeois for a self-respecting militant; expatriate Baldwin was a socialist throughout his adult life. No natural-rights republicanism for Turner to worry about, here. “The primary responsibility of the American writer, Ellison insisted, was ‘to give as thorough a report of social reality as possible,'” “arbitrating the representation of reality.” To Marxist class consciousness he very understandably added race consciousness to counter the “false consciousness” of writers and readers who ignored racism. In an area where natural rights and Marxist ideas do intersect, Ellison was on board: He eschewed any attempt (which would have been entirely Quixotic, anyway) of substituting black racial dominance for white racial dominance; proletarian dictatorship was one thing, race-based dictatorship another. “Black people would be their own death and destruction if they sought not equality and justice but merely an inversion of American racial hierarchy”; “interracial fraternity” or genuine racial integration fits well enough with ‘America’ and ‘Germany’ alike. (Race and class, yes, but Turner pauses to deplore the notion of fraternity, a sex-based word that he should have discarded. Even Ellison did not achieve the trifecta of the twenty-first century Left, ‘race, class, and gender.) “Well versed in Marx, Ellison recognized the economic and social roots of white supremacy,” but he also saw that white supremacy contradicts the “unalienable rights and natural equality” enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. He did not base his own critique of racism so much on natural rights as on the analysis of the neo-Marxist Erich Fromm’s claim that the remedy for modern man’s loss of the security of “a stable social order” (i.e. feudal aristocracy) was “self-creation and the pursuit of meaningful work,” lest one turn toward the new ‘aristocracy’ offered by fascism. Racial supremacy feeds into this quest for a new aristocracy; Ellison’s rhetorical strategy was to point this out, alerting American ‘innocents at home’ that they should not “take for granted their own good character” in matters of race relations. He remained a historicist, “treat[ing] the word America as an indefinite signifier of mystical importance,” “keep[ing] the word’s significance indefinite, so as to encourage his audience to regard the meaning of American as evolving”—the characteristic strategy of the ‘progressive’ Left, Marxist or not.

Baldwin not only “personifies ‘awakening to race'”; he also adds the category of ‘sex’ to race and class. “I interpret Baldwin as a democratic individualist,” which is to say a democratic socialist, and the interpretation is fair enough, at least when considering his later writings—especially The Fire Next Time. He rejected the progressivist liberals of his time; “liberal idols such as Roosevelt and Kennedy, according to Baldwin, defended black humanity only when it cost them little or nothing,” or, as a politician who has responsibility for making real-world decisions in a republic might say, when the public opinion upon which they depended for accession to and continuation in high public office permitted them to act. A critic of American ‘exceptionalism,’ Baldwin viewed his native country as “a prosaic nation among prosaic nations, unexceptionally capable of both good and evil. At the same time, Baldwin believes we have it in our power to create a redeeming future if we admit that redemption has yet to occur.” This is why he was so foolish. Why would human beings “capable of both good and evil” transform themselves into purely good ones?

Baldwin replies in the accents of neo-Hegelian egalitarianism. “White citizens must accustom themselves to hearing blacks’ imperative voice”—Hegelian recognition. In Baldwin’s words, “the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it…and history is literally present in all that we do,” that is (in Hegelian terms) immanent. Turner sees the problem. “Baldwin runs into a classic problem of democratic reconstitution: reconstitution is necessary both to do justice to citizens and to create citizens capable of sustaining a just regime. But for citizens to recognize that reconstitution is necessary, they must be better than they presently are.” Historicists typically invoke the figure of the leader to address this problem, but Turner’s Baldwin contents himself with calling for “the assertive speech of dissident citizens.” But are not members of the Ku Klux Klan equally dissident citizens? Indeed so: American “self-creation” must then become “a self-conscious struggle with historical inheritance, a battle to reduce history’s power over the self through patient and forthright confrontation.” Turner makes a brave if implausible effort to refute Locke on this basis. “In Locke’s political theory, property is conceived as a natural institution that comes into existence prior to the constitution of either political society or government,” a claim Turner’s Baldwin denies on the basis that Locke assumed that “any pauper could find untilled land and create property by mixing his labor with it.” The real Locke defined property first and foremost as the innate capacities and characteristics of human beings—physical strength, moral rights, and intelligence. Arrangements for civil property rights derive from human nature. It isn’t hard to refute Locke if you haven’t understood what he says. But it is hard to understand Locke if you read him assuming that human beings ‘constructed’ by their society—”socialized all the way down,” as Richard Rorty puts it, along with hundreds of lesser historicists.

