[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 in… - Harry V. Jaffa

Every human good we enjoy today is, directly or indirectly, a legacy from what the Founders wrought, and Lincoln preserved. That legacy was formed by what the American Founders called an experiment in free government, at the heart of which is a simple, yet radical idea; that under the laws of nature and of nature's God, all men are created equal. From this idea, and this idea alone, flow all the precepts of free government. If all men are created equal, it is unjust for one man to rule another without his consent. If men possess rights by nature, the purpose of government is to protect our natural liberty. As we know the purpose of government we know also of its limitations, and so we limit the power of government by writing a constitution, and requiring the government as well as citizens to live under the rule of law- laws which must be consented to by the citizens in order to be legitimate.

We have these inalienable rights, and in the exercise of these same inalienable rights, we agree with each other to form civil governments. And Madison has an essay on sovereignty, which is a sort of simplified repetition of John Locke’s argument in the second chapter of the Second Treatise.

The paradox of calling the same human beings persons and property brings the cause of the Civil War into the sharpest focus. A person by definition is a being possessed of a rational will. A chattel by equal definition is a piece of movable property without a rational will. Because a horse or a dog lacks a rational will, its owner is responsible for any damage or injury it may cause. But slaves were held as responsible for their own actions, as were their masters, under the criminal codes of the slave states. The slave owners, in seeking to have the slaves counted as five-fifths, were asserting that they were full human beings. At the same time, by claiming the right to their labor as chattels, they were asserting them to be sub-human. How the slaves could be both was something that Jefferson Davis and his friends never explained.