The "No True Founder" Fallacy and Dred Scott v Sanford (1857)
In July of 2020 I published a review of Robert Reilly’s book, America on Trial (three years ago- but those were COVID years, so it seems like aeons ago). In it I mentioned a point that I explain to every class when I teach the Dred Scott decision:
In logic, there is a fallacy called the “no true Scotsman.” The trick of it is, examples to the contrary are illegitimately dismissed. If I were to claim, “No Scotsman runs from a fight,” and you were to point out that “Douglas ran from a fight yesterday and he’s from Scotland,” I might try to dismiss your counterexample by saying, “Douglas must not be a true Scotsman.” If I had no evidence showing that Douglas was not a Scot, I would be committing a logical fallacy by unreasonably dismissing the counterexample.
I would contend that “no true Scotsman” fallacy appears over and over in the historiography of the American Founding. When advocates want to claim something about the Founding Fathers but have a weak case for it, they often try to dismiss counterexamples in this fashion. Perhaps the most destructive “no true Founder” fallacy was committed by Roger Taney in regard to the Founders’ views of slavery. In the Dred Scott decision Chief Justice Taney had no evidence from the writings of the Founders to show that African Americans were not counted among “all men” who were said to be “created equal” in the Declaration of Independence. However, Taney averred no true founder believed the slaves were created equal. He dismissed evidence to the contrary by pointing to the fact that Founders such as Jefferson owned slaves, and therefore would have been hypocritical if they believed the Declaration rights applied to slaves. Adding another fallacy, Taney slyly asserted that no true Founder would be a hypocrite: “the conduct of the distinguished men who framed the Declaration of Independence would have been utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted.” But that fallacious reasoning did not prove Taney’s own thesis in any way, as Lincoln and others pointed out at the time.
Chief Justice Taney purports to be following the Founders original intent- but he lies about the original intent in his Dred Scott opinion. Consider this passage from Dred Scott (1857):
"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among them is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
The general words above quoted would seem to embrace the whole human family, and if they were used in a similar instrument at this day would be so understood. But it is too clear for dispute that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration, for if the language, as understood in that day, would embrace them, the conduct of the distinguished men who framed the Declaration of Independence would have been utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted, and instead of the sympathy of mankind to which they so confidently appealed, they would have deserved and received universal rebuke and reprobation.
Yet the men who framed this declaration were great men -- high in literary acquirements, high in their sense of honor, and incapable of asserting principles inconsistent with those on which they were acting. They perfectly understood the meaning of the language they used, and how it would be understood by others, and they knew that it would not in any part of the civilized world be supposed to embrace the negro race, which, by common consent, had been excluded from civilized Governments and the family of nations, and doomed to slavery. They spoke and acted according to the then established doctrines and principles, and in the ordinary language of the day, and no one misunderstood them. The unhappy black race were separated from the white by indelible marks, and laws long before established, and were never thought of or spoken of except as property, and when the claims of the owner or the profit of the trader were supposed to need protection.
They didn’t really mean that all human beings were equal in rights; they couldn’t have, says Taney, because no true founder could have meant that. Unfortunately this lie about the phrase “all men are created equal” has been repeated over and over again since Taney, by acknowledged enemies of the American Founders such as Nikole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 project:
The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, signed on July 4, 1776, proclaims that ‘‘all men are created equal’’ and ‘‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.’’ But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst.
At the same time, Taney’s interpretation has also repeated by purported friends of the Founders. Many political conservatives have repeated it over the years; see for example as Wilmoore Kendall and George Carey in The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition:
Do the drafters really mean “all men”? That is, do they mean it literally in the sense of “every man”? We might say so given the fact that women were seemingly excluded from the most reasonable injunction of any such terminology. However, the assembly that approved the Declaration would not subscribe to the denunciation of slavery that Jefferson sought to include, so that we might be led to believe that the signers were talking of equality of men in a sense far short of that which modern egalitarians hold.
The fact that both “friends” and foes of the Founders repeat the no true founder fallacy makes the situation all the more confusing. Which is why it is all the more necessary to teach what the Founders actually wrote.