The Promise of Equality in Lincoln and in Jaffa

Responding to an invitation to speak at an event honoring the birthday of Thomas Jefferson, Lincoln wrote on April 6, 1859, to Henry L. Pierce and others that “one would start with great confidence that he could convince any sane child that the simpler propositions of Euclid are true; but, nevertheless, he would fail, utterly, with one who should deny the definitions and axioms. The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society” (1989b, 18). Citing this passage inCrisis of the House Divided (Jaffa 1959), Harry Jaffa picked out the Euclidean cast of Lincoln’s arguments about equality, as well as the foundational depth of the moral and political commitments those arguments express. The key toCrisis of the House Divided is Jaffa’s attention to the implications of Jefferson’s claim that it is a self-evident truth that all men are created equal and to the central role that claim plays in Lincoln’s thinking. Concern with the meaning of equality outweighs every other aspect of Jaffa’s treatment of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, even the question of the future of slavery in the western territories, the ostensible subject of the 1858 debates. Jaffa’s treatment is also distinctive in that he himself wishes to treat the proposition that all men are created equal as a self-evident truth, and he treats Lincoln’s politics as an instance of the consequences of taking the promise of equality in that way. Nowadays most American politicians treat human equality as axiomatic, and most American lay people, whatever their politics, at least give equality lip service. But it is customary for scholars to treat the idea in a historicist way, which requires them