To ask whether what the American people in the Declaration of Independence had affirmed as truth was in fact truth, was now said to be meaningless. B… - Harry V. Jaffa

Three years later in the contest for Kansas, the administration headed by James Buchanan tried to railroad through a constitution called the Lecompton Constitution, which would have made Kansas a slave state, but on the basis of a phony vote. Douglas stuck to his popular-sovereignty doctrine, which meant that the people of the territory, in a fair vote, would decide for or against slavery. That was the way in which he replaced the Missouri Compromise restriction. It opened slavery, but it said that the decision in each territory would be made by the people in that territory on the basis of their preferences.

The President's proclamation is intended to give heart to, and rightly does give heart to, the Right to Life movement. It does so by identifying the right to life of the unborn with the first of the rights mentioned in the Declaration. It does so as the free soil movement and the Republican party, in the antebellum United States, had identified the right to liberty in the Declaration as the principled ground of its opposition to slavery. Then it was understood that the principle of equal rights for all in the Declaration of Independence was, as Lincoln said it was, "the apple of gold in the picture of silver" that gave life and meaning to the Constitution. Then it was understood that the original intent of those who framed and those who ratified the Constitution was to "secure these rights," the rights that defined the moral order which the legal order was to implement.

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.