How July 4 Threatened the Confederacy

O ne of the most regrettable developments of this summer in the United States is the way in which certain commentators have tried to pit the spirit of Juneteenth against the spirit of July 4, as if the two were in tension with one another.

In fact, they are not. The essential concord that exists between the two holidays has been pointed out by other writers who stress that the final extirpation of slavery on Juneteenth was a follow-through on the promises and principles of July 4, not a repudiation of them. But in fact, the events of July 4, 1776, relate to the demise of slavery on these shores in a much more specific and technical way than this true but simple narrative of straightforward prophecy and fulfillment suggests.

Like many commentators on the far left and far right today, the Confederate secessionists of the 1860s insisted that the United States of America did not come into being as a nation on July 4, 1776. Their preferred date of birth for the Union was June 21, 1788, when the Constitution became the official framework of government for the United States.

The rebels had compelling contemporary polemical reasons for arguing that the United States had come into being when the Constitution was ratified rather than when independence was declared. During the 1850s, they could feel the walls of national electoral consensus closing in on slavery, their “peculiar” sectional institution. John C. Calhoun, along with the other intellectual progenitors of the Confederacy, needed an authoritative constitutional precedent that would authorize secession and secure a future for human bondage in the South. The diminishment of July 4 as the date of the nation’s founding turned out to be an indispensable revisionist move in order to make the argument for secession. To understand why July 4 was so threatening to the Confederates, one really has to understand how they made this constitutional argument for secession.

The Confederate argument for the constitutionality of secession centers upon Article XIII of the Articles of Confederation, which preceded the Constitution as the governing document of the United States, and Article VII of the Constitution itself. Here they both are, side by side:

Article XIII of the Articles of Confederation: “And the Articles of this confederation shall be inviolably observed by every state, and the union shall be perpetual; nor shall any alteration at any time hereafter be made in any of them; unless such alteration be agreed to in a congress of the united states, and afterwards confirmed by the legislature of every state. “

Article VII of the Constitution of 1787: “The ratification of the conventions of nine states, shall be sufficient for the establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the same.”

Article XIII of the Articles clearly states that the Union enshrined in that document cannot be altered without the unanimous consent of all 13 state legislatures. But Article VII of the Constitution claims that the ratification of nine states sufficed to make the new governing document operative. Since no provision is made in the Articles for nine states to alter the nature of the Union without the consent of the other four, the Constitution of 1787 clearly effects a new Union, rather than simply altering or renovating the old one. Therefore, the nine states that ratified the Constitution must have seceded from the Articles of Confederation, dissolving the old Union, and forming a new one. The rebels of 1860 were not claiming any more rights for themselves than were exercised by the Founders in 1787 when Messrs. Madison, Jefferson, and company dissolved another preexisting union without unanimous consent and proceeded to forge a new one. This was how the Confederate argument ran. For secession to be legitimate in 1860, the American Union must be dated to June 21, 1788, and no earlier.

Opposed to this line of reasoning was Abraham Lincoln, who argued that the United States of America was born on July 4, 1776. Unfortunately for the Confederates where constitutionality was concerned, Lincoln had Madison and Jefferson on his side. On March 4, 1825, the Board of Visitors at the University of Virginia adopted a series of resolutions that had been worked out and agreed upon by the two great Virginians in writing. The resolutions affirmed “that on the distinctive principles of the government of our state, and of that of these United States, the best guides are to be found in 1. The Declaration of Independence, as the fundamental act of union of these States. . . .” Both Jefferson and Madison expressly endorse the notion that the Declaration of Independence is “the fundamental act of union of these States.”

How then, did Lincoln and the Founders answer the charge of discrepancy between the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution upon which the Confederates built their case for secession? Madison answers this question directly in Federalist No. 43. Concerning the relationship between the states that would ratify the Constitution and the states that wouldn’t, he writes that

In general, it may be observed, that although no political relation can subsist between the assenting and the dissenting States, yet the moral relations will remain uncancelled. The claims of justice, both on one side and on the other, will be in force, and must be fulfilled; the rights of humanity must in all cases be duly and mutually respected. . . .

Madison draws a distinction between political relations between the states on the one hand, which are contingent upon circumstance and which may fluctuate throughout the years, and moral relations on the other, which were established by the Union of July 4, 1776. He writes further of “the anticipation of a speedy triumph over the obstacles to re-union,” which the moral union of the 13 states, preceding positive law, will help to bring about eventually in positive law.

In other words, it was the position of Madison, Jefferson, and Lincoln that the United States of America came into being on July 4, 1776, in a shared affirmation of the principles outlined in the Declaration of Independence, and that while the constitutional scaffolding might go through various permutations throughout the years, the nation itself remained continuous from that initial July 4 throughout. A corollary of this view is that recourse to secession is unconstitutional absent the violation of the fundamental principles outlined in the Declaration. There can be no recourse from ballots to bullets so long as the principles of the Declaration, fleshed out by a constitutional framework that honors its claims, remain inviolate by the federal government. The perpetual union of these states was, for Lincoln and for the Founders, founded on the proposition that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” not on the constitutional instrument that exists solely to make the vison of the Declaration a living reality. As Harry Jaffa writes,

Lincoln’s argument for the indissolubility of the Union depended upon the premise that it was formed, not by the Constitution nor by the Articles, but by the event of July 4, 1776. Without this assumption, the argument against secession as a constitutional right does indeed fall to the ground. That is why Calhoun’s reformulation of the doctrine of state rights had as a necessary foundation the denial of any authority to July 4, 1776, as the time of the formation of the Union. For Calhoun, that date was the occasion for the independence of thirteen separate (not united) states, which at that moment became as legally independent of one another as of Great Britain.

We are so used to hearing President Lincoln’s words, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” that we forget their polemical heft as it relates to the intellectual question of secession’s legitimacy. That the nation was born “four score and seven years ago” was precisely what the rebels denied. That it was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” and not simply to an easily dissolved compact of convenience between 13 autonomous states flew in the face of their reading of the nation’s history.

Lincoln’s understanding of July 4 as the date of the nation’s Founding provided him with the intellectual and rhetorical springboard to justify the salvation of the Union both to his contemporaries and to posterity. But it also allowed him to throw down the anchor of July 4 further into the depths of the nation’s strife than had the Founders in 1787 and to pull up with it Americans who had been held in bondage for centuries. It matters that the United States was born of the Fourth of July not only because it really was, but because the conviction that it was cleansed this country of its most grievous sin and still propels it further up and further into an ever more perfect Union characterized by life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.