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Harry V. Jaffa Quotes
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Harry Victor Jaffa was an American political philosopher, historian, columnist and professor. He was a professor emeritus at Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate University and a distinguished fellow of the Claremont Institute. Robert P. Kraynak says his "life work was to develop an American application of Leo Strauss's revival of natural-right philosophy against the relativism and nihilism of our times."Jaffa wrote on topics ranging from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas to Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill and natural law. He has been published in the Claremont Review of Books, the Review of Politics, National Review, and the New York Times. His most famous work, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, written in 1959, has been described as "the greatest Lincoln book ever."Jaffa was a formative influence on the American conservative movement, challenging notable conservative thinkers including Russell Kirk, Richard M. Weaver, and Willmoore Kendall on Abraham Lincoln and the founding of the United States. He debated Robert Bork on American constitutionalism. He died in 2015. Wikipedia  

✵ 7. October 1918 – 10. January 2015
Harry V. Jaffa photo
Harry V. Jaffa: 171   quotes 0   likes

Harry V. Jaffa Quotes

“And it’s important to understand the sequence of events, and the ideas that accompanied that sequence of events that led up to the Civil War. The subtitle of my new book is Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War, and I believe I’ve discussed the question of the nature of secession and the role of secession in that crisis, I believe, more thoroughly than I think it’s ever been discussed before.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The South was a Closed Society

War , Books , Idea , Understanding

“And if you look at the things that are denied to the states in the Constitution, for example, they are denied the right to coin money. Now, throughout history, the right to coin money has been a symbol of sovereignty. If states do not have the right to coin money, they are not sovereign in the sense that would justify secession as a state right.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Rebuttal

Money , History , Sense

“That all men are created equal does not mean that human beings are the same, or equal, in size, strength, beauty, virtue, or intelligence. There are obviously great differences in individual aptitudes and talents in sports, music, mathematics, speaking, and writing. They are also unequal in the virtues, among them courage, temperance, and justice. But as Jefferson once said, the fact that Sir Isaac Newton may be the most intelligent of living human beings does not give him any right whatever to my person or my property.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, God Bless America (2008), The American Proposition

Men , Justice , Beauty , Music

“Pro-slavery impulse still governs the Democratic Party, the party of government sinecures. It is the party that wants to use political power to tax us not for any common good, but to eat while we work. Consider the Great Society and its legacy. In the fall of 1964, I was on the speech-writing staff of the Goldwater campaign. In September and October I went on a number of forays to college campuses, where I debated spokesmen for our opponents. My argument always started from here. In 1964 the economy, thanks to the Kennedy tax cuts, was growing at the remarkable annual rate of four percent. But federal revenues were growing at 20 percent; five times as fast. The real issue in the election, I said, was what was to happen to that cornucopia of revenue. Barry Goldwater would use it to reduce the deficit and to further reduce taxes; Lyndon Johnson would use it to start vast new federal programs. At that point I could not say what programs, but I knew that the real purpose of them would be to create a new class of dependents upon the Democratic Party. The ink was hardly dry on the election returns before Johnson invented the war on poverty; and proved my prediction correct. One did not need to be cynical to see that the poor were not a reason for the expansion of bureaucracy; the expansion of bureaucracy was a reason for the poor. Every failure to reduce poverty was always represented as another reason to increase expenditures on the poor. The ultimate beneficiary was the Democratic Party. Every federal bureaucrat became in effect a precinct captain, delivering the votes of his constituents. His job was to enlarge the pool of constituents. But every increase in that pool meant a diminution of our property and our freedom.”

