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Harry V. Jaffa

168 quotes

“Douglas's doctrine of 'popular sovereignty' meant no more than that: in a democracy justice is the interest of the majority, which is 'the stronger'. Lincoln, however, insisted that the case for popular government depended upon a standard of right and wrong independent of mere opinion and one which was not justified merely by the counting of heads.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln Douglas Debates (1959), p. xi
“The American Revolution and the Civil War were not merely discrete events. They constitute the first and last acts of a single drama. The fourscore and seven years between the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address comprehended the action of a tremendous world-historical tragedy.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: How to Think about the American Revolution: A Bicentennial Cerebration (1978) p. 53
“In the tradition of American constitutionalism, all men are equally endowed by their Creator with certain rights. The equality of man is understood in the light of man's inequality with God: because men are not and never can become God or gods — because unqualified wisdom is never available to human beings — only government by the consent of the governed, and under the rule of law, is intrinsically in accordance with the eternal order.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Alexander Hamilton Stephens' Constitutional View of the War Between the States, which was and remains probably the best defense of the Confederate cause. It is all about states' rights, and the defense of the minority against the tyranny of the numerical majority, although the "silent minority", the four million slaves, are never counted. It is substantially the book that Calhoun would have written had he been alive to do so. Stephens, who was Vice President of the Confederacy, had also been widely known, north and south, as one of the intellectual luminaries of his time.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The vice-president and the president of the Confederate States of America grounded their justification of American slavery on the grounds of a fraudulent science and a crazy fundamentalism. No sane person today can regard them as other than pathetic reminders of a society, like Nazi Germany, mentally unbalanced by its commitment to human inequality.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“John C. Calhoun was the philosopher-king of the old south, the spiritual mentor of Stephens, Davis, and most of the political leaders of the Confederacy. Bradford and McClellan, following Willmoore Kendall, are obsessed with the utterly false notion that Lincoln was somehow responsible for the permissive egalitarianism of the contemporary welfare state. But equality as such was no less important to Calhoun than to Lincoln. It was just a different kind of equality.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hubert Humphrey, one of the chief authors and sponsors of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, had declared that under Title VII no discrimination on the basis of race or color was to be lawful. He explicitly said that this meant no discrimination of white against black, and no discrimination of black against white.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Much has been written about Jefferson himself being laggard, later in life, in his efforts against slavery. But in Jefferson the draftsman and spokesman for the American people in the American Revolution, the man of whom Lincoln would say that he 'was, is, and perhaps will continue to be, the most distinguished politician of our history', there was never the least equivocation as to slavery's injustice and immorality.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That the equality of human souls in the sight of God ought to be translated into a political structure of equal political rights has come to be regarded as the most authentic interpretation of the Gospel itself. Slavery, and the imposition of all arbitrary forms of inequality of man by man, has come to be seen as demeaning to the souls of God's creation.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The subculture of American Negroes is perhaps the most deeply rooted of all American subcultures, since most black Americans are descended from ancestors who were on the North American continent long before those of the great majority of white Americans. And the blood of many of them is, in truth, mingled with that of the great white families of the colonial and Revolutionary periods. The achievements of this subculture, both in slavery and in freedom, are among the most exalted in human record. It is doubted whether any expression of the human spirit transcends the Negro spiritual.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While slavery meant Egypt, and slavemasters meant Pharoah, America itself remained the promised land. The slaves knew that it was not in Africa, Europe, or anywhere else that a nation had been founded upon the self-evident truth that all men are created equal. It was their destiny to cross over jordan here, and to make their decisive contribution to the human story here, by partaking of that new birth of freedom that alone could vindicate the cause of all human beings everywhere.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[S]lavery existed among the Americans largely because of the action of the crown. For the king to have been complicit in the importation of slaves into America and then to have attempted to use them in a war against their masters merited condemnation in its own right. In no way did such condemnation imply a justification of slavery itself.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[S]laves are never referred to in the Constitution as anything but 'persons', a characterization that is perfectly neutral as to race or sex. That some of these persons were slaves was something arising from state law, not from the Constitution itself.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he generation of the Founding Fathers, who certainly knew the story of Noah and his sons, nonetheless believed in the equality of the races.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“According to Davis it did not require a Galileo or a Harvey (or a Darwin) to discover the natural inferiority of the Negro. All that was necessary was a visit to the District of Columbia jail!”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In 1860 Senator Wilson, like Lincoln, could not ask for recognition of more than the black man's natural rights. But he showed in dramatic fashion that his argument, like Lincoln's, applied ultimately to all rights, civil and political no less than natural.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That one man can run faster than another is no reason to prevent the latter from entering the race. Indeed, until the race is run, how do we know who can run faster? In comparing the known inequalities among whites to the alleged inequalities between blacks and whites, Wilson illuminates the logical and moral irrelevance of the distinction of the races in considering the principles of republican government. Nevertheless, this topic could not be addressed in the pure light of reason and nature, because public opinion, North or South, would not permit it.