Harry V. Jaffa Quotes

And comparing what happened in England—after all, in England the Parliament in Westminster was making laws for the West Indies. The West Indians didn't have any representation in the Parliament. The laws were made for them, and they had to go along with it. There was no such power within the Federal government to interfere with slavery, except by limiting the expansion of slavery. And it was Lincoln’s belief—and I think the best economic analysis that we have of the American economy in the antebellum United States indicates—that if the expansion of slavery had been ended, and if it was no longer possible for surplus slaves to be sold from the old states to new territories, that the pressure within the states to adopt programs of emancipation would become great enough to do that.

But he did want to see to it that loyal slave owners were not expropriated by his emancipation policy. But he couldn't get the Congress to adopt it. He couldn't get any Representatives, and people from Kentucky, or Missouri, or the border states to vote for it, and so he failed. This is the message to Congress which ended with those wonderful words, “Gentlemen of the Congress, we cannot escape history. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last, best hope of Earth.” Well, it failed.

Now, during the Civil War, Lincoln did endorse a program of compensated emancipation. In his 1862 message to Congress, he proposed a series of Constitutional amendments that would have authorized the Federal government to reimburse states that adopted programs of compensated emancipation. He was very anxious. This was before the Emancipation Proclamation, the final one, was issued on January 1, 1863.

Yeah, I’d like to comment. In the first place, the idea that the federal government in 1860 should have offered to buy the slaves is a political absurdity. Any claim by Lincoln or his party of any jurisdiction over slavery in the states would have been regarded, and justly regarded, as completely unconstitutional, and advocating the overthrow of the Constitution.

DiLorenzo thinks that it is a reflection on Lincoln's anti-slavery character that he supported the Fugitive Slave Act. But the Fugitive Slave Clause is in the Constitution, and Lincoln thought that any refusal to implement the right clearly defined in the Constitution would justify secession. You can't pick and choose which parts of the Constitution you like. Once you do that, then the Constitution is simply, as Jefferson said once, "a blank sheet of paper." Jefferson said that when he was contemplating purchasing Louisiana. And having said that by purchasing it he would make the Constitution a blank sheet of paper, he went ahead and purchased Louisiana.

And if you look at the things that are denied to the states in the Constitution, for example, they are denied the right to coin money. Now, throughout history, the right to coin money has been a symbol of sovereignty. If states do not have the right to coin money, they are not sovereign in the sense that would justify secession as a state right.

With this, we are introduced to a unique American contribution to political science: dual federalism and dual sovereignty. The states are sovereign within the spheres of the powers that are reserved to them by the Constitution. They are not sovereign in those things that are delegated to the United States as a whole.

Now, the truth of the matter is that the idea of the meaning of the word 'federal' underwent a change from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution. Under the Constitution, the states gave up their sovereignty in the Calhounian sense. And if you have any doubt about that, let me just read a sentence from George Washington. 'It is obviously impracticable in the federal government of these states to secure all rights of independent sovereignty to each, and yet provide for the interest and safety of all'. So all the rights of independent sovereignty, or some of those rights, have been surrendered.

Now there’s document on a subject of states' rights and states' sovereignty which is very seldom cited but which is absolutely fundamental to understanding the status of sovereignty under the Constitution: the letter that George Washington wrote transmitting the new Constitution to the Congress on September 17, 1787. And among the ironies of this letter is the fact that John C. Calhoun in his Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States, the sequel to his Disquisition on Government, cites the words that Washington used to support his position that this was a federal government, and that “federal” meant one in which the constituent parts retains complete sovereignty. And he refers to the fact that Washington refers to “the federal government of these States.”

As far as Hamilton, the banks and internal improvements, contrary to Professor DiLorenzo, I think, and several other people have thought, that Hamilton was the greatest Secretary of the Treasury we ever had. The assumption of the debts of the states, and the funding of the debt through the bank produced an enormous prosperity in the country, and this was all done under Washington’s administration. And if you want to speak of Federalists and people supporting the Federalist economic agenda, the first one of them was George Washington.

Now it's absolutely true, and I agree with Professor DiLorenzo, that the Republican Party could never have been successful without the support of the tariff interests involved. The Free Soil Party and the Liberty Party were anti-slavery parties, which were, you might say, pure in their principles, but they had no chance of being successful on a national basis. It was the addition of the tariff interests that gave the Republicans the ability to carry their anti-slavery program into action. And it’s in that light, I think, that you have to look at the whole question of the tariffs.

Don't we hear nowadays objections on the part of the labor unions to importing goods from China, which are made with slave labor? Is the existence of slave labor not a reflection upon the idea of a free commercial society?

I myself believe in free trade and would be glad it could be implemented whenever possible. But in the actual conflict that led to the Civil War, we had two obstacles to free trade, and I ask you to think which one of them was the greater obstacle. One was the tariff, and the other was slavery.

So the slave issue really under-laid the tariff issue. But it also happened that in the committee which was scheduling the tariffs, the people in South Carolina, and I think other Southerners, moved to raise the tariffs to this abominable level on the assumption that they would be voted down on the floor of the House. And they got fooled by that. Instead of being voted down, it was voted in. They were hoist by their own petard. But in 1833 a compromise was reached. The tariffs were reduced. Jackson’s Force Bill was repealed, and so there was a peaceful resolution of that.

What happened in 1828 is also a very curious fact. 1828 was a crucial moment in the history of the tariff, because the national debt was just being paid off, and so the income from the tariff would produce a surplus in the treasury. And at that time, there was a great fear that a surplus in the federal treasury might be used to buy the freedom of slaves.