Harry V. Jaffa

1990s, The Party of Lincoln vs. The Party of Bureaucrats (1996)

War , Failure , Freedom , Time

“So the repeal of the Missouri Compromise opened that whole territory to the ingress of slavery. That sparked the greatest political revolution in American History. In the spring of 1854, when the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed, there was no Republican Party; there were no Republican congressmen. In the four elections of 1854, 100 Republican Congressmen were returned to the Congress. At that moment, Stephen A. Douglas was looked upon as the antichrist from the point of view of the anti-slavery movement.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Right of Secession Is Not the Right of Revolution

History , Spring

“When people speak about the results of the 1860 Presidential election, it’s usually given out that Lincoln had, I think, 39 percent of the popular vote in that election. But, of course, there were 10 states in the South who formed part of the ten or the eleven states of the Confederacy, in which no Republican electors were on the ballots. And since we know that at least 100,000 men from those states came north to join the Union Army, there were at least 100,000 votes that weren't counted.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The South was a Closed Society

Men , People , Thinking , Parting

“But bear this in mind: if this demand had been acceded to, that meant that every territory in the United States which would become a state—and remember, there were then 33 states and there would be 50 states eventually—but every other state would become a slave state. Because if one slave owner went to North Dakota with his slave, the federal police power would follow him to make sure that he could hold that slave securely in that place.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Right of Secession Is Not the Right of Revolution

“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.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, Bush's Lincolnian Challenge (2002)

Life , Way , History , Change

“Remember, the ultimate object of Marxist Communism is to return to the Garden of Eden with no forbidden fruit. That’s the goal of libertarianism as well. And we’re marching rapidly in that direction. Morality is disintegrating in front of our eyes.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2010s, Interview with Eric Benson (2012)

Communication

“So that was the basic issue. Once the ballots had been decided, Lincoln said the only recourse must be through future elections in which the minority can try to become the majority; but there can be no right to reject the results of an election conducted under the rules of the Constitution.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Right of Secession Is Not the Right of Revolution

Future

“This nation was founded," President Bush wrote, "upon the belief that every human being is endowed by our Creator with certain 'unalienable rights.'" The President, in using the exact language of the Declaration of Independence, including the archaic "unalienable," has expressed the conviction that "the laws of nature and of nature's God" furnish the moral foundation of constitutional government. "President Jefferson's timeless principle," he wrote, "obligates us to pursue a civil society that will democratically embrace its essential moral duties…”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, Bush's Lincolnian Challenge (2002)

God , Law , Nature

“What exactly did these words, of both the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, mean? They meant that there was no difference, between one human being, and another human being, that made one the master and the other the servant. As Jefferson once put it, some men are not born with saddles on their backs, nor are others born booted and spurred to ride them. That a man or woman rides a horse corresponds with the difference in their natures. No injustice is done to the horse! That an ox should pull a plow, while a man walks behind, is according to nature. In these cases, servitude follows from the laws of nature. But these same laws of nature tell us that when a human being is subjected to other human beings as if he were a horse or an ox, the laws of nature are violated. All human beings are accordingly equal in their right not to be enslaved, and in their right to be in secure possession of their lives, liberties, and property. To this end they have a right to be governed only by laws to which they have consented.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, God Bless America (2008), The American Proposition

Men , Law , Nature , Horse

“We have these inalienable rights, and in the exercise of these same inalienable rights, we agree with each other to form civil governments. And Madison has an essay on sovereignty, which is a sort of simplified repetition of John Locke’s argument in the second chapter of the Second Treatise.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Q&A

Exercises

“[T]he one unforgivable sin, according to dominant Southern public opinion, was moral condemnation of slavery.”

Harry V. Jaffa

Source: 2000s, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), p. 249

“And Lincoln in his Cooper Union speech, which he gave in February of 1860, raised the question, 'What can we do to satisfy our Southern brethren? No assurances that we give them that we will have no intention of interfering with the institution of slavery where it exists will satisfy them. We must get rid of all anti-slavery sentiments from our state constitutions.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The South was a Closed Society

Question

“If a minority, losing an election, can break up the government rather than accept the results of the election, free government is impossible. If the only alternatives to rule by a Constitutional majority, I say, Constitutional majority, a majority formed under the rules of the Constitution with minority rights secured. There were no examples of the Republicans doing anything to prevent the opposition from having freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of association. There was a great deal of interference with those rights in the Southern states. But they lost the election according to their own rights. And Lincoln said that if people can break up the government rather than accept the results of a fairly conducted election, then the only alternatives are anarchy or tyranny. What is to prevent, he said, anyone of the states seceding from any future union?”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Right of Secession Is Not the Right of Revolution

People , Freedom , Future

“Karl Marx; the great enemy of human freedom.”

