Sir, - G.T. Dempsey (May 1st) wants to project Abraham Lincoln's populist notion of government onto the American Founding Fathers, and offers quotes from two documents in an effort to support his argument: but neither document was written by the Founding Fathers (who are more accurately known as the Framers of the Constitution).
The line offered by Mr Dempsey about "governments deriving their powers from the consent of the governed" is from the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration, which forms no part of the United States Constitution had just one purpose, which was to justify the colonies' decision to secede from the British empire by means of violent revolution. It was a document for the destruction of government. It was not written by the Founding Fathers who dealt only with the establishment of government.
The Framers were contemptuous of mass democracy and they allowed no provision for it in the original United States Constitution: the States remained absolutely free to choose on their own how they were going to elect individuals to congress and the presidency. When the Framers wrote "the people", they meant "the people in the States", not the people in the aggregate.
When Lincoln delivered his populist Gettysburg Address in 1863, he was engaging in Yankee propaganda. He spoke of the founding of the United States, and pinned the date at "four score and seven years ago." But that would count back to 1776, the year of the revolution, not to 1787, the year of the Constitution.
It was important for Lincoln to propagate the doctrine that the country had begun with the Declaration of Independence, and not with the Constitution, for during the Federal Convention, at which the Constitution was drafted, the delegates specifically considered and rejected the idea that the Federal government could coerce the States. The Constitution also guaranteed the States the right to secede from the Union which they themselves had invented.
Lincoln needed an excuse to justify his imperalist aggression against the South. The Declaration could be used to justify war. (It also presented a cogent argument for the right of secession, but Lincoln never referred to that).
All this is why Lincoln disregarded the Constitution in favour of the Declaration. He was, at Gettysburg, in the midst of blood soaked coercion of the sovereign States of the Confederacy. His actions against the South were in clear violation of the major intents of the Founding Fathers.
As for Mr Dempsey's suggestion that the line from the Virginia Bill of Rights of 1776 supports his argument that "popular sovereignty had been a truism for the Founding Fathers"; the suggestion fails. The Virginia document has no constitutional significance. Even the Virginia delegates to the Federal Convention did not propose that their Bill of Rights be attached to the Constitution. The Bill was just a document for Virginia; and it was, by the way, drafted by George Mason, who was leader of the opposition at the Federal Convention. Mason refused to sign the Constitution. - Yours, etc.
Merchants Quay,
Dublin 8.