Assuring Freedom to the Free: Jefferson’s Declaration and the Conflict over Slavery

As Republicans contemplated the future of freedom in a slaveholding country, they sometimes echoed Thomas Jefferson’s fears. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson expressed particular concern that the people’s liberty could not be sustained if they removed “its only secure basis.” In his view, this basis was “a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God.” And he candidly admitted that he trembled for the fate of his country when he recalled that God is just. Because blacks and whites were equally members of the human race, the vagaries of circumstance could someday ensnare whites in the black man’s bondage. “Considering numbers, nature and natural means only,” Jefferson explained, “a revolution of the wheel of fortune, [and] an exchange of situation is among possible events.” In fact, he believed such an event could easily occur through “supernatural interference.”¹

Over seventy years later, Charles Sumner informed his southern colleagues in the Senate that “it was the inspiration of Liberty Universal that conducted us through the Red Sea of the Revolution.” This principle also gave the Declaration of Independence “its mighty tone, resounding through the ages.” Shortly thereafter, Sumner stood before a New York audience and endorsed Jefferson’s argument that the liberty of whites depended on the liberty of blacks: “As a man, he stands before you an unquestionable member of the Human Family, and entitled to all the rights of man. You can claim nothing for yourself, as a man, which you must not accord to him. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—which you proudly declare to be your own, inalienable, God-given rights, and to the support of which your fathers pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor, are his by the same immortal title that they are yours.”² According to Sumner, universal liberty meant all men were justly entitled to their natural rights by virtue of their common humanity. Without that assumption, individual liberty would never be fully secure.

If slavery was the beneficent and paternalistic institution that southerners claimed, could it not be applied with equal morality to whites as well as blacks? Republicans repeatedly expressed concern that proslavery arguments were not inherently racial—that they were subject to the mutable prejudices and economic motives of those who made them. Anyone, irrespective of race, could fall victim to the argument that they were “inferior,” that they would be better off enslaved, that their enslavement served the interests of society, or that their subjugation was justified by history and religion.

Some Republicans, most notably Abraham Lincoln, held that the only effective safeguard of individual liberty was universal liberty, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. As long as Americans believed “all men” were endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, everyone’s liberty would be self-evident, regardless of circumstance. Each person’s liberty would be respected simply by virtue of his or her status as a human being. Conversely, the justifications invoked to exclude a segment of society from the rights of man destroyed the self-evidence of those rights. Having rejected the Declaration’s principle that all men are naturally free, Americans eliminated simple humanity as an unquestionable defense against the oppression. Therefore, by failing to repudiate slavery—and thereby rejecting the universality of human liberty—they made themselves vulnerable to proslavery rationales, especially when they happened to occupy a position of political, social, or economic weakness.

This was a major theme in Lincoln’s campaign against Stephen A. Douglas and the introduction of popular sovereignty as the method for determining slavery’s status in the territories. Lincoln’s greatest challenge was to convince northern audiences that simple indifference to slavery was itself inimical to the liberty of whites. The question, as he saw it, was whether liberty would be universal (at least in theory) or whether the justifications for black slavery would survive to threaten the liberty of all—a danger he pointed to repeatedly, as when he criticized Douglas...