Harry V. Jaffa

As quoted in "What Would Lincoln Think?" http://listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=knpGZGYLrRM#What_Would_Lincoln_Think__Harry_Jaffa_on_The_American_Mind (20 February 2014), by Charles Kesler, The Claremont Institute
2010s, Interview with Charles Kesler (2014)

Freedom

“[P]reservation of the Union was not a partisan policy.”

Harry V. Jaffa

p. 254 https://web.archive.org/web/20160408021354/https://books.google.com/books?id=u1xgWBntGYIC&pg=PA254#v=onepage&q&f=false
2000s, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000)

“Well, Douglas became the leader of the Republicans in the struggle in Congress to defeat the Lecompton Constitution, and he succeeded. And from becoming the antichrist of the anti-slavery movement, he became the savior. And many people in the Republican Party wanted Lincoln and the Republicans in Illinois to support Douglas for reelection.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Right of Secession Is Not the Right of Revolution

People , Support

“But the South became a closed society on the eve of the Civil War, and it became a closed society after the end of Reconstruction. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute for some time circulated a book edited by my late friend Mel Bradford, The Essays of Andrew Litell; was one of the Southerners who took their stand in 1931, I think it was. And one of those essays, written in 1934, praised lynching as a legitimate exercise of the reserve powers of the states when the government didn't fulfill its duty to take care of racist agitators. So the South was a closed society on the subject of race right up until World War II.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The South was a Closed Society

War , Books , World , Exercises

“Now, there were many reasons why the south did not appeal to the right of revolution. One reason was that there were no abuses that they had been subject to, comparable to the ones enumerated in the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln, in his inaugural address, said that there was not a single constitutional right which anybody could point to, to say that that had been violated. They were exercising this right as something that was to their pleasure, for their own purposes, but that had nothing to do with the Constitution, and yet they were claiming it as a Constitutional right to withdraw from the Union.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Right of Secession Is Not the Right of Revolution

Pleasure , Exercises

“But all those same resolutions said that, in the Declaration of the Union, the internal police of each colony should be recognized as binding. In other words, the origins of American dual federalism are to be found in the resolutions of the revolutionary assemblies authorizing the Continental Congress to declare independence. They declared independence and union together, and there was never any time in which any state acted on the international sphere, having diplomatic relations—and the Constitution itself forbids each state to have any diplomatic action. They could not act independently of the other states in the international arena.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Q&A

Time

“That was the line he took, and he did not try to settle the matter of what would be done if universal emancipation came. No intelligent politician tries to raise questions that will divide his followers. He tries to take positions that will unite his followers. And Lincoln did the best that anybody could have possibly done to unite his followers on the questions of principle, which applied directly to the great issue of public policy, which at that time was slavery in the territories. And I think my time is up.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

Intelligence , Question , Thinking , Universe

“He didn't care whether slavery was voted up or down, he cared only for the sacred right of the people to make that decision. Why the right of the people should have been sacred, if the results of the exercise of that right were indifferent, Douglas never undertook to say.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Speech That Changed the World (2009)

People , Exercises , Decision , Indifference

“That the equality of human souls in the sight of God ought to be translated into a political structure of equal political rights has come to be regarded as the most authentic interpretation of the Gospel itself. Slavery, and the imposition of all arbitrary forms of inequality of man by man, has come to be seen as demeaning to the souls of God's creation.”

Harry V. Jaffa

Source: 2000s, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), p. 151

God , Soul

“This, by the way, was a demand for the greatest increase of federal power prior to the New Deal, maybe even since the New Deal. The greatest demand for an increase in federal power was made by the Southern states in 1860. And the majority in the convention refused to adopt this, and they refused to adopt it because nobody could be elected dogcatcher in a free state who supported a federal police power over slavery in the territories.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Right of Secession Is Not the Right of Revolution

Way , Support

“Well, Lincoln, in his July 4th Special Message to the Congress, 1861, said that the people of the South were a law-abiding people, and they would not have undertaken to do what they were now doing if it hadn't been for the invention of an ingenious sophism, according to which a state could secede from the Union without the permission of the Union or of any other state.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Q&A

People , Law

“The American Revolution and the Civil War were not merely discrete events. They constitute the first and last acts of a single drama. The fourscore and seven years between the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address comprehended the action of a tremendous world-historical tragedy.”