Although Turner dresses his “democratic individualism” in American garb, it really amounts to familiar contemporary postmodernism, “sensitivity to dialectics of identity and difference” wedded to “historical consciousness.” With these elements in hand, his readers will develop “appreciation of relinquishment as a virtuous act,” also known as ‘give us your money, and do it with a smile.’ Such are the arts of “rhetorical jujitsu.” “Though advocates of racial justice argue in a sense for a type of group equality”—one must admire that “in a sense”—”they must put the rhetorical focus on the individuals within the group.” This enables them to “talk about conditions of deprivation and inequality” in “specific terms,” as they affect individuals, or what might be called the HLN News approach to social analysis. Disagree in whole or in part? Well, “those who pretend otherwise do not have the courage to face reality.” So there. You are probably “a very specific type of citizen insulated from the worst aspects of American life: the white, middle-class, heterosexual male.” You blackguard.

It is equally necessary to face unreality. To take ‘race, class, and gender’ as a moral slogan intended to reduce one’s political rivals to a condition of guilt-ridden disarray confuses morality with rhetoric. To take it as a political slogan to unite socialists overlooks the question of whether socialism would actually produce the egalitarian effects its proponents seek, or claim to seek. Inasmuch as socialism transfers economic resources from private to public control, it enhances the power of the modern state, as Marx forthrightly admitted. Marx also claimed that once the state had done its proper work of eradicating socioeconomic classes it would wither away, yielding communism. That has yet to happen anywhere socialism has been tried; supposed socialist realism turned out to be utopianism and then soured into a scam (as in the old joke, ‘We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us’). Egalitarianism wasn’t served. To insist that this time it will be different because this time we will have democratic socialism studiously overlooks the need to empower the state in order to redistribute income, an empowerment unlikely to be relinquished once—if—redistribution has been accomplished.

Frank Goodnow: “The American Conception of Liberty.” In The American Conception of Liberty and Government. The Colver Lectures. Providence: Brown University, 1916.

Originally published by Constituting America. May 29, 2013.

 

The best-remembered first-generation American Progressives were Woodrow Wilson and John Dewey. Unlike his fellow political scientist Woodrow Wilson, Frank Goodnow never won an election for public office, having spent his career almost entirely in academia. Unlike John Dewey, another professor, Goodnow wrote no books that have been widely read beyond his own generation. Yet he stands as an important figure in the Progressive movement, particular with respect to his championing of Progressivism’s most distinctive institutional feature, the administrative state.

Born in 1859 in Brooklyn, New York, Goodnow received his advanced degree not in history or political science but in law from Columbia University, which hired him to teach administrative law in 1882. “Political science” as an independent academic discipline barely existed in the United States at that time, but Goodnow and such like-minded academics as his colleague John W. Burgess at Columbia and Woodrow Wilson at Princeton established it as such in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, founding the national professional organization of political scientists, the American Political Science Association, in 1903. Goodnow was its first president. He ended his career as president of the Johns Hopkins University–the first American university to emulate the great German research universities not only in their emphasis on scholarly research and graduate studies (as distinguished from education of undergraduates) but also in its promotion of German political philosophy in opposition to the principles of John Locke, Montesquieu, and the other philosophers whose ideas had animated the American founding. At this time university presidents enjoyed greater prominence in American public life than at any time before or since; Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia was a well-know voice nationally, and of course Wilson vaulted from the presidency of Princeton to the governorship of New Jersey and the presidency of the United States in the space of about three years. Obscure today, Goodnow nonetheless exercised a decisive influence on American political history. If, as he writes in “The American Conception of Liberty, ” “We teachers are in a measure responsible for the thoughts of the coming generation,” Goodnow helped to shape the thoughts of not only the next generation of every generation of American citizens up to and including that of President Barack Obama. Universities are now conceived as engines of social and political progress, and many if not all American educators more or less self-consciously thing as ‘progressives’ of one sort or another.

