p. 300 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

What is Lincoln's favorite standard maxim?

Answer here starting with yellow highlight.

p. 283 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

Why is the right of Revolution connected with the Declaration whereas the right of succession is not?

p. 282 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

How was Lincoln in complete agreement with one of his great southern adversaries, Alexander Stephens? And why did this agreement make war unavoidable? And how does John Calhoun prove himself the modern liberal?

p. 267-269 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

In both his first inaugural and in his Lyceum speech 23 years prior, Lincoln establishes a rule for proving whether or not a people are capable of governing themselves. What's the rule? (p. 267)

What is the theory of compact or contract theory of political obligation as espoused by Jefferson and Madison? What does it mean to say that we enter into a government by unanimous consent, and what do we consent to?

How did Calhoun contradict the above?

p. 256 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

Did the states make the Union or did the Union make the states? What was the Jeffersonian/Madison view, and on what did they base their argument? What was the Davis/Calhoun view?

p. 211 - 212 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

Davis asks how it was that if Negros were free and equal, King George was denounced in the Declaration for stirring up insurrection among them. The answer, of course, is that freedom and equality are natural rights, not civil rights.

Women didn't have the civil right to vote, but their natural rights were not violated by this.

What was Jefferson's logic with regard to the insurrection discussed in the Declaration? What were the facts on the ground that Jefferson and founders dealt with at the time of the Declaration?

How did Calhoun oppose and contradict Davis with regard to the Declaration of Independence? (Community independence vs. individual human equality.)

p. 202 & 205 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

Describe the split in the Democratic Party Convention held in Charleston, South Carolina in May, 1860. Note that the Democrat Buchanan rejected the successionist ideas of Jefferson Davis, seemed indifferent to slavery in the name of "the law," and counseled restraint above all else.

p. 205 Lincoln argued that the Union stood in the same relationship to the state as a state to a county, which fits with both Buchanan and Madison. Davis, on the other hand, inherited Calhoun's theory of undivided state sovereignty, which meant that an individual was bound by his promise to his state but not by his promise to the nation.

An argument: Slavery was doomed if left to popular sovereignty (this is the reason Stephen Douglas split the Democratic Party); with the new territories there would eventually be enough votes for a Constitutional Amendment against it. Calhoun understood that the South depended entirely upon favorable rulings in the Courts for slavery's survival, such as that provided by Justice Roger Taney in Dred Scott. This is much like gay marriage today where the gay marriage movement fails whenever it is left to popular vote, but survives only by way of judicial activists in the tradition of Taney.