Was Frankenstein Really Uncle Sam? Vol. Vi: Notes on the State of the Declaration of Independence

By Richard J. Rolwing

This is one of eight volumes on the Declaration. The fi rst four contain each 365 essays. These last four contain about 25 essays each. Rolwing examines nearly all the major writers on our Basic Charter, most of whom repudiate it. He focuses on their manifold criticisms and rejections, reveals their multiple distortions and misunderstandings, rebukes their self-contradictions and inconsistencies, and pities their general Theo-phobia. He argues that while America was Founded almost completely by Protestant Christians (the only two deists were not even deists), what was Founded was formally only a philosophical product, not a faith-based or Christian one, although the philosophy had been more Catholic than Protestant. Rolwing makes a great deal of American history, law, ethics, politics, philosophy, and theology easily accessible to the average reader. Read any of these books and you will clap your hands that you are an American.

Certainly the Declaration is worth many an hour explaining and defending it. Mr. Rolwing seeks to make the problems brought up about the document capable of being understood by both scholar and ordinary citizen.
Fr. James Schall, S.J.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 18, 2007
• ISBN: 9781462809899

Richard J. Rolwing

Richard J. Rolwing, a retired theologian, taught philosophy, world religions, Christianity, and politics at small colleges and large universities. He was a supermarket manager, arbitrator, insurance agent, mortgage broker, stockbroker, registered financial planner, and executive VP for several corporations, which drilled oil/gas wells, marketed business equipment internationally, and bought and operated a gold mine in California. He has rehabbed dozens of homes all over his city, spoken before business groups all over his state, and lectured before professional groups all over the nation. He has published four volumes on the philosophy behind the US Constitution. A recent work was Digging Up Darwin in Ohio Without Holding Your Nose.

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Copyright © 2008 by Richard J. Rolwing.

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Contents

Taking It Seriously

Douglas’s Declaration

Douglas’s Constitution

Common Good

Darkness at Noon

Topsy

Two Extremists

From the Wilson Quarterly, Autumn 2006

Nature Revealed

Newdow

Interpreting the Constitution

New World Order

Fight the Real Enemy

Unhappy Anniversary

The Declaration’s International Influence

IBO

A Masterpiece of American Oratory

The Paradox That is Man

The Enemy At Home

A Genuine Mind

The Ideal Form of Government

Is the Declaration Law?

Charity Without Justice

"What Kind of God Does

Human Rights Require?"

Return to Unhappy Anniversary

Jefferson’s Wall

The Declaration Was Not Deist

The Declaration Was Not Multi-culturalist

Origins of Political Authority

Silliness

Joseph Storey

Dred Scott (1857)

Principles of Civil Liberty

Jaffa’s Declaration

The Declaration’s Adequacy

The More

Fake Hysteria at Christianity

Endnotes

Taking It Seriously

In a paper given at the 2005 national convention of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists, Recovering the Declaration (and the Constitution): Some Lessons from Lincoln and [Frederick] Douglas, Joseph Harder remarks that Frederick Douglas, the self-made intellectual who had been born a slave, and his contemporary, Abraham Lincoln, were, I am afraid, the last mainstream American statesmen to take the Declaration of Independence seriously… the Declaration which has been left to die in an old age home was once a belle with many suitors. The last two great Americans to court her were Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglas.(2)

Harder argues that both of her final suitors failed; their constitutional thought fell on barren ground. "Their contemporaries did not understand them. Their effort to recover Natural Right was eclipsed, first by Social Darwinism and then by the Progressive Movement.

Only Blacks understood and remember Douglas. Lincoln was evoked by his fellow Republicans as a kind of totem, but few of them took his ideas seriously. Practically the only American to take the natural rights philosophy of Lincoln and Douglas seriously was Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan the elder.(3)

The St. Augustine church is Washington D.C.’s oldest Black Catholic church, "founded in the 1850’s by white Catholic abolitionists and black Catholic former slaves. Abraham Lincoln’s early support of this parish, as their records narrate, revealed his conviction that the Declaration’s all men applied to both Blacks and Catholics, neither of whom were accepted as full Americans at the time.

Harder maintains that neither Lincoln nor Douglas knew anything directly of the classical and medieval notions of natural law and natural right, yet they stumbled on certain conclusions roughly similar to them. If nothing else, the Declaration came with a historical pedigree.

Douglas’s Declaration

Douglas began his public career as a follower of William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist Anti-Slavery Society. They saw the Constitution as a pro-slavery document written by slave-owners for slave-owners. Garrison called it a covenant with death and once publicly burned a copy. The Constitution made the American political system corrupt. So his abolitionists rejected political action in favor of preaching/teaching. In an 1847 speech Douglas said we should tear up the Constitution.

But he soon reversed himself. Abolitionism needed a political and legal rationale… from within the American tradition.(9) He studied Lysander Spooner and Gerrit Smith, two other abolitionist heretics, the first a published and serious author on the natural law.

His conclusion: "The Constitution might contain a few passages, which read superficially, [and mistakenly] were pro-slavery… but read properly, and in the light of other founding texts, was essentially a glorious liberty document."

