“Is there an intelligent man throughout the whole country, is there a Senator, when he has stripped himself of all party prejudice, who will come forward and say that he believes that Mr. Jefferson, when he penned that paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, intended it to embrace the African population? Is there a gentleman in the Senate who believes any such thing?… There is not a man of respectable intelligence who will hazard his reputation upon such an assertion.”[237]
All this is characteristic of the author, as afterward revealed to us.
Then, Sir, in the list we skip to April 5, 1870, when the Senator from Wisconsin ranges himself in the line, characterizing the great truths of the Declaration as “the generalities of that revolutionary pronunciamento.” In reply to myself, he rebuked me, and said that it was my disposition, if I could not find a thing in the Constitution, to seek it in the Declaration of Independence,—and if it were not embodied in “the generalities of that revolutionary pronunciamento,” then to go still further.[238]
I present this exposition with infinite reluctance; but the Senator makes it necessary. In his speech the other day, he undertook to state himself anew with regard to the Declaration. He complained of me because I made the National Constitution and the National Declaration coëqual, and declared, that, if preference be given to one, it must be to the Declaration. To that he replied:—
“Now the true theory is plain.”
Mr. President, you are to have the “true theory” on this important question:—
“If the Senator from Massachusetts says, that in doubtful cases it is the duty of a court, or the duty of the Senate, or the duty of any public officer, to consider the Declaration of Independence, he is right. So he must consider the whole history of this country; he must consider the history of the Colonies, the Articles of Confederation, all anterior history. That is a principle of Municipal Law. A contract entered into between two individuals, in the language of the cases, must be read in the light of the circumstances that surrounded the parties who made it. Certainly the Constitution of the United States must be construed upon the same principle; and when we are considering a doubtful question, the whole former history of the country, the Declaration of Independence, the writings of Washington and of Jefferson and of Madison, the writings in ‘The Federalist,’—everything that pertained to that day and gives color and tone to the Constitution, must be considered.”[239]
Plainly, here is improvement. There is no derision. The truths of the Declaration are no longer “the generalities of that revolutionary pronunciamento.”
Mr. Carpenter. Oh, yes, it is; I stand by that.