A New Declaration.

A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War, by Harry V. Jaffa (Rowman & Littlefield, 608 pp., $35)

The towering reputation of Abraham Lincoln unites in opposition two furious factions that are ideologically worlds apart. Southern conservatives disdain Lincoln for allegedly bringing on the Civil War; northern radicals disdain him for bringing on market capitalism by promoting enterprise and industry. One camp considers Lincoln's claim that a nation cannot endure half-slave and half-free utterly false. The other dismisses the iconography of Lincoln as a "self-made man" as pure myth that denies the reality of class conflict. The secessionist and the Marxist both have their quarrels with American history; both see Lincoln as embodying the curse of liberalism and, hence, frustrating their hopes for turning America toward either conservatism or radicalism.

The literary critic Edmund Wilson once quipped that the worst fate that befell Lincoln, aside from assassination, was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg, the poet who wrote a six-volume biography and sentimentalized his subject to the point of parody. But even Wilson, in Patriotic Gore, hardly does justice to Lincoln's political ideas, and his comparison of Lincoln to Lenin tells us more about the Cold War than about the Civil War.

A little less than a half-century ago, Harry V. Jaffa rescued Lincoln from his friends and foes alike in his pioneering classic on the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Crisis of the House Divided. The book appeared in the late 1950s during the heyday of the "consensus" interpretation of American history. At the University of Chicago, Daniel J. Boorstin insisted that political ideas had played no significant role in American history. Yet at the same institution, Leo Strauss educated a galaxy of graduate students to believe that the world turns on political ideas and their promise of reason, virtue, and wisdom. Jaffa, one of Strauss's outstanding students and now professor emeritus of political philosophy at Claremont Graduate School, believes fervently in the power of ideas to do good-or ill. The good ideas are those derived from Aristotle and Aquinas and are founded on objective principles of truth discoverable by reason; the bad ideas, in Jaffa's words, include "historicism, positivism, relativism, and nihilism."

Jaffa's long-awaited sequel to Crisis, A New Birth of Freedom, uses Lincoln's interpretation of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to demonstrate that the South had no right to secede from the Union and that sovereignty resides in the nation and its laws. The subject could not be more timely. Today it is still debated whether the states, the national government, or the Supreme Court has ultimate jurisdiction over such matters as education, abortion, the environment, and election procedures. These issues are important in view of the tensions within the antifederalist wing of the conservative movement.

No other scholar has scrutinized the main documents of early American political thought as thoroughly as Jaffa. If his book is a little dense and repetitious, it is also learned and provocative, as well as passionate and perceptive. In true Straussian fashion, Jaffa comments on texts with the aim of taking Thomas Jefferson away from self-styled Jeffersonians like John C. Calhoun, who believed that state sovereignty and the right of secession derived from the rights announced in the Declaration of Independence. Jaffa reads the Declaration as Lincoln read it-as an implicit argument against the cause of the South, holding that the right of revolution cannot violate the higher duty to uphold the rights of all human beings. Lincoln immortalized this argument in the Gettysburg Address, a document viewed by Jaffa and other Straussians as the cornerstone of America's "second founding" and "a new birth of freedom." Jaffa's argument is ingenious, but to support his case he must make Jefferson into a philosopher of authority as well as of liberty, a thinker who articulated principles that not only guaranteed freedom but entailed obligations and responsibilities.

Jaffa spends considerable effort analyzing Jefferson's Summary View of the Rights of British Americans (1774), which previous scholars have seen as simply affirming the colonists' entitlement to enjoy the same rights as Englishmen under the British Constitution. Drawing on that document as well as the Declaration, Jaffa shifts our attention from historic to natural rights under the "Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." Historical right is a matter of circumstance, but natural right derives from the essential nature of things; while the former risks falling into relativism, the latter, prescriptive and normative, remains safe from the ravages of time. Jefferson and the founding generation spoke as moralists who believed that the "great principles of right and wrong" were "legible to every reader." "The people," instructs Jaffa, "could not promote public happiness if they did not have a due regard for virtue and the moral law in their private lives."

Having established the moral foundation of the Republic, Jaffa believes he has the grounds to refute the South's claim to a right of secession. Some of the book's best sections present Jaffa's critical analysis of Calhoun's denial of equality and his claim that majority rule is tyrannical. But in order to win his argument, Jaffa must deal with Jefferson's views on slavery. Accordingly he writes that Jefferson was as adamantly opposed to slavery as Lincoln; hence the southern doctrine of states' rights, applied to protect slavery, violates the human and natural rights guaranteed under the Declaration.

