AND GOD DIDN'T CREATE CORPORATIONS:

Inventing the Gettysburg Address: a review of Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America. by Garry Wills (Harry V. Jaffa, Fall 1992 issue of The Intercollegiate Review)

Lincoln at Gettysburg is the sequel to Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, which was published in 1978. In the Prologue to that book, Wills reveals that even then he was less concerned with the Declaration itself than with undoing the myths about it perpetrated by the Gettysburg Address. In that book, as in this one, Lincoln’s deception is said to have begun with the assertion in the Gettysburg Address of the bond between independence and union. Here is how Lincoln himself summarized his view—long before Gettysburg—in his Inaugural Address of March 4, 1861:

The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured and the faith of the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally, in 1787, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was “to form a more perfect Union.”

The words from the Preamble were italicized by Lincoln himself, since he evidently thought it impossible to deny that the Union preceded the Constitution, if the Constitution itself speaks of forming “a more perfect Union.”

However, in his 1978 book, Garry Wills ridicules the “four-score and seven years ago” of the Gettysburg Address. He says Lincoln chose “his Biblically shrouded figure” because it:

. . . takes us back to 1776, the year of the Declaration, of the self-evident truth that all men are created equal. But there aresome fairly self-evident objections to that mode of calculating. All thirteen original colonies subscribed to the Declaration with instructions to their delegates that this was not to imply formation of a single nation. If anything, July 4, 1776, produced twelve new nations (with a thirteenth coming in on July 15)—conceived in liberty perhaps, but more dedicated to theproposition that the colonies they severed from the mother country were equal to each other than that their inhabitants were equal.

In 1981, I reviewed Inventing America. I pointed out that Wills’s confident assertion about the instructions of all thirteen colonies to their delegates in the Continental Congress was simply not true. I quoted from these documents—which Wills, perhaps relying upon Kendall, apparently had never seen. (I surmise also that Kendall, relying upon either Calhoun or Jefferson Davis, had never seen them either.) In the majority of cases, the colonies had instructed their delegates to vote for independence and union. Not one instructed to the contrary. All of them did, however, reserve to themselves individually their “internal police.” This reservation marks what is probably the first appearance in our political literature of the principle of American federalism. Although Americans have been disputing for 200 years how to draw the line between state and federal authority, no one thought, either then or now, that federalism is inconsistent with union, or that union is inconsistent with nationhood. In adopting Kendall’s thesis that the thirteen colonies, in becoming independent of Great Britain, became independent of each other, Wills is simply—shall we say it?—swindling his readers.

Let us consider further how the relationship of independence and union was looked back upon in the after-light of the Founding. In 1825, Jefferson asked Madison for his recommendation of books or documents that ought to be made authoritative—norma docendi—for instruction by the law faculty of the new University of Virginia. In response, Madison did recommend—and Jefferson incorporated his recommendation into a resolution adopted by the Board of Visitors of the University—some of the “best guides” to “the distinctive principles of the government of our own State, and of that of the United States.” The first was the “Declaration of Independence, as the fundamental act of Union of these States.”

In his earlier book, Wills refers to the Declaration and the Gettysburg Address together as “war propaganda with no legal force” (362). But this is to ignore the testimony of Madison and Jefferson, that the Declaration was “the fundamental act of Union.” “Act” here means “law.” Article VI of the Constitution declares that:

All debts contracted and engagements entered into before the adoption of this Constitution shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution as under the Confederation.

Article XII of the Articles of Confederation declares, in like manner, that all debts contracted under the authority of Congress before the Articles went into effect shall be considered charges against the United States, and honored as such. This more than confirms Lincoln’s contention that the legal and moral personality of the United States, as a Union, extends continuously not only to the Declaration of Independence, but before that to the Congress of the Union that declared independence, and which had incurred debts from the beginning of the war in 1775. The Declaration of Independence is today the first of the four organic laws of the United States, according to the United States Code, as adopted by the United States Congress. [3] Article VII of the Constitution, as signed by George Washington, and submitted to the states for ratification declares that it was “done in Convention in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-seven and of the independence of the United States of America the twelfth.” All acts and deeds of the United States are by the Constitution itself dated from the Declaration of Independence. How anyone could write two books on this topic, as Garry Wills has done, and remain ignorant of these most elementary historical and legal facts, is difficult to understand.