In what his most recent biographer, William S. McFeeley, called the greatest anti-slavery oration ever given, entitled The Meaning of the July Fourth for the Negro, Douglas said, I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ringbolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that document are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all forces and at whatever cost. He saw the Declaration as a work of public philosophy, a preface to the Constitution.

The founding fathers, he maintained, were men of principle, refusing to compromise with tyranny. Those principles were expressed in the Declaration. He contrasted your fathers with present day politicians all too willing to compromise with slavery. The Declaration was not mere political rhetoric or philosophical puffery. It brought on one war, and it would soon enough bring on another and far more deadly war.

Douglas’s Constitution

Frederick Douglas offered an interpretation of the Constitution from the perspective of the Declaration which could, we suggest, have been used to legally justify an enactment by Congress to abolish slavery. Lincoln never thought Congress had the authority or power to do that, and neither did anyone else. Everyone, apparently, even Douglas, thought the Constitution gave no just authority to Congress to do that. Lincoln had often confessed that neither he nor Congress could legally interfere with slavery in the slave states. He often promised he would never try, although confederates never believed him.

Slave-owners claimed that the Constitution sanctioned slavery, and abolitionists quite agreed. They did disagree about the Declaration, but not about the Constitution. Douglas argued that both sides utterly misread the latter.

In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but interpreted as it ought to be interpreted is a glorious liberty document… Now take the Constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand, it will be found to contain principles and purposes entirely hostile to the existence of slavery.

In this 1852 July 4th address he only hinted at these principles and purposes. After the 1857 Dred Scott case he gave a scathing indictment of Justice Roger Taney’s decision, which, we have seen, notoriously distorted the Declaration as well as the Constitution.

In 1860, in Glasgow, Scotland, a Garrisonite attacked him as betraying Garrison and attacked the Constitution as a pernicious pro-slavery document. Harder says that Douglas, although a non-lawyer, offers a paradigmatic example of Constitutional and legal analysis and a profound account of the founding principles of the regime. He makes no explicit reference to the Declaration." He restricts himself to the actual text of the Constitution.

After defining the Constitution he offers a theory for interpreting it. Then he argues that its supposed pro-slavery passages do not really protect slavery at all, "and more controversially, he argues that they were not even intended to protect slavery in the first place… He concludes with an extended exposition of the real principles and purposes of the Constitution, and with an effort to show that these ‘principles and purposes’ are inimical to slavery." Contrary to the abolitionists, who refuse to take part in politics and repudiate all politicians whether they are pro- or anti-slavery, the Constitution itself need not be abolished to abolish slavery. Douglas was convinced it was fundamentally anti-slavery.

What then is the Constitution? I will tell you. It is no vague, indefinite, floating, insubstantial idea, something colored according to any man’s fancy, now a weasel, now a whale, and now nothing. On the contrary, it is a plainly written document, not in Hebrew or Greek, but in English, beginning with a preamble, filled with articles, sections, and clauses defining the rights, powers, and duties to be secured, claimed and exercised under its authority… The American Constitution is a written instrument full and complete in itself… Again, it should be borne in mind that it was the mere text, and not any commentaries or creeds written by those who wished to give the text a meaning apart from its plain reading, which was adopted as the Constitution of the United States… secret motives and unexpressed intentions do not matter, but common sense and common justice, and the sound rules of interpretation all drive us to the words of the law for the meaning of the law.

Douglas quoted Thompson, the abolitionist who attacked Douglas in Glasgow, Article 1, section 9, provides for the continuance of the African slave trade for 20 years after the adoption of the Constitution. Article 4, section 9, provides for the recovery from other States of fugitive slaves. Article 1, section 2, gives the slave States a representation of three fifths of all the slave population, and Article 1, section 8, requires the President to use the military, naval, ordinance and militia resources of the entire country for the suppression of slave insurrection, in the same manner as he would employ them to repel invasion.

That sounds like a damning indictment, comments Harder. However, there is only one problem with it. It reads words in the Constitution that aren’t there. Douglas points out, it so happens that no such words as ‘African slave trade,’ no such words as ‘slave representation,’ no such words as ‘fugitive slaves,’ no such words as ‘slave insurrections’ are used anywhere in that instrument.

Douglas insists that the 3/5ths clause does not say anything about Negroes, or about slaves. It deliberately uses the ambiguous, but telling words, ‘other persons.’ Note that it says persons, not property, not chattel. Summarizing Douglas’s arguments, Harder says, Even if it is, indirectly, referring to slaves, the clause does not strengthen slavery. Instead it weakens it, by decreasing the number of representatives available to the slave states. Douglas says, So much for the three fifths clause; taking it at worst, it still leans to freedom, not to slavery, for, be it remembered, the Constitution nowhere forbids a colored man to vote. As Harder notes, when the Constitution was first ratified, eleven of the thirteen states—slave states included—gave property-owning ‘free people of color’ the right to vote.

