Independence Day 2023

Over the years, as I have contemplated writing my annual Independence Day message, I have found myself, many times, turning to Abraham Lincoln. This year, coming on the heels of the Supreme Court's decision regarding "affirmative action" in college admissions decisions in Students for Fair Admissions, this is especially so.

Born in 1809, Lincoln was a generation (or two, depending on how you count) removed from the Founding generation. But there is no doubt that, among all the post-Founding era presidents, Lincoln understood, and drew inspiration from, the true meaning of the self-evident "Truths" proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence – "that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."

In my Independence Day 2017 message, I showed how, in his little known but eloquent address at Peoria in October 1854, Lincoln grounded his extended argument against slavery firmly in the philosophy and principles expounded in the Founders’ Declaration of 1776, not the Constitution of 1787. Invoking the Declaration's self-evident truths, Lincoln said this in 1854: "What I do say is, that no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other's consent. I say this is the leading principle---the sheet anchor of American republicanism."

Now, fast forward to February 22, 1861. On Lincoln's journey to Washington as president-elect to be inaugurated, he stopped in Philadelphia. And not just any place in Philadelphia, but at the Pennsylvania State House site where the Declaration of Independence had been signed. There Lincoln delivered some very brief remarks – in contrast to his Peoria Address which lasted over three hours. Indeed, at the site that subsequently became known as Independence Hall, Lincoln protested to the gathered crowd, "I did not expect to be called upon to say a word when I came here."

Unsurprisingly, what Lincoln did say that day was memorable. Most notably, and most pertinent as we prepare to celebrate Independence Day 2023, Lincoln declared: "I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence."

Explaining what he meant by invoking the sentiments embodied in the Declaration, Lincoln declared: "It was not the mere matter of the separation of the Colonies from the motherland; but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men."

The citizenry of our country is riddled with deep divisions, some involving matters of high principle and others not so much so. And, of course, our politics reflect these divisions, as it always has in our democracy, and on matters of principle that is appropriate. But I can't help believing that perhaps our politicians could find more common ground if every day, or if only occasionally, they said to themselves: "I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence."

Towards the end of his remarks in Philadelphia on that day in February 1861 at the site of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln said that if the country could not be saved without giving up on the fundamental principle of equality of all men, "I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it."

Lincoln was assassinated on April 15, 1865, little more than four years later – but not before the Declaration's sentiments, which so inspired him and of which he so often spoke, had been vindicated by the Union's victory in the bloody Civil War.

I respect the views of those who disagree with Chief Justice John Roberts' majority opinion in Students for Fair Admissions. But, for me, it was time for the Supreme Court to return to the foundational equality principle at the core of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment. As the Court emphasized, pursuant to the Equal Protection Clause: "Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it."

On this Independence Day, it's appropriate to reflect on the meaning of the Declaration's self-evident truths.

Best wishes to you and your family for a safe and meaningful Independence Day 2023!

 

My previous Independence Day messages are here: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022.

 

Labor Day 2021

There is a still lively debate as to whether Peter McGuire or Matthew Maguire should be credited as the Founder of Labor Day. You can review the particulars of the debate on the Department of Labor's "History of Labor Day" page. What is not in dispute is that on June 28, 1894, President Grover Cleveland signed a law making the first Monday in September of each year a national holiday. The origin of an annual holiday to honor working men and women was clearly rooted in the organized labor movement, and it is certainly appropriate, on Labor Day, to acknowledge the generally positive historical contributions of private sector (non-government) labor unions to the nation's economic progress.

But here I wish to draw attention to the relationship between the labor of individuals, the creation of private property by virtue of such labor, and freedom. To do so, below is material that I have largely published previously, including on previous Labor Days. To my mind, while I will happily credit either Peter McGuire or Matthew Maguire as a founder of Labor Day – by the way, they both attended the country’s Labor Day parade in New York City in 1894 – for my purposes, it is more important today to recall how Abraham Lincoln resorted to the Declaration of Independence and the nation's Founders in thinking about the connection between labor, property, and freedom. (My colleague, Seth Cooper, the Free State Foundation's Director of Policy Studies, deserves credit too for the research and writing that led to the previous publication of much of this material.) 

