Quotes from Timothy Sandefur

There was no point in trying to compensate for the crimes of the past, but "the nearest approach to justice to the negro for the past is to do him justice in the present."19 That meant integrating schools and ending legal barriers to employment and property ownership.

Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1991); Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Women would then need to resort to the ballot box to request that protection—assuming the majority sees fit to give them the right/privilege to vote.

But to argue, like Filmer, Tribe, Sunstein, and Bork, that government comes first, and that it gives people freedom when it wills, and for its own purposes, is, as Locke concluded, the same as saying "that no man is born free.

Noble as the ideas of the Declaration of Independence were, it was obvious before the ink was dry that they clashed with a central fact of everyday life in America: slavery.

Once slavery was abolished, the core of the changes that followed was found in the Fourteenth Amendment, which for the first time defined the terms of American citizenship and declared that no state could deprive people of their natural rights or the traditional rights inherited through the common law. Yet shortly afterwards, that amendment was crippled by a Supreme Court decision known as The Slaughter-House Cases.

Although parts of the amendment still provide real security for individual freedom today, the wrong done in that 1873 precedent still hampers protections for liberty today.

Attacks on the principles of the Declaration began at an early point in American history. In the four decades before the Civil War, defenders of slavery explicitly rejected it, even calling it, as Senator John Pettit did in 1854, "a self-evident lie."63 Horrified by this, antislavery politicians rallied to the Declaration. They developed a constitutional interpretation that emphasized liberty and equality, and they denounced slavery as incompatible with the

President Franklin Pierce, determined to demonstrate the federal government's resolve to enforce the act, dispatched 2,000 soldiers to Boston to recapture a single fugitive.

We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative[s]," wrote one Bostonian, "and waked up stark mad abolitionists."7

The Constitution's foundation is the Declaration of Independence, and as slavery's defenders were increasingly forced to reject its principles, and to defend racial inequality and hierarchy as good things, they found it increasingly difficult to maintain allegiance to the Constitution.

A mere look, word, or motion,—a mistake, accident, or want of power,—are all matters for which the slave may be whipped at any time," wrote Douglass

The profession of political science, he claimed, had "abandoned" the Declaration's premise "that liberty is a natural right," and had come to hold that freedom is created by government as a sort of privilege: "rights are considered to have their source not in nature, but in

Holmes's experience in the war taught him not that all people have a right to freedom, but rather that claims about right and wrong are really only illusions.67 Ethical principles, he believed, are subjective, emotional commitments that cannot be judged right or wrong. Ideas such as justice or moral good are only the expressions of arbitrary personal preferences and are no more rational than a person's preference for one kind of beer over

But it would be more precise to say that the master aimed to transform the slave into an automaton by obliterating his sense of personhood.

What we call laws or rights are just arbitrary preferences enforced by violence, in just the same way that "a dog will fight for his bone."69 A constitution is simply an effort to render that process less violent by subjecting the inevitable clashes to majority vote instead of battle. But in the end, politics is just war by other means.

His curiosity aroused by seeing Sophia read the Bible, Douglass asked her to teach him. Naively, she agreed. He caught on rapidly, and Sophia was proud enough of her student to mention his progress to Hugh. He exploded. Literacy, he cried, would "spoil the best nigger in the world," and "unfit him to be a slave.

Hugh Auld was wise to fear slave literacy. Reading could kindle in a slave a desire for learning and for a personal future, thus undermining slavery's consistent effort to stamp out any sense of self-worth.

If religion had any effect on his character at all, it made him more cruel and hateful.

Douglass's feeling of pride at choosing his own employment was soured somewhat when white laborers on the wharves threatened to quit if the boss hired a black man.

According to the social compact tradition articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, government is legitimate because the people consent to it, thus agreeing in some sense to respect its determinations. But people can consent only because they have a basic right to decide whether or not to consent, a right that is not a mere privilege from the government.

politics is then basically an act of will, not of reason.

My cause, first, midst, last, and always," he wrote, "was and is that of the black man; not because he is black, but because he is a man.

This way of seeing things makes it impossible to distinguish free states from tyrannies, just rulers from unjust rulers, or healthy regimes from abusive regimes. In practice, it would mean that whatever political group happens to wield power, by arms or by propaganda, is, ipso facto, legitimate. Yet the whole point of the Declaration and the Constitution was to found a government on something more than accident and force.