"But assuming the same premises, to wit, that all men are equal by the law of nature and of nations, the right of property in slaves falls to the ground; for one who is equal to another cannot be the owner or property of that other"
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Seward isolates a premise his era’s politicians claimed to honor: that all men are equal by the law of nature and of nations. Accept that premise, he insists, and the legal fiction of property in human beings collapses. Equality and ownership are mutually exclusive categories. Property can be owned precisely because it is not a moral equal; a person who is an equal cannot be reduced to a thing without erasing the very equality affirmed at the outset.
This argument draws on Enlightenment natural law and on the law of nations, the body of principles that nineteenth-century jurists invoked to describe civilized norms among states. By tying equality to both natural reason and international standards, Seward elevates antislavery above a regional moral sentiment and situates it within a broader legal and philosophical consensus. He also practices a kind of argumentative jujitsu: he grants his opponents the premise many publicly endorsed, then shows that their defense of slavery contradicts it. The force comes not from sentiment alone but from logic.
The context is American politics on the brink of rupture. As a leading antislavery Whig and later Republican, and ultimately Lincoln’s secretary of state, Seward pressed the claim that there is a higher law than statutes protecting slavery. His formulation challenges legal positivism that treated enslaved people as commodities under state codes. If equality is a foundational American creed, articulated in the Declaration of Independence and echoed in international abolitionist currents, then statutes making persons into property are not merely unjust; they are incoherent.
The statement also clarifies the boundary between property and personhood. Rights can be traded in markets; equals cannot. To concede equal moral standing is to concede reciprocal duties and claims, which ownership by definition denies. By making that contradiction stark, Seward turns antislavery into a test of whether the republic’s principles govern its practice, foreshadowing the constitutional transformation that would culminate in the Thirteenth Amendment.
This argument draws on Enlightenment natural law and on the law of nations, the body of principles that nineteenth-century jurists invoked to describe civilized norms among states. By tying equality to both natural reason and international standards, Seward elevates antislavery above a regional moral sentiment and situates it within a broader legal and philosophical consensus. He also practices a kind of argumentative jujitsu: he grants his opponents the premise many publicly endorsed, then shows that their defense of slavery contradicts it. The force comes not from sentiment alone but from logic.
The context is American politics on the brink of rupture. As a leading antislavery Whig and later Republican, and ultimately Lincoln’s secretary of state, Seward pressed the claim that there is a higher law than statutes protecting slavery. His formulation challenges legal positivism that treated enslaved people as commodities under state codes. If equality is a foundational American creed, articulated in the Declaration of Independence and echoed in international abolitionist currents, then statutes making persons into property are not merely unjust; they are incoherent.
The statement also clarifies the boundary between property and personhood. Rights can be traded in markets; equals cannot. To concede equal moral standing is to concede reciprocal duties and claims, which ownership by definition denies. By making that contradiction stark, Seward turns antislavery into a test of whether the republic’s principles govern its practice, foreshadowing the constitutional transformation that would culminate in the Thirteenth Amendment.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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