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The Declaration also clearly defines the states as "free, independent and sovereign," and concludes that, as sovereign states, they have the right to raise taxes and even wage war. Indeed, the Revolutionary War was waged by the sovereign states, not a "nation" called "the United States." King George, III of England signed a peace treaty with each individual, sovereign state, not the American "nation." None of the founding documents – the Declaration, Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution – uses the words "united states" in the singular, which would connote a unitary, consolidated government. It is always in the plural, signifying that the sovereign states are united in forming a compact.

Nor were "we" engaged in "a great civil war," as Lincoln stated. A civil war is a battle between two factions over control of the nation’s government. But Jefferson Davis did not want to run the government in Washington, D.C. any more than George Washington wanted to run the government in London. It was a war of secession, not a "civil war."

The notion that democracy – government of the people, by the people, for the people – would perish from the earth if peaceful secession were permitted was by far the most outlandish nonsense in the Gettysburg Address. The Confederates posed no threat to British democracy, or French Democracy, Dutch democracy, New England democracy, or any other democracy. Lincoln’s argument was "just plain nonsense," wrote Jeffrey Hummel in Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men.

Exactly the opposite was true: It was the Confederates who no longer consented to being governed by Washington, D.C., and Lincoln waged total war to deprive them of government by consent. As H.L. Mencken once wrote, "The Union soldiers in the battle [of Gettysburg] actually fought against self determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves."

As for Lincoln’s Jeffersonian "all men are created equal" language in the Address, it is important to keep in mind that Lincoln was a master politician and that the address can be considered to be the first speech of the 1864 presidential campaign, a campaign that he thought he had little chance of winning, at the time. Lincoln "hated Thomas Jefferson as a man and as a politician," said his longtime law partner and friend, William Herndon. Lincoln was a Hamiltonian centralizer, the very opposite of a Jeffersonian. But a politician so cynical as to invoke Scripture in his speeches despite being an atheist himself would not flinch at quoting Jefferson to advance Hamiltonian policies. Michael Lind seems to have figured this out in his book, What Lincoln Believed (p. 103) where he writes that "In his support for a strong federal government . . . Lincoln, like Clay, followed Hamilton, not Jefferson. However, he sought to appeal to voters whose political culture was Jeffersonian, so it was politic to quote Jefferson for Hamiltonian ends."

Lincoln of course did not believe in equality of the races at all. He clearly stated his opposition to it many times, spent his entire adult life advocating "colonization" or deportation of blacks; and supported the Illinois Black Codes and other laws that would deny blacks any semblance of citizenship. He also was behind the "Corwin Amendment" to the Constitution that would have enshrined slavery in the Constitution forever. His ever-so-slick position was that "the Africans," as he called them (as though they were aliens from another planet) could be equal all right, but only back in "their native clime," as he put it, i.e., in Africa, Haiti, or some other place. Not in the U.S.

Boritt lets the cat out of the bag toward the end of his Newsweek article where he waxes eloquent about the real meaning of the voodoo "religion" in the Gettysburg Address. He claims that woven into the speech is "the conclusion of Daniel Webster’s reply to South Carolina’s Robert Hayne in the Senate, denying that the U.S. government was a creature of the states. It was ‘the people’s government,’ Webster said, ‘made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people." Sound familiar?

James J. Kilpatrick was certainly right, however, when he wrote in The Sovereign States that "the delusion that sovereignty is vested in the whole people of the United States is one of the strangest misconceptions of our public life." The "whole people" never had anything to do with the enactment of the Constitution or the Articles of Confederation. James Madison himself wrote in his Notes on the Constitutional Convention that the Constitution was ratified "by the people composing those political societies [of the states] in their highest sovereign capacity." There was never any general election over the Constitution and even if there was, women – who did not have the right to vote until 1920 – would not have participated. Webster’s "whole people" would have excluded more than 50% of the population.

The Preamble of the first draft of the Constitution did not read "We the people" but "We the people of the States of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New-York, New Jersey," etc. because it explicitly recognized the fact of state sovereignty. As mentioned above, all of the founding documents refer to the "free and independent" states, not the "whole people."

Webster’s nationalist myth was always nothing but a Soviet-style re-writing of American history for the purpose of promoting a consolidated, monopolistic form of government. Today’s statists continue to echo this Big Lie, and to cloak it in religious rhetoric, as Lincoln did, in a continued attempt to fool the public into supporting their political agendas.

Tom DiLorenzo
December 8, 2006