Following their German preceptors, American progressives committed themselves to the rejection of the laws of nature and of nature’s God as the source of moral and political right. Instead, they looked to ‘history’—defined as the course of all events, said to be unfolding rationally toward a culmination or ‘end of history.’ Whether the end of history was understood to be a constitutional monarchy (as in Hegel), worldwide communism (as in Marx), social democracy (as in Dewey), or the dominance of a ‘Caucasian master race’ (as in Gobineau and other ‘race theorists’), all past and present human thoughts and actions are judged good or bad, ‘progressive’ or ‘reactionary,’ insofar as they do or do not contribute to mankind’s advance toward that end. What is more, the course of events or ‘history’ was held to unfold in accordance with scientifically discernible laws of development—not unlike Darwin’s laws of natural selection, which had ‘historicized’ natural science.

This explains why Goodnow’s critique of the philosophy behind the American founding—natural rights, social contract—amounts to a critique of that philosophy from the standpoint of historical accuracy. The Founders’ ideas did not depict any real social condition, he claims; rather, the social and economic conditions of the Founders’ time in effect produced their ideas. For example, the Founders’ theoretical justification of property rights merely reflected the economic interests of men living under the conditions of early capitalism, under which governmental controls tended only to cramp individual initiative and the security of profits. Oddly, Goodnow associates the “extreme individualism” of the Founders not with Locke—who did indeed defend property rights—but with Rousseau, whos moral commitment to such rights was considerably less decided. Be that as it may, Goodnow associates the Founders with “a doctrine of unadulterated individualism” whereby “social duties are hardly recognized, or if recognized little emphasis was placed upon them.” This doctrine had embedded itself even more in American courts than it did in our legislatures. At places like Columbia, the next generation of lawyers would learn differently.

Goodnow attributes two flaws to the (supposed) Rousseauian-American doctrine of natural rights. First, it assumes an incorrect theory of nature, having been “formulated before the announcement and acceptance of the theory of evolutionary development.” Since Darwin, nature itself has been ‘historicized.’ We now speak not so much of nature as of ‘natural history.’ In terms of human society this mean that a ‘natural right’ to property might be valid in the eighteenth century but increasingly invalid in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as human societies and perhaps even human beings themselves change, evolve, progress. With the disappearance of a frontier society founded upon agriculture and herding, with the rise of large-scale industry—”a social organization such as our foregathers never saw in their wildest dreams”—our rights also must evolve. “Changed conditions…must bring in their train different conceptions of property rights if society is to be advantageously carried on.”

“This leads to the second flaw of the American doctrine: It is too individualistic. Given the new conditions of industrialism and urbanization, which put men and women in factories wherein their movements must be coordinated rather than independent of one another, the private rights of the individual person increasingly must give way to “social duties.” Although Goodnow remained a liberal in the sense that he opposes any form of absolute statism—”We are not…taking the view that the individual man lives for the state of which he is a member”—he did expect vast improvement in administration—the institutional agent of well-coordinated social duties. Just as modern business corporations require the administration of a vast array of persons and their actions, so too will the modern state need its administrators, if only to coordinate the activities of the corporations.

