Harry V. Jaffa on Life

"Don't we hear nowadays objections on the part of the labor unions to importing goods from China, which are made with slave labor? Is the existence of slave labor not a reflection upon the idea of a free commercial society?"

"And comparing what happened in England—after all, in England the Parliament in Westminster was making laws for the West Indies. The West Indians didn't have any representation in the Parliament. The laws were made for them, and they had to go along with it. There was no such power within the Federal government to interfere with slavery, except by limiting the expansion of slavery. And it was Lincoln’s belief—and I think the best economic analysis that we have of the American economy in the antebellum United States indicates—that if the expansion of slavery had been ended, and if it was no longer possible for surplus slaves to be sold from the old states to new territories, that the pressure within the states to adopt programs of emancipation would become great enough to do that."

"In this struggle President Bush will find, like Lincoln, and like one who came before Lincoln, that "a man's foes will be those of his own household." However hard and long it might be, this battle must be borne. For what is at stake is nothing less than the future of our entire civilization."

"You can not have free government if you can not bind the people who participate in the government to accept the results of the election. It is the exercise of our inalienable right to life that enables us, and justifies us, in forming legitimate governments. When those governments are formed, we cannot reject them because we don’t like the results."

"The 43rd Federalist deals definitively with this question. There was no question but that the Constitutional Convention, simply as a convention, had no authority of any kind. It did not form a government. But it said that the ratification of nine states shall then bring this new government into existence. The Congress of the Confederation transmitted the results to the country, the ratifications took place, and the government came into existence."

"George W. Bush has said he wants to change things in Washington. On this President's Day, we find him attempting this change in a most profound way. President Bush is to be commended for his recent Proclamation of National Sanctity of Human Life Day, in which he reminds his fellow citizens of the true principles of free government. But those principles today are usually ignored, or scorned. By taking up the challenge of defending these principles, President Bush aligns himself with the greatest President of our nation's history."

"In the decade from the Declaration to the Constitution every state north of the Mason Dixon line, and north of the Ohio River, either abolished slavery or adopted measures leading to abolition. But in 1793 the cotton gin was invented, shortly after the power loom in England. This was the onset of the industrial revolution. Almost overnight, a new industry or rather a series of new industries, proliferating worldwide, was born. It began with the growing of cotton but was followed by its manufacture into a wide variety of products, especially cotton cloth and cotton clothing. Suddenly, slave labor became vastly more profitable. In the decade before the Civil War, the value of slaves doubled. Once again, greed overwhelmed all other motives. From being regarded as a temporary evil, as it was at the founding, slavery came to be regarded as a positive—and permanent—good."

"And what this could mean, as illustrated by what happened in 1854, the first real test of the Fugitive Slave Act? There was a slave named Anthony Burns in Virginia who stowed away on board a coastal vessel that then sailed to Boston. And Anthony Burns, who was apparently quite literate but not very smart, wrote a letter to his brother back in Virginia telling him where he was. Well, before Anthony Burns was returned to the State of Virginia, the President, Franklin Pierce, had sent an artillery regiment of marines to Boston. He had federalized the National Guard of Boston. He had 3,000 soldiers surrounding them, making sure that nobody could break the jail and let Anthony Burns out. This was an example of the way in which the federal police power would be used to make sure that slaves were returned to their masters or that slaves couldn’t escape from their masters. So this is the real issue."

"DiLorenzo is absolutely wrong in saying that the 13 states were recognized as independent separate sovereignties. They were not. In 1826, Madison and Jefferson together, in making rules for the University of Virginia, resolved that the first of the documents that should be studied by the law faculty of the University of Virginia, was the Declaration of Independence as the Act of Union of the States. The Declaration was a declaration of separation from Great Britain and union with each other. And the state legislatures, or state revolutionary colonial legislatures on the road to independence—almost all of them passed resolutions calling for independence and for union."

"If "safeguards of individual liberty" do not have "any intrinsic worth", then neither does individual liberty. And if individual liberty has no intrinsic worth, neither does individual life. It is impossible to imagine a more complete denial of President Bush's proclamation of the sanctity of human life, or of his assertion of an "essential human dignity attached to all persons by virtue of their very existence." This is not only legal positivism, it is nihilism. It is not only a denial of any moral foundation of constitutionalism, it is a denial of any moral foundation of political community."

"If the people in this room were not citizens of the United States, if they were not citizens of any state, or of any sovereign government, and if we decided that we needed to, for our own protection, first beginning with safety—September 11th told us why we need each other for the sake of safety—form a government, we have to recognize, each one of us, that this government shall protect the right to life, and to liberty, and property of each one of us. No one of us can say that he deserves protection for the government to be formed, but not somebody else, or that somebody is entitled to more protection than anybody else. Anybody who demands more protection from the government than his fellow citizens won’t be accepted as a fellow citizen."