Words Worth Remembering: An Exchange of Principle
He was not from the South. He did not have slaves. But he was as thoroughly invested as any Southern statesman in the new and peculiar ideology which made the Declaration of Independence a parchment of near meaningless scrawl.
A senator from Indiana, John Pettit was, in many ways, a clone of Stephen Douglas when it came to understanding the issue of slavery and its consistency or inconsistency with the founding principles. Like Douglas, Pettit held that America was built on the white basis, intended only for the benefit of white men and their posterity.
Speaking in the Senate on the Kansas-Nebraska Act on Monday, February 20, 1854, Pettit repeated the indifference of his Illinois counterpart: he would vote neither for nor against slavery in the territories; it was an issue for the people alone, expressed only through their “popular sovereignty.”
But Pettit didn’t stop there; he slipped into a memorable digression — “one little reflection as to ultra, extreme Abolitionism,” as he put it. “It is alleged that all men are created equal,” he said. “However egotistical or absurd it may appear in me to venture to contradict or dispute the language of the Declaration of Independence,” he added, “I proceed to do it fearlessly.
“I hold it to be a self-evident lie,” Pettit declared. “Tell me that the imbecile, the deformed, the weak, the blurred intellect in man, is my equal, physically, mentally, or morally, and you tell me a lie.”
Then, repeating white supremacist pseudoscience, Pettit added, “[tell me] the slave in the South, who is born a slave, and with but little over one half of the volume of brain that attaches to the northern European race, is his equal, and you tell me what is physically a falsehood.”
Even more, Pettit announced that “it is not true that even all persons of the same race are created equal,” adding, in language eerily exact to John C. Calhoun, that “there is no truth in the declaration.”
Pettit, as with Calhoun, approached the equality principle in a strikingly literal way, one that says more about their confusion and ignorance, willful or not, than perhaps their political motives. Pettit, after all, admitted that “there might have been truth in” proclaiming equal political rights.
But to Pettit, the Declaration incorrectly stated the exact equality of all people in all ways. It did not occur to him, as it had to Jefferson and later Lincoln, that the natural equality mentioned was plainly the equality of human beings as bearing the image of God and each possessing equal dignity and natural rights.
He argued, too, that the contemporary state of individuals determined whether they were free or equal. Tell me, he said, that the autocrat’s serf in Russia, “kneeling at his feet, and willing to lick his spittle, is my equal, and I scorn the assertion.”
More still, he reminded listeners, almost approvingly, that God had “in olden times… made exceptions… as to political rights, as well as moral, physical, and mental rights” by creating “a priesthood,” “kings,” and other offices of superiority “over the people.”
Ohio’s Benjamin Wade was dumbfounded and on Friday, March 3, engaged in a rhetorical—and logical—contest with Pettit. “This great declaration cost our forefathers too dear thus lightly to be thrown away by their children,” Wade said, rebuking Pettit directly. “Was it not to vindicate these great truths… that the fathers of the Republic pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor?”
Alas, Wade said, “without the influence of those soul-inspiring principles it would have been impossible for the patriots of that day to have achieved our independence.”
Wade added, “You cannot serve God and mammon. They speak of slavery as a divine institution. What, then, was gained by the Revolution? Was no new principle of Government established by that great event? Has one man, in fact, really a divine right to the soul and body of his neighbor?”
If Pettit is born superior, to stand over countless inferiors, Wade asked the Indianan directly, “I should like to know what mark he wears, how to designate this divine governor, this favorite of Heaven, and who is to be the ill-fated victim of his despotism?”
“I see one man born a slave and another a master,” Pettit replied, after again rejecting the Declaration’s meaning.
“The Senator has forgotten the whole thing after all,” Wade replied as laughter filled the chamber. Pettit’s Declaration was this: “That physical force is the only criterion to decide when one man may enslave another.”
“They were created equal,” Wade said. “How? Not in physical power; certainly not. Not in point of intellect; nobody pretends this. But what follows? Created equal and have certain unalienable rights.
“I stand upon the good old Declaration,” Wade said. “The serfs of Russia, or the slaves of the Southern States, in my doctrine and the doctrine of the fathers, have precisely the same rights as he who had trampled them down.”
Pettit replied: Freedom is not listed in the Declaration as a gift of creation; it is said that men are only created equal, which was itself false.
“Is that [being created equal] not free?” Wade asked.
“No, sir; not free.”
“What is the difference?” Wade asked.
Pettit struggled to answer. He admitted that individuals can by law, and perhaps should, have equal enjoyment of freedom and rights. Still, the Declaration’s language was simply too confusing. Pettit had unknowingly laid a trap for himself.
“He says the language is not well expressed,” Wade said. “If it said they ought to be equal, it would be all right. Then, I will inquire, if you find them in an unequal condition, is it not your duty to make them right?”
Laughter again erupted. Checkmate.
“I must leave that to the Almighty,” Pettit said, caught in his own web of confusion.
“It is a hard thing for a man to quarrel on this floor with that old Declaration,” Wade replied. “Rather a hard thing.”