Harry V. Jaffa

How to Think about the American Revolution: A Bicentennial Cerebration https://books.google.com/books?id=iKGGAAAAMAAJ (1978) p. 53
Also quoted in Vindicating the Founders https://books.google.com/books?id=DjlpSl-x1gMC, by Thomas G. West, p. 32
1970s

War , World

“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.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Q&A

Law , Thinking

“Diversity in the service of freedom might be a very good thing. Diversity in the service of slavery might be a very bad thing.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, Is Diversity Good? (2003)

Freedom

“Ask yourself, if you or a loved one is to undergo brain or heart surgery, does it matter whether the surgeons who will operate had been selected for medical school for any other reason than their aptitude for medicine and surgery? Even if there were no quotas, should race have been "taken into consideration" in their selection? Consider the hairline life and death decisions that surgeons make all the time. Does not every consideration, however slight, apart from aptitude, dilute the qualifications of surgeons for surgery? The next time you are crossing a great bridge, do you not rely upon the qualifications of the engineers and builders to ensure your safety? What does the skin color of the classmates of doctors or engineers have to do with their medicine or their engineering? Is it not their professional qualification that matters, and not either the sameness or the differences from which they came? Is not the same true if we are seeking mathematicians, physicists, economists, or generals? In each case, what is apt for the end in view may be regarded as good, what is inapt may be regarded as bad.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, Is Diversity Good? (2003)

Love , Life , Death , School

“To ask whether what the American people in the Declaration of Independence had affirmed as truth was in fact truth, was now said to be meaningless. But if History or Progress or 'change' is to be our guide, if the truth of relativism is to replace the truth of the Declaration, then the cause for which the nation fought at its birth, and in the Civil War, was meaningless, too. White power, black power, the Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, are as justifiable as Jefferson, Lincoln, or the doctrine of the equal natural rights of all human beings. We may understand how the Rev. Jeremiah Wright could so awfully misunderstand the American political tradition, inasmuch as it has been so very misunderstood for so long in circles from whom a better understanding could be expected. But this misunderstanding is a cancer which can in the end prove fatal, not only to a political campaign but to our country.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, God Bless America (2008), Slavery and the American Cause

War , People , Truth , History

“Now, during the Civil War, Lincoln did endorse a program of compensated emancipation. In his 1862 message to Congress, he proposed a series of Constitutional amendments that would have authorized the Federal government to reimburse states that adopted programs of compensated emancipation. He was very anxious. This was before the Emancipation Proclamation, the final one, was issued on January 1, 1863.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Q&A

War

“In the tradition of American constitutionalism, all men are equally endowed by their Creator with certain rights. The equality of man is understood in the light of man's inequality with God: because men are not and never can become God or gods — because unqualified wisdom is never available to human beings — only government by the consent of the governed, and under the rule of law, is intrinsically in accordance with the eternal order.”

Harry V. Jaffa

1990s, The End of History Means the End of Freedom (1990)

Wisdom , Men , God , Law

“Jefferson Davis is categorical in pronouncing four million Americans, and all their descendants for all future time, to be "the degenerate sons of Ham", fit only to be slaves. This implies that Negroes were descended from the Canaanites. But the Canaanites were not black! Neither were the great majority of the many millions of slaves in the ancient world. We mention these facts as conclusively refuting Davis' thesis, even if there is someone not under legal constraint who is inclined to accept the lunatic notion that anyone today can be justly enslaved because of the episode described in the ninth chapter of Genesis.”

