p. 283-284 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

The mind of the South going into the Civil War was represented by a largely non-slaveholding populous, yet Jaffa writes that this group was the most fanatical in its defense of slavery. Why?

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. 281 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

What is Lincoln's 'central idea' speech, and why is it the barometer of all American public opinion at all times?

p. 278 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

How did the South conceive of rights? What were they completely dependent upon?

p. 263 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

In what regard can we say that "legislating morality" is the only way to secure the consent of the governed?

...Certainly the laws governing marriage and the family were as "domestic" as those concerning master and servant. The first platform of the Republican Party, in 1856, denounced the 'twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery.' Jefferson, in his Bill for Proportioning Crimes and Punishment for Virginia in 1779, grouped, 'rape, sodomy, and bigamy' as felonies of equal heinousness. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln trapped Douglas with the inconsistency of his doctrine of popular sovereignty which presumably left the people of a territory or a state 'perfectly free' to decide for themselves what their domestic institutions would be. Yet Douglas would not accept Utah either as a territory or state unless polygamy was abolished.

It was clear to Lincoln, although not so clear to many of his contemporaries, that the 'consent of the governed' could be rightfully exercised only within the boundaries of a moral law that gives consent its validity but whose validity does not depend upon consent.

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. 232 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

The Civil War was not a matter of states rights vs. the national government. Make the case of that argument using the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which Pierce, Buchanan and Lincoln all enforced. Who was Anthony Burns?

[It's always important to remember that slavery was going to die either by the mathematics of the new territories and new states passing a Constitutional amendment, or under the weight of its own economic need to expand and its failure to do so. This impending failure must have had an impact upon the often conflicting political rhetoric of the South from Stephens, to Douglas, to Buchanan, to Davis, etc.]

p. 217 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

What was the great rift between Taney/Davis vs. Alexander Stephens? Given the various rifts between prominent Southerners regarding the Constitution, the Declaration, succession, revolution, etc. behind what ideas did the South eventually rally?

I think the answer is that, according to Taney/Davis, regardless as to whether you were for or against slavery, if the government restricted Southerners from take their own property into the new territories it could only do so by violating the Constitutional rights of the Southern states (and Taney/Davis saw Constitutional rights as group rights and not so much as individual rights).

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.

p. 193-195 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

Four states refused to ratify the Constitution. What was the difference between those four states in 1789 and the Southern states in 1860?

p.183-185 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

How is no-fault divorce analogous to Southern nullification? "But a compact to form a government, like a marriage, although entered voluntarily, does not leave the contracting parties free thereafter to do as they please." What is the 'positive good' theory of slavery that Calhoun supported?

Calhoun did not believe the Union was a contract that states could enter and leave as they please, but he saw nullification and possible succession (failing nullification) as the proper route.

The marriage analogy is similar to Douglas' popular sovereignty argument that Buchanan rejected. Buchanan believed in the 'positive good' of slavery, and that if all the states did not recognize slavery as a 'positive good' then that would justify succession.

Buchannan believed the South could justify resistance on the basis of the natural law of self preservation, but he could "see no justification for resistance to slavery." p. 185. Under slavery, the positive law denied the slave the right to defend himself against the theft of his property in the fruit of his labor and the violence to his person that might be committed with impunity by his master. But the sovereign rights to life, liberty, and property are inseparable from one's being." p. 184

pp. 33-34 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

What are the outcomes of the Alien and Sedition Acts? What must we not "read back into" these outcomes?

Relevant Passage: These acts were followed by the resolutions of the Kentucky and Virginia legislatures in November and December of the same year, and a further resolution adopted in Kentucky in February 1799. These protests presented the already familiar argument about strict construction as a constitutional requirement of the Tenth Amendment. They also introduced, as a necessary inference from the doctrine of strict construction, a theory of civil liberty as the ground of the legitimacy of the political process. If we understand the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions as Jefferson and Madison understood them at the time, the defense of state rights and the defense of civil liberty formed part of a single argument. Looked at in the light of nearly two centuries, however, they stand at the headwaters of two divergent trends in American political and constitutional history. The defense of state rights against "numerical majoritarianism" and the "tyranny of the majority" became in time a defense of slavery and, after that, of Jim Crow. Paradoxical as it may be, in its association with "state rights," the argument against "tyranny" became the argument for "despotism," notwithstanding the fact that these two words at bottom mean the same thing. For Jefferson and Madison, however, the rights of the states, as of all legitimate civil societies, were grounded in the natural rights of individuals, as proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and the bills of rights of the states. The rights of the states and the condemnation of slavery were part of the same doctrine. To understand the election of 1800, we must not read back into it the opposition between state rights and civil liberties that may be said to have begun (as Lincoln saw it) in the nullification crisis of 1828 to 1833.