The enduring significance of the Declaration of Independence—embodied in the Gettysburg Address—is accordingly less in marking the separation of the colonies from Great Britain, than of marking the union of the states with each other. This enduring significance, however, is constituted less by the legal fact of union, than by the moral fact that—according to Madison and Jefferson—the Declaration embodies the principles of government of the States severally, and of the United States corporately. Moreover, the Constitution of 1787 guarantees “to every state of this union a republican form of government,” without ever defining that form. Can there be any doubt that, as indicated by the testimony of the aforesaid witnesses, such form is best defined in the Declaration of Independence?

What made the Declaration of Independence the best of all guides to educating the guardians of republican freedom? In 1978, as we have seen, Wills, following Kendall, thought that the equality mentioned in the Declaration referred to the collective legal equality of the States with each other, not to the moral equality of the human persons who were their “inhabitants.” We have seen Wills quote with full approval—in opposition to Lincoln—the assertion that:

. . . the statesmen who founded the government . . . were men possessing too much self-respect to declare that Negroes were their equals. . . .

That the Declaration of Independence included Negroes in the proposition of human equality is the heart of hearts of Lincoln’s alleged “new past.” Wills also inherited this thesis from Kendall, who had charged Lincoln with “a startling new interpretation of . . . ‘all men are created equal’” (39). The denial that Negroes had been included in the humanity of the Declaration had also been the contention of Chief Justice Taney in his opinion for the Court in Dred Scott. By a strange twist of fate, what was an article of faith for the old defenders of slavery has become unquestionable orthodoxy among “black power” historians and their allies of the radical Left, who take it as proof of the racism of the American Founding.

Where does the truth lie? Are individuals equal, or are only “peoples” collectively equal? Consider the Massachusetts Bill of Rights of 1780—whose author was John Adams, a member of the committee charged by the Congress in 1776 to draft the Declaration:

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

And the premise upon which this voluntary association is formed is that:

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

Here is an authoritative gloss upon the doctrine of the Declaration, prefaced to a Revolutionary state constitution.

In 1835, after being engaged in mortal combat against the doctrine of state rights enunciated by Calhoun during the nullification crisis (1828–33), James Madison drafted an essay on the meaning of sovereignty in constitutional jurisprudence. He wrote:

To go to the bottom of the subject let us consult the theory which contemplates a certain number of individuals as meeting and agreeing to form one political society, in order that the rights, the safety, and the interest of each may be under the safeguard of the whole.
The first supposition is, that each individual being previously independent of the others, the compact which is to make them one society must result from the free consent of every individual.

Therefore, there can be no doubt that the consent that brings the body politic into existence, the consent upon which majority rule and the “just powers of government” depend, is “the free consent of every individual.” It is true that communities of men founded in this way are themselves equal to other independent communities. But this collective equality is a by-product of the equality that individuals enjoyed, as contracting parties, prior to forming themselves into a people. The equality enjoyed by citizens and persons under the constitutional law of a free society is a consequence of the antecedent equality belonging to them under the laws of nature and of nature’s God. It is this natural equality that defines the ends, and limits the powers, of all legitimate governments. This is the philosophical core of the idea of limited government. For Calhoun—and his followers to this day—state rights are sui generis—that is to say, they have no anterior justification. State rights, severed from the natural rights of human persons, are not limited in what they can do—and what they did do was to place the legal right to own human persons on the same level as all other rights.

The proposition of human equality, understood to refer first and foremost to the rights of individuals, forms the core of the Gettysburg Address because it forms the core of the Declaration of Independence. Even more importantly, it forms the moral core of our existence as civilized human beings.