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“South Carolina cites, loosely, but with substantial accuracy, some of the language of the original Declaration. That Declaration does say that it is the right of the people to abolish any form of government that becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established. But South Carolina does not repeat the preceding language in the earlier document: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal'.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he one unforgivable sin, according to dominant Southern public opinion, was moral condemnation of slavery.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[P]reservation of the Union was not a partisan policy.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]t is impossible for men who exercise their reason to believe that any one part of the human race has been marked out by God or nature as so superior to any other. No man is by nature, or by manifest declaration of God's will, the possessor or possession, the master or slave, of another. Whoever asserts such a right to such domination or possession is, in Congress's words from that same document, 'rightfully resistible'.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For nearly three quarters of a century, Jim Crow imposed on free Negroes a regime in many respects harsher than slavery. The persons of slaves received a certain protection from the fact that they were valuable property, a protection that was stripped from them after they were free.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The king is not responsible for the fate of each man's soul. Every man is responsible to God, but not the king, for this. Shakespeare, while displaying unflinchingly the defects of kingly rule, does not in the English histories have on his horizon any alternative to divine right monarchy. The American Founding's Lockean republican political theory provides an answer to the defects of Christian divine right monarchy, the answer that Lincoln inherited. This supplied as well the theoretical foundation for Lincoln's assault on slavery.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“George W. Bush has said he wants to change things in Washington. On this President's Day, we find him attempting this change in a most profound way. President Bush is to be commended for his recent Proclamation of National Sanctity of Human Life Day, in which he reminds his fellow citizens of the true principles of free government. But those principles today are usually ignored, or scorned. By taking up the challenge of defending these principles, President Bush aligns himself with the greatest President of our nation's history.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This nation was founded," President Bush wrote, "upon the belief that every human being is endowed by our Creator with certain 'unalienable rights.'" The President, in using the exact language of the Declaration of Independence, including the archaic "unalienable," has expressed the conviction that "the laws of nature and of nature's God" furnish the moral foundation of constitutional government. "President Jefferson's timeless principle," he wrote, "obligates us to pursue a civil society that will democratically embrace its essential moral duties...”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The President's Proclamation is in direct contradiction of the legal positivism reigning in the legal profession, a positivism held no less tenaciously by conservatives than liberals, a positivism that denies all constitutional status to the principles of the Declaration of Independence. The contrast between the President's Proclamation and this positivism reveals a profound alienation from the principles of the American Founding among our nation's intellectual elites.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If "safeguards of individual liberty" do not have "any intrinsic worth", then neither does individual liberty. And if individual liberty has no intrinsic worth, neither does individual life. It is impossible to imagine a more complete denial of President Bush's proclamation of the sanctity of human life, or of his assertion of an "essential human dignity attached to all persons by virtue of their very existence." This is not only legal positivism, it is nihilism. It is not only a denial of any moral foundation of constitutionalism, it is a denial of any moral foundation of political community.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By the principles of the Declaration of Independence, majority rule in a free society is not an end in itself, nor is it a source of the purposes served by free government. Majority rule exists to secure the rights with which all human persons are "endowed by their Creator." The recognition of the origin of these rights, in God and nature, comes before any action of any majority. Only as we all recognize that "the just powers of government" exist to secure the equal rights possessed by every human being, whether in the majority or minority, can tyranny be prevented.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The President's proclamation is a mighty blow against the legal positivism that infects our legal establishment, and the moral relativism that pervades our society. But this can only be the beginning of a far greater struggle than that against the physical danger of terrorism. It means taking up once again the burden Lincoln bore, in reasserting the truth of the Declaration, against the "positive good" theory of slavery, and against the still more deadly theory that majorities, and not the difference between right and wrong, should decide the future of slavery.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In this struggle President Bush will find, like Lincoln, and like one who came before Lincoln, that "a man's foes will be those of his own household." However hard and long it might be, this battle must be borne. For what is at stake is nothing less than the future of our entire civilization.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On the question of the gentlemanliness of the debate, I'm reminded that in the Congress, just before the Civil War, the Senator from New Hampshire, I think, made an anti-slavery speech, and a Senator from Mississippi, not Jefferson Davis, invited him to come down to Mississippi to make that speech, promising to see that he was hanged from the highest tree in the forest. The Senator from New Hampshire invited the Senator from Mississippi to come to New Hampshire where he would be given a respectful hearing in every township in that State.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When people speak about the results of the 1860 Presidential election, it’s usually given out that Lincoln had, I think, 39 percent of the popular vote in that election. But, of course, there were 10 states in the South who formed part of the ten or the eleven states of the Confederacy, in which no Republican electors were on the ballots. And since we know that at least 100,000 men from those states came north to join the Union Army, there were at least 100,000 votes that weren't counted.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And Lincoln in his Cooper Union speech, which he gave in February of 1860, raised the question, 'What can we do to satisfy our Southern brethren? No assurances that we give them that we will have no intention of interfering with the institution of slavery where it exists will satisfy them. We must get rid of all anti-slavery sentiments from our state constitutions'.