 

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Though Lincoln is not often associated with, or quoted on, Labor Day, a holiday first observed a quarter century after his assassination, there is good reason, on Labor Day and every day, to consider his views on what, before the Civil War, was called the "free labor" movement.

An integral part of the anti-slavery "Free Soil" movement was rooted in a "free labor" philosophy. Here is how prize-winning historian Eric Foner put it in Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War:

For the concept of ‘free labor’ lay at the heart of the Republican ideology, and expressed a coherent social outlook, a model of the good society. Political anti-slavery was not merely a negative doctrine, an attack on southern slavery and the society built upon it; it was an affirmation of the superiority of the social system of the North—a dynamic, expanding capitalist society, whose achievements and destiny were almost wholly the result of the dignity and opportunities which it offered the average laboring man.

In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln famously called for a "new birth of freedom." Given his background and his philosophical grounding in "free labor" antislavery principles, which he consistently related to the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence, it is not surprising that Lincoln often cojoined freedom to an individual's natural right to enjoy the fruits of his own labor. For Lincoln, this natural right was inherent in the Declaration's pronouncement of the self-evident truth that all men are endowed with the unalienable right to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."

As far back as 1847 speaking at a Whig event, Lincoln said this:

I believe each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor, so far as it in no wise interferes with any other man’s rights and that the general government, upon principle, has no right to interfere with anything other than that general class of things that does concern the whole.

And Lincoln frequently reminded his audiences that, "I always thought the man that made the corn should eat the corn."

This colloquial Lincolnian expression is stated in a decidedly less philosophically formal fashion than John Locke's famous injunction contained in his Second Treatise of Government:

[E]very man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.

As President, Lincoln affirmed this Lockean view of labor in his Reply to the New York Workingmen's Democratic Republican Association in 1864:

Property is the fruit of labor...property is desirable...is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself….

As Seth Cooper and I show in our book, The Constitutional Foundations of Intellectual Property, Lincoln's views regarding free labor and property rights extended to protection of intellectual property as well. In Chapter 10, "Adding Fuel to the Fire of Genius: Abraham Lincoln, Free Labor, and the Logic of Intellectual Property," we discuss Lincoln's 1859 Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, where he said this:

The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This, say its advocates, is free labor – the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all – gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.

*     *     *     *     *

 As we celebrate Labor Day in 2021, at a time when many in America seek, sometimes mightily, to divide us based on all manner of discrete "identities," including race, gender, religion, and class, it is worth taking more than a moment to reflect on Lincoln's understanding of the importance of the "free labor" concept, and especially its integral relationship to a proper understanding of private property rights – and then, to a proper understanding of freedom itself.

On Labor Day, and every day, we should never forget the dignity that is inherent in an individual's natural right to enjoy the fruits of his or her own labor, or as Eric Foner put it, free labor's central role in America's "dynamic, expanding capitalist society, whose achievements and destiny were almost wholly the result of the dignity and opportunities which it offered the average laboring man."

*    *    *    *    *

 Best wishes to all for a happy and safe Labor Day!

Labor Day 2020

Abraham Lincoln is not often associated with, or quoted on, Labor Day, a holiday first observed a quarter century after his assassination. But there is good reason, especially now but for all seasons, to consider Lincoln's views on what, before the Civil War, was called the "free labor" movement.

 

An integral part of the anti-slavery "Free Soil" movement was rooted in a "free labor" philosophy. Here is how prize-winning historian Eric Foner put it in Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War:

 

For the concept of ‘free labor’ lay at the heart of the Republican ideology, and expressed a coherent social outlook, a model of the good society. Political anti-slavery was not merely a negative doctrine, an attack on southern slavery and the society built upon it; it was an affirmation of the superiority of the social system of the North—a dynamic, expanding capitalist society, whose achievements and destiny were almost wholly the result of the dignity and opportunities which it offered the average laboring man.

