Declaration of Independence: Promissory Note

In the matter of slavery Lincoln was the basic politician. On this very important issue he was difficult to pin down on specifics. He was quite capable of leaving any audience with the impression that he, Lincoln, agreed with him, the voter, whatever was his view.

One could parse his various speeches and determine the nub of his thinking if one tried hard enough. Regarding the matter of slavery Lincoln did not favor bringing about a society wherein there was social and political equality of the races. He did not favor making voters or jurors of Negroes. Nor did he favor intermarriage.

Lincoln reasoned that there was a basic difference between the races. He accepted the basic prejudice of his times that the white race was superior to the black. However, he did not think this meant that the black man be denied everything.

Lincoln was a politician who could reason his way to a fundamental position, a position in which he knew exactly what the truly important issue was and was willing to give ground on less important issues to gain acceptance of this fundamental issue, the nub of the matter. He was noted, in his law practice, of concentrating fiercely on the main point at issue and to concede ancillary matters as required.

Regarding Negro intellectual ability Lincoln was an agnostic. This was a popular “liberal” view that there was no way to prove the difference in intellect between white and black and thus Lincoln refused to allow this matter to become entangled with the very practical matter of political equality. Nevertheless Lincoln was convinced that it was wrong to treat any human being as property.

Lincoln further reasoned that if the black man owns himself he thus is entitled to the product of his labor. Lincoln often quoted the biblical text “in sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread” as the sardonic right of the Negro. This was a telling argument because of the adherence to the bible that was characteristic of so many Americans. Lincoln constantly argued that one couldn’t own human beings and one should not be in a position to be king over human beings.

The Declaration of Independence became a tactical weapon for Lincoln as a means around the prejudice of the population. The population in general was prejudiced in favor of slavery and also prejudiced in favor of the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln attempted to convince them, in various round about ways, that for consistency sake they must abandon one prejudice or the other. Senator Douglas argued that such a choice was not necessary. Douglas argued that the Constitution countenanced slavery and the Constitution, not the Declaration, was the law of the land.

It is at this point that Lincoln set up the statement that the Declaration was a statement of a permanent ideal of American democracy and that the Constitution represented a “first cut” at the practical implementation of that ideal. The Declaration was a metaphysical statement of what our democracy must strive for even though we may never exactly meet our ideal.

Lincoln felt that the Declaration established an ideal for all men and that all men should attempt to establish a government that attempts, even though unsuccessful, to meet that ideal. The Declaration is a pledge “to all people of all colors everywhere”.

Quotes from “Lincoln at Gettysburg” by Garry Wills

It is at this point that Lincoln set up the statement that the Declaration was a statement of a permanent ideal of American democracy and that the Constitution represented a “first cut” at the practical implementation of that ideal. The Declaration was a metaphysical statement of what our democracy must strive for even though we may never exactly meet our ideal.

Lincoln felt that the Declaration established an ideal for all men and that all men should attempt to establish a government that attempts, even though unsuccessful, to meet that ideal. The Declaration is a pledge “to all people of all colors everywhere”.

Quotes from “Lincoln at Gettysburg” by Garry Wills
I hadn't heard that "first draft" argument before. That's good. Did you know that we were one vote shy of banning slavery in the US in 1776? And the one vote was not cast because some guy was home sick.

The founding fathers, despite some of them being slave owners themselves, knew slavery was wrong from the start. We inherited the institution of slavery from the English and fought our bloodiest war to finally put an end to it.

Anyway, interesting post.

We inherited the institution of slavery from the English and fought our bloodiest war to finally put an end to it.Even though that is the way the Civil War is commonly justified to schoolchildren, its truth is arguable. Lincoln had no intention of alienating slaveowners in the border states of Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri, and abolition was not an issue when the first shots were fired in the Civil War.

We libertarians are convinced that the war was entirely about Lincoln's hubris, his yearning to be remembered as the man who "preserved the Union," and historians deferentially grant his wish. Yet if the Constitution presents a process by which the citizens of a state can join the Union, it stands to reason that there must be a symmetrical process to sever that connection, and Lincoln refused to allow them to pursue it.

Nonetheless the roots of the war were in economics, which bears on any analysis of slavery. Slavery is not a cost-effective way to manage a labor force in an industrial economy. German immigrants demonstrated this in the years leading up to the war, getting a higher yield per acre of cotton farmland tended by employees than the slave-tended farms were getting. Slavery was the South's way of hanging onto a storybook medieval, pre-industrial economy, with slaves filling the roles of yeomen since no free men were willing to take them.

As the Western Hemisphere industrialized, slavery was abolished peacefully--by attrition and the rule of law--in every other country except Haiti. It just wasn't working in an era of mechanized farming and railroad transport, as productivity and the wealth it creates were being democratized, and there was little serious resistance to its abolition. Brazil's slaveowners were notorious for being the world's cruelest, and the institution was abolished even in Brazil in the 1880s.

If the South had been allowed to go its own way, its economy would have collapsed within a generation. Queen Victoria would have made a destitute Confederacy an offer it couldn't refuse, and it would have rejoined the Commonwealth--where, incidentally, slavery had been illegal since 1833. It would have gone the way of Canada and Australia, and today the border between Virginia and Maryland would be as easy to miss as the one between Montana and Saskatchewan.

It's sobering to note that in every other country (again except Haiti) the African-ancestry and European-ancestry populations quickly assimilated. Today they come in a complete spectrum of brown. Only in America (and Haiti) are there still distinct light-skinned and dark-skinned communities with an abysmally low intermarriage rate (about 2% in the USA compared to 25% for the "conservative" East Asian immigrants and the "gonna take over our country" Latinos), each with its own dialect, music and social customs.

