A Crumbling Cornerstone

Alexander Stephens refers to "the equality of races," a principle that the founders of our nation considered to be a natural law governing all humankind, as an "error" and a "sandy foundation."  I find this idea, the fulcrum of Stephens' argument in his famed Cornerstone Speech on the eve of the Civil War, ludicrous.  Stephens nods to Thomas Jefferson's premonition that slavery would be "the rock upon which the old Union split."  Sure enough, less than a century after the Declaration was boldly endorsed by 56 revolutionary men, the Confederacy sought to wrench itself away from the newborn nation.  Stephens spits the signers' words back at them, claiming irrationally that the enslavement and subsequent gross mistreatment of African people should be the proverbial cornerstone of a nation.  The vice president of the Confederacy asserts that what Jefferson and the other signers thought to be an "evanescent" trend in labor and trade is instead a solid foundation.  Stephens even goes so far as to call those opposed to slavery "fanatics," blaming a "defect in reasoning" for anti-slavery sentiments felt by many Americans.  It is a travesty that Stephens and others in favor of slavery were so narrow-minded.  Had these men considered how much their own freedom rested upon the Declaration's guarantees of "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" to all men, perhaps they would have noticed the cracks in their "cornerstone."

Democracy, Freedom, Deliberation, Citizenship

The Cornerstone Speech: contemporaneous news coverage. BTW, this source is a good case study in internet research. Google Cornerstone Speech 1861 and one early hit is

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=227002 , which cites

http://www.pointsouth.com/csanet/greatmen/stephens/stephens-corner.html -- but the link is broken. What to do? Paste the link into:

http://www.archive.org/

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Democracy: the people rule themselves

• Who are the people?
• Limited government v. unlimited scope of power: "everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."

Freedom

• Negative Freedom
• Positive Freedom

Deliberation

• What does it mean to reason on the merits?
• How does deliberation differ from bargaining?

Citizenship

• What is civic virtue?

Cows and Isms

The Declaration

I Have a Dream

The Declaration (hyperlink versions)

Lincoln-Douglas Galesburg debate (forward to 1:01:30)

From the Cornerstone Speech by Alexander Stephens:

The prevailing ideas entertained by him [Thomas Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."

Deleted Paragraph:

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidels powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. He has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

Comments About the Declaration and the "I Have a Dream" speech

As I was reading the Declaration of Independence, I could not help but wonder why the writers of the Declaration were so blind to the fact that their slaves were suffering from the same type of oppression that they endured at the hands of the British king. The declaration said that "all men were created equal" and were blessed with the "unalienable rights of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness," yet this was not so. This continued to not be the case hundreds of years later during the Civil Rights Movement. I wholeheartedly agree with Dr. King when he said in his "I Have a Dream" speech that the Declaration of Independence was a "promissory note to which every American was to fall heir" (regardless of race or gender) and that African Americans were given a "bad check marked "insufficient funds". Watching the "I Have a Dream" speech in its entirety brought me to tears. I usually do not think about all of the injustices that my ancestors endured, but watching that speech made me realize how far African Americans have come. It was mind boggling to be sitting in my dorm room at such a prestigious institution as CMC with my non-black roommate during the presidency of America's first African American president, while watching a speech from only forty-seven years ago that urged for equality and social justice for African American people.

James Madison and Health Care

Why are the Constitution and Federalist relevant to health care? Explains Charles Lane of The Washington Post:

Everyone has his own explanation for the fact that the U.S. still doesn’t have a national health plan while all the other industrial democracies do. Here’s mine: The constitution.

I don’t mean that Obama’s plan, or any other, actually violates the constitution. Perhaps Congress lacks the authority to impose an individual mandate. Or perhaps not. I mean that the whole effort to create a new national health insurance system all at once flies in the face of this country’s quirky but durable 18th-century political structure. The Obama plan isn’t so much unconstitutional as it is counter-constitutional.

For better or worse, our founding document disfavors comprehensive national legislation of any kind -- let alone bills that seek to reconfigure 17 percent of the economy. This was intentional, of course. The Framers wanted to create a government that would protect the new country from foreign threats and foster trade among its constituent parts, but would not threaten liberty, which they defined as the freedom of individuals, states and localities to govern themselves.

Lane quotes Federalist 51:

While all authority in it will be derived from and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests and classes of citizens that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.

Click here to read the entire article.