 

In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln famously called for a "new birth of freedom." Given his background and his philosophical grounding in "free labor," anti-slavery principles, which he consistently related to the Declaration of Independence's ideals, it is not surprising that Lincoln often joined freedom to an individual's natural right to enjoy the fruits of his own labor. For Lincoln, such right was inherent in the Declaration's self-evident truth that all men are endowed with the unalienable right to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."

 

In many of his addresses, including as far back as 1847 speaking at a Whig event, Lincoln said this, usually in more or less the same words:

 

I believe each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor, so far as it in no wise interferes with any other man’s rights and that the general government, upon principle, has no right to interfere with anything other than that general class of things that does concern the whole.

As often, Lincoln reminded his audiences that, "I always thought the man that made the corn should eat the corn."

 

This colloquial Lincolnian expression is stated in a decidedly less philosophically formal fashion than John Locke's famous injunction contained in his Second Treatise of Government:

 

[E]very man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.

 

As President, Lincoln affirmed this Lockean view of labor in his Reply to the New York Workingmen's Democratic Republican Association in 1864:

Property is the fruit of labor...property is desirable...is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself….

 

As my Free State Foundation colleague Seth Cooper and I show in our book, The Constitutional Foundations of Intellectual Property, Lincoln's views regarding free labor and property rights extended to protection of intellectual property as well. In Chapter 10, "Adding Fuel to the Fire of Genius: Abraham Lincoln, Free Labor, and the Logic of Intellectual Property," from which much of this special message is drawn, we discuss Lincoln's 1859 Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, where he said this:

 

The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This, say its advocates, is free labor – the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all – gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.

 

As we celebrate Labor Day in 2020, at a time when many in America seek to divide us based on all manner of discrete "identities," including race, gender, religion, and class, it is worth taking more than a moment to reflect on Lincoln's understanding of the importance of the "free labor" concept, and especially its integral relationship to a proper understanding of property rights, and of freedom itself.

 

On Labor Day, and every day, we should never forget the dignity that is inherent in an individual's natural right to enjoy the fruits of his or her own labor – and as Eric Foner put it, free labor's central role in America's "dynamic, expanding capitalist society, whose achievements and destiny were almost wholly the result of the dignity and opportunities which it offered the average laboring man."

 

And an important postscript: It is especially important – you could say essential – to acknowledge the extraordinary contributions of so many "essential workers" who, in so many ways, have provided and maintained many crucial services during the pandemic. Thanks to these special individuals who have labored for the benefit of us all.

Labor Day 2017

Here is one of my favorite quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr., a fitting thought for Labor Day.

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”

“No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”

Instead of trying to improve upon Dr. King – which is difficult to do in any event – I am pasting in immediately below my message from last Labor Day. While not new, I don’t think it is out of date. And, of course, the line from Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King, Jr., while surely not always straight and true, nevertheless is a line that continues to have meaning with respect to the close relationship between free labor and individual freedom.   

Labor Day: Abraham Lincoln, Free Labor, Freedom and Free Enterprise

By Randolph J. May

On Labor Day – as on many other days – I often find my thoughts turning to Abraham Lincoln’s words. And so it was on this past Labor Day, for Lincoln had much to say that is worth considering concerning “labor” and its relationship to individual freedom and the American free enterprise system.

Lincoln, of course, was America’s first Republican president. But I fear that far too few today know that the party of Lincoln grew out of the antebellum “Free Soil, Free Labor” movement, itself grounded, of course, in the growing antislavery agitation leading up to Lincoln’s election in 1860.

As Seth Cooper, my Free State Foundation colleague, and I showed in our recent book, The Constitutional Foundations of Intellectual Property, Lincoln’s thought concerning “free labor” was grounded largely in his understanding of the meaning of the Declaration of Independence, most particularly the Declaration’s proclamation that all persons are endowed with certain inalienable rights, including “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” For Lincoln, this meant, consistent with the Lockean view, that every person possesses a natural right to enjoy the fruits of his or her own labor. As Lincoln put it as early as 1847, “each person is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruits of his labor.”

Or, as Lincoln later put it more colorfully: “I always thought the man that made the corn should eat the corn.”