This is where the modern university comes in. As the present of one such institution, Goodnow deplores the fact that “many universities have in the past been the homes of conservatism,” not progressivism. To keep up with the historical evolution of human societies, universities have needed to take the lead, educating students who will become, among other things, administrators of the modern state. Quickened by the new historical consciousness that now eclipses the old philosophy of natural right, student will now learn the new form of government—scientific administration—which will replace or at least supplement the old regime of government by elected officials identified with political parties. Indeed government by elected officials and political parties themselves will also change, with officials running for office as leaders on ‘the cutting edge of history’ supported by parties enunciating a rhetoric of ‘change,’ ‘progress,’ and ‘social justice’ defined as social egalitarianism.

Under Progressivism, America would see a radical transformation of the foundation and purposes of its regime: natural right abandoned for historical right; social coordination preferred to individual effort; the politics of the courthouse and the party clubhouse replaced by the politics of bureaucracy and ‘administrative science.’ For better or for worse, Frank Goodnow deserves to be better-remembered than he is.

Originally published by Constituting America. May 24, 2013.

 

Lincoln came to the Gettysburg field of the dead and spoke of “a new birth of freedom.” What did he mean by it?

A lot of men killed a lot of other men at Gettysburg during those three days in July of 1863. But that happened more than once in the Civil War: at Antietam, in the Wilderness, at Cold Harbor, and many other places. People remember those places and those battles, too, but not the way the remember Gettysburg.

Maybe because this was the battle? The one in which the Confederate States of American lost not just a battle but began to lose the war? But what did they lose in this battle and that war, and why did they lost it?

They lost militarily, and also lost the way of life they were defending because General Lee miscalculated. He didn’t get his arithmetic right. As we’d put it today, in his heart he wanted to stop ‘playing defense’ and ‘go on offense.’ But he didn’t have the numbers of troops he needed to go on offense. His heart overbore his head. Cemetery Ridge became the graveyard of the Southern regime, the Southern way of life.

General Sherman did his arithmetic right later on, when he made Georgia howl, breaking the Southern regime by destroying the plantations that slaveholders ruled. Before the fighting started, Sherman had tried to tell the Confederates that they had their arithmetic wrong; In Louisiana in 1860 he told Southerners that war is not as glorious as you think; it’s not an aristocratic idyll of knights in shining armor. A year before the presidential election of 1860, speaking in Cincinnati, Lincoln had said that, too: the Northern states have the Sothern states outnumbered, and Northerners will fight no less valiantly than Southerners will do, if it comes to fighting.

Southerners didn’t believe it. At Gettysburg they began to believe Yankee arithmetic. Yankee arithmetic turned out to be arithmetic, simply.

Great military commanders show us something about ourselves, as they make their calculations. they show us that to win aa war you must do a uniquely human thing: counting. You must exhibit your humanity while simultaneously treating men, your fellow human beings, like ciphers in the cruelest of equations. You must deploy the most distinctively human capacity endowed by God, reason, in sending your men, for whom you bear moral responsibility, to slaughter other men as if they were animals, and to risk their being slaughtered by those they intend to kill.

And as the commander of such commanders, as the Commander in Chief of such calculating men, You, Abraham Lincoln, and You, Jefferson Davis, must give a human—that is to say a rational—justification for this military arithmetic, which is amoral in itself. we remember Gettysburg because there it was that Lincoln gave to his fellow citizens exactly such a justification in the greatest American speech ever, in defense of the purpose for which the speaker commanded men to fight the greatest American battle of the greatest American war. America, the country that declared its independence in a logical syllogism, a rational argument whose premise was that all men are subject to God’s arithmetic, that all men are created equal and thus may need to kill in order to defend their right to life and their right to a way of life that is fully human: America and the reason for America were defended by this great action, which Lincoln then vindicated in his great speech .

