Today’s Wall Street Journal features a well-deserved positive review of the latest book by Princeton historian James McPherson, one of our leading authorities on the Civil War era. The book is titled The War That Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters, and gathers together a dozen of McPherson’s essays, most previously published but some revised for this collection. The reviewer for the WSJ is Richard Snow, the author most recently of a book on Henry Ford.
Why do I bring up this book review here? Because of this passage from the final paragraph of Snow’s review (my emphasis):
Shortly after his first election, speaking of the weaknesses of a Declaration of Independence that did not embrace the enslaved, Lincoln said that although the Founders knew their work was flawed, “they meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be . . . constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”
This characterization of the Declaration—which could be understood in context to be Snow’s understanding of Lincoln’s view of it, or even Snow’s take on McPherson’s understanding of Lincoln’s view of it—really took me aback. For it was consistently Lincoln’s argument throughout his career that the Declaration did “embrace the enslaved” in its capacious language that “all men are created equal.” Indeed, it was the linchpin of Lincoln’s whole campaign against the extension of slavery into new territories, even by the apparently democratic means of “popular sovereignty” on the part of local territorial majorities. Had Lincoln held the view indicated by Snow—that the Declaration’s terms “did not embrace the enslaved”—he could indeed have continued to argue that slavery was a grave injustice. But he would not have had the Declaration on his side in doing so, and it was of incalculable advantage to Lincoln’s case that he could count on the Declaration’s support for his argument. It helps also that he was right about that.
So, I wondered, is Richard Snow correctly characterizing James McPherson’s incorrect characterization of Lincoln’s view and of the Declaration itself? Thanks to the search features on Amazon, I was able to assure myself that the error is all Snow’s, not McPherson’s. Here is what McPherson writes (p. 163 of his new book):
As for equality, said Lincoln on another occasion, the author of the Declaration and the Founding Fathers who signed it clearly “did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects.” They did not even “mean to assert the obvious untruth” that all men in 1776 were equal in rights and opportunities. Rather, “they meant to set up a standard maxim for free society . . . [etc.]”
Notice McPherson’s phrase “on another occasion” here. He had just a little before this been quoting Lincoln’s remarks at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, when traveling on his way to his inauguration in early 1861. The “on another occasion” is of course vague about just when that was, earlier or later, and Snow must have drawn the natural—but in this case mistaken—inference that the other occasion was close in time to the Philadelphia speech. (And McPherson’s endnotes here merely give volume and page numbers from the Collected Works without dating the individual items cited.) And so Snow tells us Lincoln made these remarks—which he has plainly misunderstood—“[s]hortly after his first election.” But the passage about “a standard maxim for free society” appeared in Lincoln’s speech on the Dred Scott case in Springfield, Illinois, on June 26, 1857, nearly four years earlier.
And here is how the relevant paragraph begins, which McPherson quotes in the passage Snow has fumbled so badly (my emphasis):
Chief Justice Taney, in his opinion in the Dred Scott case, admits that the language of the Declaration is broad enough to include the whole human family, but he and Judge Douglas argue that the authors of that instrument did not intend to include negroes, by the fact that they did not at once, actually place them on an equality with the whites. Now this grave argument comes to just nothing at all, by the other fact, that they did not at once, or ever afterwards, actually place all white people on an equality with one or another. And this is the staple argument of both the Chief Justice and the Senator, for doing this obvious violence to the plain unmistakable language of the Declaration. I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. . . .
Lincoln was fond enough of this passage to use it again, quoting himself in the last of his seven debates with Stephen A. Douglas in the Senate campaign of 1858. Here is what Lincoln said after quoting his own Dred Scott speech:
At Galesburg the other day, I said in answer to Judge Douglas, that three years ago there never had been a man, so far as I knew or believed, in the whole world, who had said that the Declaration of Independence did not include negroes in the term “all men.” I re-assert it to-day. I assert that Judge Douglas and all his friends may search the whole records of the country, and it will be a matter of great astonishment to me if they shall be able to find that one human being three years ago had ever uttered the astounding sentiment that the term “all men” in the Declaration did not include the negro. Do not let me be misunderstood. I know that more than three years ago there were men who, finding this assertion constantly in the way of their schemes to bring about the ascendancy and perpetuation of slavery, denied the truth of it. I know that Mr. Calhoun and all the politicians of his school denied the truth of the Declaration. I know that it ran along in the mouths of some Southern men for a period of years, ending at last in that shameful though rather forcible declaration of Pettit of Indiana, upon the floor of the United States Senate, that the Declaration of Independence was in that respect “a self-evident lie,” rather than a self-evident truth. But I say, with a perfect knowledge of all this hawking at the Declaration without directly attacking it, that three years ago there never had lived a man who had ventured to assail it in the sneaking way of pretending to believe it and then asserting it did not include the negro. [Cheers.] I believe the first man who ever said it was Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott case, and the next to him was our friend Stephen A. Douglas. [Cheers and laughter.] And now it has become the catch-word of the entire party. I would like to call upon his friends everywhere to consider how they have come in so short a time to view this matter in a way so entirely different from their former belief? to ask whether they are not being borne along by an irresistible current—whither, they know not? [Great applause.]
Richard Snow evidently knows none of this. And sadly, what Lincoln saw as a new heresy about the Declaration has, over time, become orthodoxy. Whether Lincoln was right that the assertion was new with Taney, there are countless scholars and partisans today who assert, like Taney and Douglas that “all men are created equal” could not really have meant “all men” of all races, given the fact of widespread American slavery in 1776. Since many who argue this way are, unlike Taney and Douglas, partisans of human rights, it is too bad that they throw away one of the best available arguments for the truth about human equality. Lincoln knew better, and said better, and deserved better in today’s Wall Street Journal.