And here is Lincoln, in his 1859 Address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, eloquently connecting his understanding of “free labor” to the opportunity for individual advancement in the American free enterprise system:

The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This, say its advocates, is free labor – the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all – gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all. If any continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune.

Of course, when Abraham Lincoln uttered all these words, the evil of slavery had yet to be eradicated. And much more needed to be accomplished in the decades after the Civil War to protect the rights of those who had been enslaved to make meaningful the opportunity to reap the benefits of “free labor.”

That said, as we think about Labor Day, I submit it’s certainly worth taking a little time to consider what Lincoln had to say about free labor, freedom, and free enterprise. Like much of what Lincoln said, his words still resonate – and have meaning – in 2016.

PS –  If you are interested in learning more about Lincoln and the Free Labor movement, especially including what Lincoln said about protecting intellectual property rights in the context of a person’s natural right to enjoy the fruits of his or her labor, see Chapter 10 of our book, The Constitutional Foundations of Intellectual Property – A Natural Rights Perspective.

  

Independence Day 2017

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, without question one of the most powerful, eloquent speeches in the American canon, consists of only 272 words and was delivered in less than three minutes.

Compare Lincoln’s far less well known, but nevertheless eloquent address in Peoria, Illinois, on October 16, 1854. The Peoria Address, as it came to be known, consists of over 17,000 words and took Lincoln three hours and ten minutes to deliver. 

The Peoria Address was a response to passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which voided a restriction on the extension of slavery that had been part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The speech marked Lincoln’s reentry into politics and thrust him into the national debate over slavery.

For present purposes, the Peoria Address is relevant to understanding the meaning of Independence Day. Indeed, Lincoln grounded his extended argument against slavery firmly in the philosophy and principles expounded in the Founders’ Declaration of 1776, not the Constitution of 1787.

While Lincoln referred to the Declaration throughout his Peoria Address, not surprisingly, he made the true core of the Declaration the heart of his own argument:

What I do say is, that no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other's consent. I say this is the leading principle---the sheet anchor of American republicanism. Our Declaration of Independence says:

"We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, DERIVING THEIR JUST POWERS FROM THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED." [The italics and ALL CAPS are in Lincoln’s original draft of the speech.]

Thus, in his opposition to slavery, Lincoln held fast to the Founders’ appeal to natural rights, or what sometimes is referred to as “higher law.” When Jefferson invoked the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” and “self-evident” truths at the Declaration’s beginning, this was simply another way of declaring that the right to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” is grounded in natural rights or natural law, not dependent upon grants of positive law conferred by government.

To be sure, it was necessary to form a government to secure those rights through positive law. And that is what the Founders did in 1787 when they drafted our Constitution creating our government with limited, enumerated, and separated powers. And when they ratified the Ninth Amendment in 1791, which provides: “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

Lincoln began the Gettysburg Address in November 1863 with this unforgettable invocation: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” It is easy to forget – unless the mathematical calculation is ingrained in memory – that Lincoln’s “four score and seven years” harkens back to 1776, not 1787. To the Declaration, not the Constitution, for the conception of the central ideals embodying the new nation.

In his Peoria Address and many other times, especially in the 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln rested his antislavery arguments on an appeal to the Declaration’s ideals, an appeal to a “higher law” than that embodied in positive law.

Notably, at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on the eve of his Inauguration, Lincoln once again invoked 1776, exclaiming that the Revolution was “not a mere matter of separation . . . from the motherland, but that something in the Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.”

I do not maintain that the Declaration of Independence itself is law. But I do say that the ideals found in the Declaration - the invocation of those self-evident truths that all men and women are endowed with certain inalienable rights, including the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - were an inspiration in 1776 and should be on this Independence Day in 2017. Indeed, as "We the People" strive for what the Constitution of 1787 calls a "more perfect Union" we should never forget the Declaration's ideals that Lincoln called "the sheet anchor of American republicanism."

All that said, my best wishes for a perfect Independence Day weekend, whether at the beach or backyard barbecue, or wherever you might be enjoying your liberty and pursuing your happiness!

My previous Independence Day messages are here: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013,  2014, 2015, and 2016.