According to Jaffa, Jefferson, "in his famous diatribe against slavery in Notes on Virginia [1782], speaks of the 'execration' with which a statesman would be loaded, 'who permits one half the citizens to trample on the rights of others.'" Jaffa assures us that in Jefferson "there was never the least equivocation as to slavery's injustice and immorality." But Notes on Virginia is nothing if not an equivocation on the capacity of black men to exist under the conditions of freedom. Jefferson conceded that blacks possessed the same inner "moral sense" as whites, but he judged them incompetent in terms of talents and abilities. After wondering "whether further observation will or will not verify the conjecture that nature has been less bountiful to them," Jefferson concludes "as a suspicion only, that blacks, whether originally or as a distinct race, are inferior to whites in the endowments both of body and mind," and he convinced himself that we cannot ignore "the real distinctions which nature has made."

Jaffa celebrates Jefferson's natural-rights philosophy as "Aristotelian," and certainly Jefferson's assumption that nature's distinctions are discovered by reason and not made by human judgment partakes of classical thought. But Aristotle made no political revolution; John Locke did. Under Lockean assumptions, blacks are equal to whites in respect to their unalienable rights deriving from the state of nature and are therefore entitled to what today is called the equal protection of law. Jaffa knows this; I'm not sure Jefferson did, or at least he conveniently forgot it in Notes on Virginia.

As to Lincoln, his thinking too was "remarkably Aristotelian," Jaffa insists. Lincoln, it is true, believed that human beings share the same essence. But Lincoln, who never read Aristotle, would have gagged on the Greek philosopher's disdain for foreigners and women, his privileging of leisure over labor, and his conviction that certain men are slaves because they "belong by nature to someone else." Lincoln did, however, absorb Euclid, as Jaffa observes, and America is thus refounded on an undying "proposition" resting on a series of moral axioms and definitions. Secession violates the theorem that the whole is greater than its parts and that (in Lincoln's argument) no polity allows for its own dissolution.

Jaffa is right to emphasize Lincoln's axiomatic mode of reasoning as well as his use of Biblical imagery to make preserving the Union appear a sacred imperative. But to regard Lincoln as a classical thinker is to miss how far he really is from Jefferson. When discussing slavery, Lincoln never cites "the real distinctions which nature has made" but instead reminds Americans that their views are shaped by customs that had "assigned" the superior social position to the white race. Lincoln is also more economically oriented than classical thinkers in looking to progress and industry. Moreover, far from being a theoretical man completely free of "historicism" and "relativism," Lincoln could hardly avoid them. He recognized that slavery had its origins in the contingencies of southern history, and he continually reminded Americans that people in different parts of the country see things differently and act accordingly. Lincoln could also be a pragmatist, convinced that in politics one must proceed experimentally and prudently and that practical consequences may be more important than moral intentions.

But Jaffa is also right to emphasize that on ultimate issues like slavery and secession, Lincoln was an absolutist who believed that all Americans must hold themselves to the same moral standards. In contrast, Jefferson rejected moral uniformity in favor of diversity. Jaffa's claim that the Founders meant to include blacks in the founding documents but held back only because of the timing is a matter of inference rather than evidence. Indeed, why is it that those who professed to believe in equality, like Jefferson and Patrick Henry, seldom sought the abolition of slavery, while those who were skeptical of equality, such as the New England Calvinists and the Federalists John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, severely criticized it and, in Hamilton's case, even advocated arming blacks during the Revolution?

How much of classical thought characterizes the American Republic? Stuck on Aristotle, Jaffa would have us believe that the Founders embraced principles that "were knowable to the unassisted reason" and believed that freedom cannot exist unless it has "the ability to be determined by the truth." But while the Declaration is founded on self-evident truths, in the Federalist human government is said to rest on mere "opinion." Its authors make no claim that reason, which is corruptible by "passions and interests," will prevail over naked power or that freedom rests on truth. Instead of Aristotle they draw on David Hume, the skeptic who knocked the bottom out of the classical philosophy that Jaffa expects to redeem America.

Jaffa takes Jefferson literally, at his written word, instead of weighing the disparity between expression and action. Thus while Jaffa quotes Jefferson's dictum that "The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind," Jefferson had no objection to Republican France suspending the traditional rights of Church, nobility, and crown as "enemies of the revolution." Jefferson delighted in the Jacobin Terror, and wrote that while he deplored the bloodbath, rather than having seen the Revolution fail, "I would have seen half the earth desolated." Yet when black Haitian slaves rose up to assert their natural rights, President Jefferson had no hesitation in siding with Napoleon to crush the rebellion, and endorsed the French plan to restore slavery on the island.

Prof. Jaffa's valuable book is as comprehensive as an encyclopedia and as exegetical as a scholastic thesis. Whether one agrees with him entirely or not, his argument that the ideas of Jefferson and Lincoln represent an organic continuity is original and daring and deserves to be debated for years to come.