Harry V. Jaffa

1990s, Defending the Cause of Human Freedom (1994)

World , Time , Future

“That was a decisive moment in Lincoln’s career, and that’s the situation he faced when he got up to give his “House Divided” speech on June 16th of 1858. It was a crisis of his own career. It was also, in my opinion, the gravest crisis this country has ever faced, because the greatest danger to the future of the country came not, I think, from the pro-slavery argument, but from the morally neutral argument of Douglas. And that’s a long story and you’ll find it all spelled out in great detail in my book, which I hope you will read with great care.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Right of Secession Is Not the Right of Revolution

Books , Hope , Thinking , Decision

“Affirmative action, rightly understood, would justify a wide variety of outreach programs for those whose lives have been stultified by poverty, broken families, bad schools, and neighborhoods filled with drugs, crime and gangs. One can heartily commend a program for tutoring young blacks, or young whites, who had never had a genuine teacher in a real classroom. One cannot, however, commend a program of raising the grades of young blacks, but not young whites, without having raised their skills. And what possible justification can there be there for giving scholarship assistance to the child of a black middle-class family, while denying it to a poor white? Can one imagine a more crass disregard for the genuine meaning of the Equal Protection Clause? The priests of this new religion of 'affirmative action' are not without material interests. Hundreds of millions of corporate dollars are spent annually on 'sensitivity training'. Within the universities, centers for black, brown and women's (i. e., feminist) studies are being established, with vast amount of patronage bestowed upon them. Traditional courses in Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Shakespeare and the Bible continue to appear in the catalogs, but they are increasingly taught by 'deconstructionists', who have no interest in the texts, but only in subjective reactions to the texts.”

Harry V. Jaffa

1990s, The Party of Lincoln vs. The Party of Bureaucrats (1996)

Women , School , Family , Religion

“It is only with this prelude that the Declaration of 1776 proclaims the right to revolution. The people do not have an indiscriminate or uncontrolled right to establish or to abolish governments. They have a right to abolish only those governments that become "destructive of these ends". "These ends" refers to the security of equal natural rights. It is only for the sake of security of these rights that legitimate governments are instituted, or that governments may be altered or abolished. And governments are legitimate only insofar as their "just powers" are derived "from the consent of the governed". All of the foregoing is omitted from South Carolina's declaration, for obvious reasons. In no sense could it have been said that the slaves in South Carolina were governed by powers derived from their consent. Nor could it be said that South Carolina was separating itself from the government of the Union because that government had become destructive of the ends for which it was established. South Carolina in 1860 had an entirely different idea of what the ends of government ought to be from that of 1776 or 1787. That difference can be summed up in the difference between holding slavery to be an evil, if possibly a necessary evil, and holding it to be a positive good.”

Harry V. Jaffa

Source: 2000s, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (2000), p. 231

People , Idea , Nature , Sense

“And Lincoln said that by your own argument, if the local regulations are not forthcoming, you must support the federal enforcement; if you don’t, you’re taking the same position as the abolitionists, who denied any obligation to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

Law , Support

“Now, Lincoln' position was consistent throughout the debates. A great deal is said—Dr. DiLorenzo says it, but it's been said countless times before—that Lincoln used racist language in the debates. That’s not true. Now what Lincoln argued for in the debates was the recognition of the natural rights of black people, when Douglas said that if the people of Nebraska are good enough to govern themselves, they certainly are good enough to govern a few miserable Negroes. And Lincoln replied by saying, "I doubt not that the people of Nebraska are as good as the average of people elsewhere, what I say is that no man is good enough to govern another without his consent."”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

People , Nature , Time

“And Lincoln pointed out that this argument—which the Court applied to the territories—could also equally well be applied to the states, so that the prospect of slavery becoming national, not only through the spread into the new territories but in the spread to the states, was very great. This was Lincoln’s argument.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

“In 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court decided that 'separate but equal' did not violate the equal protection clause, and the South and not only the South relied upon this decision in building their systems of racially segregated public schools. The Court's 1896 decision can be explained in part by reason of the fact that the country—and the Western World generally—was then nearly submerged by the 'evolutionary' enlightenment. This movement, which dominated the intellectual elites in the universities, the law schools, and the media, denied the story of Creation in the Bible, and rejected the hitherto received idea that "God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth." It entertained instead the idea that the races of mankind did not all emerge at the same time from the subhumanity which preceded their humanity. Evolutionary doctrine encouraged the idea that there was a fundamental inequality among the aforesaid races, and this idea virtually relegated to the "dustbin of history" the contrary idea, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, "that all men are created equal."”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Logic of the Colorblind Constitution (2004)

