A New Birth of Freedom is Harry V. Jaffa’s long awaited sequel to his acclaimed study of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Crisis of the House Divided, first published in 1958. Prof. Jaffa’s long and distinguished career (he is the Henry Salvatori Professor of Political Philosophy Emeritus at Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate University) has been devoted to the intellectual articulation, clarification, and defense of the principles of the American Founding and their perpetuation by the words and deeds of Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, Prof. Jaffa’s work has played a major role in bringing about the rebirth of natural rights and natural law reasoning in American politics and law in the second half of the twentieth century

No mere review can do justice to this remarkable book. Suffice it to say that A New Birth of Freedom is a stunning work of scholarship and erudition that vindicates Lincoln against both his contemporary adversaries and those who in our own time would diminish him and the principles of the American founding that he sought to perpetuate.

A New Birth of Freedom is a projected two-volume commentary on the Gettysburg Address. The current volume focuses on Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address and his July 4, 1861 address to Congress in Special Session.

One might ask what these two speeches have to do with the Gettysburg Address. Prof. Jaffa provides an answer in his brief introduction. The Gettysburg Address is not a self-contained work but "a speech within a drama. It can no more be interpreted apart from that drama than, let us say, a speech by Hamlet or MacBeth can be interpreted apart from Hamlet or MacBeth. The Gettysburg Address is a speech within the tragedy of the Civil War, even as Lincoln is its tragic hero. The Civil War is itself an outcome of tragic flaws--birthmarks, so to speak--of the infant nation." As such, a commentary on the Gettysburg Address must deal with the speeches and deeds that constituted the historical process in the years leading to the war.

Jaffa’s Lincoln believed that America’s "ancient faith" was the "central idea" of equality as articulated by the common sense reading of the Declaration of Independence. He believed that Jefferson meant what he said when he wrote "all men are created equal," and that this meant simply that no person has the right to rule over another without the latter’s consent.

Taking issue with the secularists of our time, Prof. Jaffa presents the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s understanding of it as the fulfillment of the promise of both classical philosophy and biblical revelation. Prof. Jaffa maintains that it was Lincoln’s conviction that the Declaration of Independence reflected the divine government of the universe, which therefore set the pattern for the moral and legal order of constitutional government.

If, as Lincoln believed, equality is the basis of republican government, then slavery is an affront to republican government. But how is it possible to reconcile the words of the Declaration with the practice of slavery among some of the Founders themselves. Lincoln argued persuasively that the Founders compromised on slavery out of necessity, not because they thought it right or even because they were hypocrites. Indeed, there is ample evidence that the founders understood clearly the conflict between slavery and the principles upon which the US was created.

Lincoln contended the Founders believed that they had placed the institution of slavery on the road to extinction. But Lincoln had to deal with the growing, if not prevalent rejection of the common-sense meaning of equality. For example, John C. Calhoun contended that the proposition that all men are created equal "has become the most false and dangerous of all political errors" Alexander H. Stephens claimed that the Confederate constitution, the "cornerstone" of which was the "great truth" of slavery and inequality, would correct the fatal error enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

Others did not go quite so far, but the effect was the same. In his Dred Scott decision, Chief Justice Roger Taney held that the Founders could not have meant to include blacks in the Declaration. As a result, the black man, whether freedman or slave, had no rights that the white man was bound to respect. According to Stephen Douglas’s doctrine of "popular sovereignty," slavery was an issue that should be left to the vote of the white people of a state or territory.

Lincoln understood the critical importance of public sentiment in a democracy. "Our government rests in public opinion....Whoever can change public opinion, can change the government, practically just so much." Lincoln was concerned that individuals like Taney and Douglas were preparing public sentiment to accept the transformation of the slavery question from one of "hostility to the PRINCIPLE, and toleration, ONLY BY NECESSITY" where the Founders had place it, to slavery as a "sacred right." Lincoln knew that if public sentiment in support of equality was undermined, the "moral lights" that supported our "ancient faith" would be extinguished and the possibility of free government would be lost.

Lincoln’s task was not only to restore this "ancient faith," but also to save the Union from those who would destroy it. The "new birth of liberty" promised by the Gettysburg Address could not have occurred if the Union had been split asunder. Thus Lincoln had to confront the argument of John C. Calhoun both with republican rhetoric and force of arms. Lincoln’s First Inaugural is an instance of the former; the speech of July 4, 1861 to Congress in Special Session lays out the justification for the latter.

It is an understatement to say that Prof. Jaffa leaves the case for secession in ruins. First he shows that Calhoun’s theory of equality was radically different than that of the Founders. According to Calhoun, insofar as equality existed it was a prescriptive attribute of the states, not a natural right of human persons as the Declaration holds. Calhoun maintained that citizens derive their equality and the dignity of that equality, not from their sovereignty as individual human persons under "the laws of nature and nature’s God," but from the constitutional equality of the states within the Union.

Second, Prof. Jaffa demonstrates that slavery and "states rights" were far more intertwined than the post-war apologists for secession admitted. All this prescriptive equality meant in practice was the constitutional right of any citizen of a slave state to carry his slave property into any US territory, then require that the federal government provide all necessary protection of that property.

Third, he points out that the real cause of the breakup of the Union had nothing to do with states’ rights, but resulted from a demand for unprecedented expansion of federal power to protect the alleged constitutional right to hold slave property. The slave power did not get its demand for federal protection of slavery in the territories. At the Democratic Convention in Charleston, held in April 1860, the majority refused such a federal guarantee. The delegates from the deep South then walked out, splitting the Democratic Party and ensuring that Lincoln would be elected by a plurality of votes.

Prof. Jaffa points out the ironies here. To begin with, "secession" really began when the South abandoned the national Democratic Party. The resulting split was instrumental in bringing about the election of Lincoln, which the South then used as the excuse for smashing the Union. Thus, the South’s demand at Charleston, far from having anything to do with states’ rights, was instead a call for an unprecedented expansion of federal power.

And finally, Prof. Jaffa makes the case that secession was nothing but a form of blackmail, the disruption of republican government by a minority that did not get its way at the polls. For the Founders, the purpose of government was to protect the equal natural rights of all. They understood these rights to be antecedent to the creation of political society and government. The just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed who possess the equal natural rights that republican government is supposed to protect. While the people never relinquish their right to revolution, in practice, this natural right is replaced by free elections, the outcome of which are determined by majority rule. When the States ratified the Constitution of 1787, they pledged that they would accept the results of elections conducted according to its rules. In violation of this pledge, the Southern States seceded because they did not like the outcome of the election of 1860.

Mr. Jaffa argues that like Calhoun’s doctrine, political science today dismisses the political thought of the American Founders based on equal natural rights as "false and dangerous." "Calhoun’s heirs have dominated the academy and by a shallow and permissive historicism and relativism have subjected ’the laws of nature and of nature’s God’ to scorn and contempt. They have done so by propaganda appealing to the basest passion, and reason has been in retreat."

But he makes a strong case that academic political science is mistaken. Thanks to the founders and Lincoln, America’s great power status can be justified on the basis of something beyond mere necessity. Because of Lincoln’s uncompromising commitment to equality as America’s "central idea," the Union was not only saved, but saved so "as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving...."

Mackubin Thomas Owens is professor of strategy and force planning at the Naval War College in Newport, RI, and an adjunct fellow of the Ashbrook Center. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the position of the War College, Navy Department, or Department of Defense.