To understand what Lincoln meant by a new birth of freedom we first need to know what Lincoln meant by self-government. Lincoln once said that self-government “lies at the bottom of all my ideas of just government, from beginning to end.” In some of his earliest public statements, Lincoln defined republican or representative government in America as consisting of “a political edifice of liberty and equal rights” secured by the consent of the governed—a security that rests of the “duty” of any would-be representative of the people to “make known” to “the people whom [he] propose[s] to represent” his “sentiments with regard to human affairs.” Self-government rests on that natural right of the people to justice, but also on the need for government by popular consent in order that justice be done, and on the consequent obligation of the people’s would-be governors to disclose the opinions that will guide them when in office.

But if popular consent and natural right conflict? Is there not a tension in the Declaration of Independence between unalienable right and government by the consent of the governed? Theoretically, one can solve this problem by defining ‘consent’ as ‘rational assent.’ Genuine consent must be rational; it must be founded upon the self-evident truth that all men are created equal. But this theoretical solution scarcely solves the practical, political problem of squaring consent with justice, a problem that will endure so long as self-government exists. Government of the people by the people—popular self-government—might not work out as government for the people, or at least not for all of them, if the majority enslaves the minority.

One of the Founders set down his thoughts on this dilemma in its most dangerous American manifestation. As he prepared a series of essays for publication in 1791, Congressman James Madison wrote a note to himself: “In proportion as slavery prevails in a State, the Government, however democratic in name, must be aristocratic in fact. The power lies in a part [of the people] instead of the whole, in the hands of property, not of numbers.” He drew a telling conclusion: “The Southern States of America,” very much including his native Virginia, “are on the same principle aristocracies.” As an architect of the new Constitution, Madison knew that Article IV, Section 4 says, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” He knew, therefore, that the regime of the American Union contained a self-contradiction—the potential for disunion. With most Americans of his generation, he hoped that the eventual removal of slavery would remove this potentially fatal flaw. In fact many states did put slavery on the road to extinction in that first, founding generation. But his “Southern States” did not.

Slavery denied self-government to a substantial portion of the people living in America. The crisis over slavery threw into hazard republican government itself by raising in practice an old philosophic controversy: To secure natural rights, must government overawe the people, lest they break out into anarchy or coalesce into majority tyranny? Or is a very powerful governments itself a greater danger to natural rights than the anarchy and popular tyranny it prevents? In Lincoln’s words, “Is there, in all republics, this inherent, fatal weakness? Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?” No parchment enumeration of civil rights can eliminate that problem.

Lincoln came to the battlefield cemetery at Gettysburg to say in public what Madison in his prudence could only write to himself. Lincoln again raised the question of popular self-government in speech only after the American soldiers, in a demonstration of military arithmetic, had answered it by their actions. He came to the cemetery, the home of the dead, to talk about the beginning of American political life. In declaring their independence, their self-government, in 1776, “our fathers,” the Founders, “brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Conceived, brought forth: This is the language of childbirth. It is a paradoxical childbirth, associated with fathers, not mothers. Somehow the Signers of the Declaration of Independence were fathers and mothers.

“Conceived” and “brought forth” are from Numbers 11, the King James Version. Moses asks his angry God, “Was it I who conceived this people? Was it I who brought them forth, that thou shouldest say to me, ‘Carry them in thy bosom as a nursing father beareth the suckling child, unto the land which thou swearest unto their fathers?” Americans, the new Israelites, were brought forth from Egypt—the British Empire—and from the tyranny of Pharaoh—George III. Moses or Washington could not bear this burden alone. God tells Moses to gather the elders, and say to the people, “Consecrate yourselves for tomorrow, and you shall eat meat, for you have wept in the ears of the Lord….” The Lord’s Spirit will be upon not Moses alone, but upon the elders. Moses wishes that the Spirit of prophecy were upon the whole people, In America, the elders were of course the Founders; Lincoln, like Washington before him, wished that the spirit of independence, of liberty and equality, were upon the whole people.