Men , God , World , School

“Well, it’s not clear how persuasive this argument was in Illinois, but it was persuasive in Mississippi and Alabama and Florida and South Carolina, which said, 'Well, Lincoln’s right. This man Douglas is denying us our Constitutional rights'. And as a result of that, it was Lincoln’s cleverness in the debates which split the Democratic convention in 1860, and this is what in fact elected Abraham Lincoln. But it was the rebellion against Douglas, not against Lincoln, which precipitated the whole secessionist movement.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

“Three years later in the contest for Kansas, the administration headed by James Buchanan tried to railroad through a constitution called the Lecompton Constitution, which would have made Kansas a slave state, but on the basis of a phony vote. Douglas stuck to his popular-sovereignty doctrine, which meant that the people of the territory, in a fair vote, would decide for or against slavery. That was the way in which he replaced the Missouri Compromise restriction. It opened slavery, but it said that the decision in each territory would be made by the people in that territory on the basis of their preferences.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Right of Secession Is Not the Right of Revolution

People , Way , Decision

“Now there's a little story to that. Chief Justice Taney, in the Dred Scott decision—which said that the Missouri Compromise restriction of slavery in 1820 and any other one, was unconstitutional—said that there was no power in the Congress to forbid slavery in the territories. And he added as a kind of obiter dictum that the only power of Congress over slavery in the territories was the power coupled with the duty of protecting the owner and his rights. Now the seven states of the Deep South interpreted that to mean that the police power of the federal government had to guarantee the integrity of the property of any slave owner going into any United States territory.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Right of Secession Is Not the Right of Revolution

Justice , Decision

“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.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Q&A

Question , Country

“Hubert Humphrey, one of the chief authors and sponsors of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, had declared that under Title VII no discrimination on the basis of race or color was to be lawful. He explicitly said that this meant no discrimination of white against black, and no discrimination of black against white.”

Harry V. Jaffa

1990s, The Party of Lincoln vs. The Party of Bureaucrats (1996)

Law , Color

“The recently passed law to "end welfare as we know it" came about because a lethargic public has been aroused at last, not by the failure of the welfare system but by its success. The public indignation, however, would have been of no effect had we not elected a Republican Congress. No Democratic Congress would ever have passed such a law. Just as welfare reform may help end the poverty industry, the California Civil Rights Initiative on the November ballot may lead to the demise of another 1960s product, the racism and sexism industry. The 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination based upon race, sex, color, religion or ethnic origin. The act was based on the premise that the only race to which a person must belong is the human race. With respect to God-given natural rights, "all men are created equal."”

Harry V. Jaffa

1990s, The Party of Lincoln vs. The Party of Bureaucrats (1996)

Men , God , Religion , Law

“Abraham Lincoln was self-educated. His curriculum included Shakespeare, the Bible, Euclid and the Declaration of Independence, the monuments to the freedom of the human soul, the possession not of western man, but of a humanity compounded of all colors and every condition. In Independence Hall on February 22, 1861, Lincoln asked what it was, above all else, that went forth to the world on July 4, 1776. It was not, he said, the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the motherland, but something in that Declaration giving hope to the world for all future time. The declaration gave promise that in due time the weights would be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all would have an equal chance. These are the principles upon which the Republican Party must stand, in 1996 no less than in 1860.”

Harry V. Jaffa

1990s, The Party of Lincoln vs. The Party of Bureaucrats (1996)

Men , World , Education , Hope

“On the question of the tariff, it may come as news to Professor DiLorenzo that the protective tariffs were first instituted by Jefferson and Madison, not by the Hamiltonian party. Hamilton tried to get the tariffs, but he was not successful. And the reason why, the protective tariffs first entered our system in the wake of Jefferson’s embargo, which put the New England shipping interests out of business. And so the first protective tariffs were put in, I think, under Madison’s administration, and supported by John C. Calhoun, who agreed that at that time it was owed to the New England people to give their infant industries protection because they had been put out of business by the embargo, and later by the War of 1812, conducted under Madison’s administration.”

Harry V. Jaffa

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Rebuttal

War , People , Question , Business