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lincoln, as we know, supported that Act as part of the Compromise of 1850. But in his inaugural address he mentioned several respects in which that law should be modified so that it would be consistent, at least, with the principles of civil liberty. But that was the temper of the country.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And it’s important to understand the sequence of events, and the ideas that accompanied that sequence of events that led up to the Civil War. The subtitle of my new book is Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War, and I believe I’ve discussed the question of the nature of secession and the role of secession in that crisis, I believe, more thoroughly than I think it’s ever been discussed before.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Colonists did not, at this point, claim any privileges under the law of Great Britain. They were breaking from the law of Great Britain. They were appealing instead to the laws of nature and of nature’s God. And it was under those laws that they had the right to resist oppression.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In 1860, the South did not appeal to the right of revolution. They appealed to a right of secession, which they claim to be a Constitutional right under the Constitution itself. In 1776, the colonists did not claim that in breaking with Great Britain they were exercising a right granted by the British Constitution. They had conducted their struggle until that moment by appealing it through the British constitution. But when they decided on independence, they appealed instead to the laws of nature and of nature’s God.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So that was the basic issue. Once the ballots had been decided, Lincoln said the only recourse must be through future elections in which the minority can try to become the majority; but there can be no right to reject the results of an election conducted under the rules of the Constitution.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now let me trace for a moment the sequence of events that led up to the secession crisis. Prelude to Southern Secession. I'll begin by saying that the decisive act of secession—the secession which caused all future secessions—was not what happened after Lincoln’s election. It was the secession of the seven states of the Deep South from the Democratic convention in Charleston of 1860. As far as I know, Mr. DiLorenzo doesn’t even know anything about this. He can still comment on that when he wants to.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But what happened then? The majority of the delegates to that convention wanted to nominate Stephen A. Douglas as the Democratic candidate for the presidency. The Democratic Party had the two-thirds rule, which they continued to have until 1936, as a matter of fact. I think only in '36 did they change it to a simple majority; Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first nomination had to be two-thirds.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The seven states of the Deep South, the same seven states that seceded after Lincoln's election and before his inauguration, demanded as a plank in the Democratic platform, without which they would not support Douglas, a slave code for the territories.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This, by the way, was a demand for the greatest increase of federal power prior to the New Deal, maybe even since the New Deal. The greatest demand for an increase in federal power was made by the Southern states in 1860. And the majority in the convention refused to adopt this, and they refused to adopt it because nobody could be elected dogcatcher in a free state who supported a federal police power over slavery in the territories.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But bear this in mind: if this demand had been acceded to, that meant that every territory in the United States which would become a state—and remember, there were then 33 states and there would be 50 states eventually—but every other state would become a slave state. Because if one slave owner went to North Dakota with his slave, the federal police power would follow him to make sure that he could hold that slave securely in that place.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now this was a demand for the indefinite extension of slavery, so the choice facing the country was whether slavery will be restricted or whether it will be extended indefinitely with the whole power of the federal government behind the extension of slavery.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now, what was Douglas' position? Douglas was the man who in 1854, in drafting and sponsoring the Kansas-Nebraska Act, had moved for the repeal of the Missouri Compromise restriction on slavery. And that meant that after Missouri was admitted to the Union in 1820 or ’21, that Congress resolved that in all the remaining territory north of 36°30’—which was a southern boundary of Missouri—all the remaining territory would be forever free. That meant that the states of Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming—slavery was excluded from them.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So the repeal of the Missouri Compromise opened that whole territory to the ingress of slavery. That sparked the greatest political revolution in American History. In the spring of 1854, when the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed, there was no Republican Party; there were no Republican congressmen. In the four elections of 1854, 100 Republican Congressmen were returned to the Congress. At that moment, Stephen A. Douglas was looked upon as the antichrist from the point of view of the anti-slavery movement.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Well, Douglas became the leader of the Republicans in the struggle in Congress to defeat the Lecompton Constitution, and he succeeded. And from becoming the antichrist of the anti-slavery movement, he became the savior. And many people in the Republican Party wanted Lincoln and the Republicans in Illinois to support Douglas for reelection.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That was a decisive moment in Lincoln’s career, and that’s the situation he faced when he got up to give his “House Divided” speech on June 16th of 1858. It was a crisis of his own career. It was also, in my opinion, the gravest crisis this country has ever faced, because the greatest danger to the future of the country came not, I think, from the pro-slavery argument, but from the morally neutral argument of Douglas. And that’s a long story and you’ll find it all spelled out in great detail in my book, which I hope you will read with great care.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And Lincoln pointed out that this argument—which the Court applied to the territories—could also equally well be applied to the states, so that the prospect of slavery becoming national, not only through the spread into the new territories but in the spread to the states, was very great. This was Lincoln’s argument.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now, Lincoln said to Douglas, if you accept that Taney’s opinion that slavery is expressly affirmed in the Constitution is true, then you are under an obligation to give the slave owners the implementation of this right.”
Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) said by 2015 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source