The Declaration calls the Americans a people —a people who, like the Israelites, existed before and after their independence. Lincoln described the bringing forth of a new nation; a nation therefore must mean an independent people. This independent people was conceived in liberty. Long before independence, before George III and parliament designed to reduce them to slavery, Americans had enjoyed civil liberty—limited self-government over their own ‘internal affairs.’ The new nation was “dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal.” In part because Britain had required some colonies to permit slavery and, as recently as 1769, had vetoed a colonial enactment to suppress the slave trade, Americans had not secured the God-endowed unalienable rights inherent in human equality; the slaves obviously had not secured those right, but neither had the free. My violation of your natural equality potentially threatens mine (even if mine seems secure) because in permitting the violation of your natural equality I have in practice contradicted the principle of natural equality. That principle applies to me as well as to you, as a creature of the same species, the same natural rank. By asserting their full, political self-government on the foundation of the principle of natural equality, Americans rejected the principle of slavery even as they tolerated its practice, and for Lincoln as for the Founders this was crucial.

The self-evident truth of human equality enunciated in the Declaration has become a proposition in Lincoln’s formulation. He means not a mere statement but the premise of a syllogism or an axiom of a geometric proof; “the principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of a free society,” he wrote. The nursing fathers of the Declaration held the truth of human equality to be self-evident. But Americans since then, like the Israelites, had disregarded the laws of nature and of Nature’s God. “When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim, ‘all men are created equal,’ a self-evident truth; but when we are grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim ‘a self-evident lie'”—as one antebellum pro-slaveholding politician indeed had done. The proposition, maxim, or axiom of the Declaration is no less self-evident now, Lincoln maintains, but it is so to fewer people, as too many are blinded by passion, like little King Georges. The loss of the dread of tyrants leads a selfish people to insufferable pride. What they’ve really lost is their fear of God, who created men and endowed them with unalienable rights, and who allows tyrants to serve as the scourge of the wicked. Americans were losing their self-mastery in their chase for mastery over others. To correct them, the war in its action and Lincoln in his speech, his argument, must show how cruel the axioms of moral geometry can be, when violated and when defended against their violators.

The Civil War—the judgment of God upon the new Israelites—tested “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.” Israel old and new are particular nations with universal significance. A republic, a nation dedicated to the protection of equal natural rights, requires popular sovereignty. Constitutional union founded upon popular rights cannot survive an appeal from lawful ballots—the election of Lincoln in accordance with the Constitution—to unlawful bullets, if those bullets go unanswered in deeds and in words. Even as labor is prior to capital, the people are prior to government; only a government that oppresses its people, attacks the people’s own laws, can justly be overthrown by force. The people of Israel escaped Egypt, the tyrannical rule of Pharaoh, but did not thereby release themselves from the law of God. The people of America escaped the British Empire, the tyrannical rule of George III, but had not released themselves from the law of God. Just the contrary: To survive as a republic they had to bind themselves all the more closely to the life-giving, rights-endowing God for, Lincoln explains, “the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon the definition of liberty.” What is self-evident to the sheep is not self-evident to the wolf, which would use the lives of the sheep for himself and, in human clothing, destroy political liberty on the same principle. As the duly elected president, Lincoln must speak and act to prevent the sheep from beginning to think like the wolf, for in doing so they unwittingly collaborate in their own eventual destruction.

The consecration of the Gettysburg cemetery by the people—the consecrating of themselves, for tomorrow, when the war will be over—reaffirmed the people’s dedication to the ‘old’ birth of freedom, to “the unfinished work” of the nursing fathers who brought them forth from Egypt but did not live to see them enter the Promised Land. Such dedication meant that the Spirit of the Lord—for the new Israelites, the once-again self-evident truths of the Declaration—will be upon not only the nursing fathers but upon all the people. The new birth of freedom, witnessed at the Gettysburg field of the dead, meant the emancipation of the slaves—one-eight of the American population—and the full emancipation of free men, including the former slave masters, who had contradicted their own right to rule by claiming a universal truth as if it were a narrow, particular entitlement.