Justice in American Thought

The same providential view of justice that erected boundaries against outsiders and allowed Mather to justify the obliteration of a community of Native Americans also called for universal descriptions that would later haunt institutions tethered to partiality and particularity. That is to say, it was contradictory to use a universal language of justice to justify political institutions and then attempt to circumvent and ignore the consequences of this language. The phrase "all men are created equal," a phrase that belongs to the domain of justice, could not be used to justify slavery. In his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln could confidently use the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to oppose the extension of slavery. This task was fraught with obstacles, though. The universality of categories pertaining to justice transformed the American Constitution into a battleground of competing conceptions of morality and conflicting views of the relationship between individuals and the government. For William Lloyd Garrison, the Constitution was a covenant with hell that vitiated its potentiality for individual liberty. Frederick Douglass followed, at first, the Garrisonian view, but he concluded that the founders had bestowed enough room to challenge the institution of slavery. In his speech of May 28, 1856, addressing the radical abolition party convention in New York, Douglass said: "This Constitution sets forth several propositions, which, if carried out, would abolish slavery. What are they? The Constitution declares its object to be 'to form a more perfect union.' How can you form a more perfect union with slavery? … The Constitution is declared to be established for the people, and who are the people? The men and women of the country. We are part of the people" (pp. 389–390).

While Douglass found refuge in the universal goals that the Constitution clearly pursued, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau invoked transcendental categories that were congenial to the providential view of justice. In his opposition to slavery, Emerson saw the universe, nature, power, justice, and the moral order as transcendental realities of a divine unity. The universe, Emerson wrote in 1845, "is not bankrupt: still stands the old heart firm in its seat, and knows that, come what will, the right is and shall be. Justice is for ever and ever" (p. 36). The planter's predicament is always unsafe, no matter how powerful he might appear to be. Nature fights against him, and "as power is always stealing from the idle to the busy hand, it seems inevitable that a revolution is preparing at no distant day to set these disjointed matters right" (p. 37). In the twentieth century, Martin Luther King, Jr., followed Douglass's footsteps and resorted to the universality embedded in the American conception of justice to challenge civil inequalities, and to fulfill Emerson's hope of setting right matters that were still "disjointed."

The providential covenant as a central component of the American conception of justice has shown a remarkable resistance to the passing of time. In 1795, Bishop James Madison painted the providential character in a language that was more emphatic than Winthrop's. God had thrown a veil upon the American continent in order "to conceal it from the nations of the east," thus saving America from the ravages of tyranny and inequality that went untrammeled in the European nations. The veil would not be lifted until the emergence of "a new race of men" that would be responsible for the redemption of humankind. "It is in America," Bishop Madison declared, "that the germs of the universal redemption of the human race from domination and oppression have already begun to be developed" (p. 1312). In 1820, Daniel Webster echoed similar themes in his "Plymouth Oration," and in 1900, Albert Beveridge, the Republican senator from Indiana, portrayed the divine plan that was in the offing.

In addressing the question of acquiring and administering territories whose population, he opined, was not yet ready for self-government, Beveridge asserted that God "has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world" (p. 704). "[O]ur place, therefore, is at the head of the constructing and redeeming nations of the earth" (p. 712).

It is worth noticing that the emphasis on redemption, covenant, natural rights, and government evinced a duty to carry out the designs of divine justice refracted through human institutions. The secular and providential notions of justice thus complemented one another. While the emphasis on legal contracts might have led individuals to seek their own interests, the providential covenant would bring them back to their public duty. It is in this providential notion that one finds the centrality of a legitimate government anchored upon the principle of consent.