The slave trade clause does not mention the slave trade, but even if it may refer to it, it once more weakens the slave power; it does not strengthen or confirm it. As Harder notes, "When the Constitution was adopted, every thoughtful man believed that ending the African slave trade would be the death-blow to slavery. All this clause does is grant the slave states a twenty year grace period. It looked towards abolishing slavery, not perpetuating it.¹

The slave rebellion clause speaks only of revolts and insurrections, not slaves. Harder notes that the founders worried about many kinds of insurrections. They had been rebels themselves, and had studied enough history to know that all fledgling republics had been beset with rebellions and insurrections. A polity which does not make provisions to suppress revolts and insurrections is signing its own death warrant. Douglas pointed out that if a sound anti-slavery man is elected President, he may have to use the ‘rebellion’ clause to suppress a revolt not of slaves, but of slave-owners. One was elected, and he did.

A more noxious fugitive slave law had been passed in 1850. Its promoters claimed they based it on the Constitution’s ‘fugitive slave clause,’ and Madison’s later praise of such. But, argued Douglas correctly, they misrepresented Madison. Madison had actually reprimanded the southern promoters by saying that the idea of property in men or of slaves as property should not be admitted into the Constitution. And it was not.

Douglas says the clause does not refer to slavery at all, much less use the term. It speaks only of those bound to service and labor—redemptioneers, indentured servants. No slave can have contractual or legal obligations to his master, for a contract is founded on mutual consent, and the master-slave relation is founded on brute force that makes a slave a piece of property.

Even without Constitutional Amendments the Federal government could have legally moved slowly bit by bit to make slavery no longer worth retaining.

Common Good

In an article in The Religion and Society Report (Vol. 23, 3/06, #2) Harold O. J. Brown begins with one way of looking at this nation. Democracy is a method, not a solution. It is a ground where there is a place for a measure of pluralism and individualism, but only as long as there are common principles to which all of the diverse parts and people give allegiance. As the late Hans Millendorfer said, democracy works well when there is a common, shared understanding of the good. We had this once in the United States. Do we still?

Yes and no. If you call democracy a form of government based on a constitution accepted by the people as a whole, as opposed to a chiefdom or kingdom in which the leader rules incontestably, yes.

No. No method is merely a method. As a practice it is pregnant with presupposed theory. Even a practice coming from animal instinct presupposes something, in fact, a good deal, behind the instinct. Democracy in this perspective is not a solution because government itself is not a solution. It presupposes a great deal. Nor can a method be a ground like either a playing field or a foundational base of a structure. His metaphors are mixed.

We agree with the general position. The problem is unifying and keeping united a multitude. However much room we leave for group diversity (pluralism) and eccentric egotism (individualism) a united multitude must serve primarily a common good. And Brown says the multitude must share a common understanding of the good society.

Our foundational charters expressed a common general understanding of the common principles, or the common good. But the modern elite repudiate the original understanding and intent of both the Declaration and the Constitution, basically because liberals no longer share the original understanding of what makes a good human life and a good human society. Is there any hope for Uncle Sam?

Darkness at Noon

That was the title of Arthur Koestler’s famous critical work on his former days of being a Communist. At the time he wrote it, there was no end in sight to the Soviet Empire and its Third International movement promoting revolution in every other country. What can cause darkness at noon? A temporary eclipse, or a storm, which is by definition temporary. Storms may cloud the skies but, being storms, they by definition come and soon go. But Koestler did not argue that Communism was only a passing fad, for he thought it was the complete opposite of the light of truth and good. It brought darkness to the brightest light of the day. What he exposed was the intellectual and moral self-blindedness of Communist thinkers, leaders, and followers, even often its victims.

The twentieth-century American elite engaged in a similar type of self-lobotomy. Its practical consequences have not been fully realized yet, although they are fast getting there in the area of sexual mores, which is really where all the self-lobotomized primarily want them. We suggest all the other arguments about republicanism, communitarianism, individualism, capitalism, natural rights republic, a welfare state, are ultimately smokescreens, but that is another story.

Here, let us look at one of the three or four greatest living American historians of the Founding Era. Gordon Wood has written The Creation of the American Republic 1776-1787 (1969), The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991), and now Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different, plus many essays in periodicals. Steven Hayward says Wood is the favorite historian of the American liberal establishment.² Historian David Hoeveler says his works and those of all his liberal disciples constitute a liberal original intent providing an ideological outline, or cultural value system, that has direct applications to law and the interpretations of law.³

Wood assails postmodern multi-culturalism, saying it not only falsifies our past; it destroys our future. Hayward says that Wood deplores relativism’s ‘insidious’ attack on the idea of objectivity in historical research and writing. And he rejects the victimology inherent in the class- and group-based obsession with ‘oppression’ . . . there was something noble in the founding, and something good in American society from the start.⁴ He has some good ethical (philosophical) presuppositions.

Should we call it a deficient historical presupposition that "in the hundreds of closely argued pages of Creation, a book that is supposed to cover the years 1776 to 1787, the Declaration of Independence barely receives a glancing nod… Wood does not think it is important to explore the ideas of the Declaration in any detail.⁵ However, in his second book, half as long as the first, Wood even sounds like Lincoln (and our own work), The Declaration of Independence set forth a philosophy of human rights that could be applied… to peoples everywhere. It was essential in giving the American Revolution a universal appeal."⁶

Yet his general disregard of the Declaration turns his history of the Founding into something