Lincoln only tossed slavery into the Civil War discourse when the war was going badly for the North and he needed something to shore up support among disillusioned Northerners. Even then he didn't outlaw it immediately in Missouri, Kentucky and Maryland, his three culturally "Southern" states whose loyalty he didn't want to test.

As a result, when the Civil War ended with 3% of the population killed, and perhaps most Americans no more than two degrees of separation from one of the dead, Euro-Americans couldn't help looking at African-Americans and saying, "My teacher/grocer/neighbor/friend's son/father/teacher/friend died for these people. I hope it was worth it." 140 years later that specter still hangs over America.

In Brazil, about the only thing they had to say was, "Let me buy you a beer to celebrate, amigo."

I have been a self-actualizing self-learner for more than 25 years. It began to develop into a hobby in 1980 while reading a book on the Vietnam Civil War when I decided that to understand this civil war in Vietnam I must understand our own Civil War in the United States.

I have since that time read many books about this important part of our history. The most enlightening book that best answered my questions was the book “The Mind of the South” by W.J. Cash. Cash says-- “With an intense individualism, which the frontier atmosphere put into the man of the South also comes violence and an idealistic, hedonistic romanticism. This romanticism is also fueled by the South conflict with the Yankee. Violence manifests itself in mob action, such as lynching, and private dealings.”

One question that developed early in my reading was why the ordinary white citizen of the South was such a good soldier, superior to the Union soldier. Why did the ordinary southern man fight so valiantly to preserve slavery when he was not a slaveholder himself? This valiant southerner fought with very little comfort and support from the Confederacy because the Confederacy was a financially poor institution. The rebel soldier often did not even have shoes. The rebel soldier often had to find food on his own. Very little in the form of supplies were provided to the rebel army.

I have over the years discovered answers to my questions. One particular aspect of this situation, which I had not considered, was how the fact of slave labor in a culture affects the culture totally. In the South there was no free labor. Slaves did virtually all labor. The effect of this reality determined to a great extent the nature of the society.

The white man would not work for anyone because he considered laboring for hire made him no better than the black slave and his superiority to the black man was essential to his self-esteem. There was no labor class in the antebellum south. The slaves did the labor but the slave was a capital investment just like a horse or oxen. Here was a total society without a laboring class.

What were some of the effects of no free labor in the South? The most important factor I suspect was that the ordinary white man felt any labor was beneath his dignity. This lack of ‘free labor’ led to many of the characteristics of the Southern man and woman that probably is a factor today in the character of the Southerner.




I think that the wheel might be a useful analogy for understanding the mind of the South. The spokes of the wheel represent the essential components of all societies--economy, law and culture. The hub to which all spokes focus is slavery. The antebellum South revolved around slavery.

This area of the United States developed as any frontier area in the US during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The climate and the circumstance of the cotton gin invention led to the evolution of a society that never lost its frontier characteristic while becoming an agricultural economy dependent almost totally upon cotton.

The economy was cotton and the power controlling the society was the cotton plantation. Early in the nineteenth century South Carolina plantation owners gained complete political control of the entire state and these plantation owners became the core that moved the eleven Southern states to emulate the South Carolina system. By the 1820s the South Carolina plantation politicians determined their goal to be separation from the Union if the Union failed to allow the expansion of slavery into the developing land as the nation moved West and new states began to join the Union.

There were three basic economic classes—plantation owners, yeomen farmers and poor whites. I do not include slaves as an economic class—they were basically capital (objects) just as horses and oxen are capital. The plantation owners controlled the wealth and power in their particular areas and banded together to control the wealth and political power in a region of state.

The yeomen and poor white were primarily subsistence farmers. Some of the yeomen had a few slaves but by and large the vast majority of slaves worked the large plantations. The plantations owned the good land leaving the less desirable land for the yeomen and poor white. Basically population ringed the best lands of the plantation with each succeeding lower rung in the economic ladder existing on less and less productive land.

There was somewhat of a heterogeneous mixture of relatives occupying each economic sector. The plantation owner was related by blood to many of the citizens in the area. There was not a great sense of hierarchy in class sensitivities because of the interrelated blood relationships. This fact also made it easier for the plantation owners to exercise their power over the community.

All classes recognized the importance of slavery to the whole society. While the yeoman and poor white did not, in most cases, own slaves they were as dependent on slavery as was the owner of slaves. For the yeoman and the poor white their self-esteem depended upon their sense of superiority to the slave. For these reasons the laws and the culture took the same attitude toward the importance of slavery, as did the plantation owners.

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The antebellum Southerner is violent, romantic, hedonistic and indolent. The dictionary defines a romantic as marked by the imaginative appeal of what is heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious, or idealized and hedonism: the doctrine that pleasure or happiness is the sole or chief good in life. All of these character traits were developed and maintained because of the culture of slavery. The yeoman and the poor white were strong white supremacists because it was a necessary component of their self-image, of their self-identity.

The character traits of a strong sense of honor, violence, devil-may-care romanticism and their lifetime of hard bare survival living coupled with outdoor hunting and acquaintance with guns were great assets as a soldier. The Southern officer was far superior to the Union officer and most obviously this is exemplified in the person of General Robert Lee. Also they fought for their homes and their self-identity and way of life. They managed to salvage the substance if not the form of white supremacy after defeat through the Jim Crow laws that held for one hundred years.