I. It has been many years since I first wrote that the American Revolution was, at once, an event in time and an idea out of time. (1) Lincoln meant no less when he wrote that Jefferson enshrined in the Declaration of Independence "an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times." (2) It was a commonplace among the Founders (and Lincoln) that the American experiment in self-government was not for Americans alone, but for all mankind. (3) This was not merely an expression of national pride. It was a sober judgment. It was almost as impossible then, as it is now, to imagine circumstances more favorable to the success of this experiment than those that existed at the Founding. It was, and is, hard to imagine this experiment succeeding elsewhere if it failed here. The Civil War clearly was a test, as Lincoln said at Gettysburg, of whether any nation "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" could long endure. (4) The test came when eleven states "seceded" following the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. The Republican platform in that year contained a pledge to end any further extension of slavery into the new territories from which new states might be formed. (5) The seceding states found it intolerable that all new states would be free states, so that eventually three-fourths of the states might be able to abolish slavery by constitutional amendment, without the consent of the slave states. As Lincoln put it in his first inaugural, "One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute." (6)
