A New Declaration. - Review - book review

National Review, Feb 5, 2001 by John Patrick Diggins

A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War, by Harry V. Jaffa (Rowman & Littlefield, 608 pp., $35)

The towering reputation of Abraham Lincoln unites in opposition two furious factions that are ideologically worlds apart. Southern conservatives disdain Lincoln for allegedly bringing on the Civil War; northern radicals disdain him for bringing on market capitalism by promoting enterprise and industry. One camp considers Lincoln's claim that a nation cannot endure half-slave and half-free utterly false. The other dismisses the iconography of Lincoln as a "self-made man" as pure myth that denies the reality of class conflict. The secessionist and the Marxist both have their quarrels with American history; both see Lincoln as embodying the curse of liberalism and, hence, frustrating their hopes for turning America toward either conservatism or radicalism.

The literary critic Edmund Wilson once quipped that the worst fate that befell Lincoln, aside from assassination, was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg, the poet who wrote a six-volume biography and sentimentalized his subject to the point of parody. But even Wilson, in Patriotic Gore, hardly does justice to Lincoln's political ideas, and his comparison of Lincoln to Lenin tells us more about the Cold War than about the Civil War.

A little less than a half-century ago, Harry V. Jaffa rescued Lincoln from his friends and foes alike in his pioneering classic on the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Crisis of the House Divided. The book appeared in the late 1950s during the heyday of the "consensus" interpretation of American history. At the University of Chicago, Daniel J. Boorstin insisted that political ideas had played no significant role in American history. Yet at the same institution, Leo Strauss educated a galaxy of graduate students to believe that the world turns on political ideas and their promise of reason, virtue, and wisdom. Jaffa, one of Strauss's outstanding students and now professor emeritus of political philosophy at Claremont Graduate School, believes fervently in the power of ideas to do good-or ill. The good ideas are those derived from Aristotle and Aquinas and are founded on objective principles of truth discoverable by reason; the bad ideas, in Jaffa's words, include "historicism, positivism, relativism, and nihilism."

Jaffa's long-awaited sequel to Crisis, A New Birth of Freedom, uses Lincoln's interpretation of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to demonstrate that the South had no right to secede from the Union and that sovereignty resides in the nation and its laws. The subject could not be more timely. Today it is still debated whether the states, the national government, or the Supreme Court has ultimate jurisdiction over such matters as education, abortion, the environment, and election procedures. These issues are important in view of the tensions within the antifederalist wing of the conservative movement.

No other scholar has scrutinized the main documents of early American political thought as thoroughly as Jaffa. If his book is a little dense and repetitious, it is also learned and provocative, as well as passionate and perceptive. In true Straussian fashion, Jaffa comments on texts with the aim of taking Thomas Jefferson away from self-styled Jeffersonians like John C. Calhoun, who believed that state sovereignty and the right of secession derived from the rights announced in the Declaration of Independence. Jaffa reads the Declaration as Lincoln read it-as an implicit argument against the cause of the South, holding that the right of revolution cannot violate the higher duty to uphold the rights of all human beings. Lincoln immortalized this argument in the Gettysburg Address, a document viewed by Jaffa and other Straussians as the cornerstone of America's "second founding" and "a new birth of freedom." Jaffa's argument is ingenious, but to support his case he must make Jefferson into a philosopher of authority as well as of liberty, a thinker who articulated principles that not only guaranteed freedom but entailed obligations and responsibilities.

Jaffa spends considerable effort analyzing Jefferson's Summary View of the Rights of British Americans (1774), which previous scholars have seen as simply affirming the colonists' entitlement to enjoy the same rights as Englishmen under the British Constitution. Drawing on that document as well as the Declaration, Jaffa shifts our attention from historic to natural rights under the "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." Historical right is a matter of circumstance, but natural right derives from the essential nature of things; while the former risks falling into relativism, the latter, prescriptive and normative, remains safe from the ravages of time. Jefferson and the founding generation spoke as moralists who believed that the "great principles of right and wrong" were "legible to every reader." "The people," instructs Jaffa, "could not promote public happiness if they did not have a due regard for virtue and the moral law in their private lives."