...when Abraham Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address, the words “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” did not refer to the signing of the Constitution but rather to the date of the Declaration Of Independence.
“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 these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” it said. Those concepts did not make it into the Constitution, because leaders in southern states did not believe in them. Instead they believed in property rights, which included the ownership of slaves. Richardson explains:
In Lincoln’s day, fabulously wealthy enslavers had gained control over the government and had begun to argue that the Founders had gotten their worldview terribly wrong. They insisted that their system of human enslavement, which had enabled them to amass fortunes previously unimaginable, was the right one. Most men were dull drudges who must be led by their betters for their own good, southern leaders said. As South Carolina senator and enslaver James Henry Hammond put it, “I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are born equal.’”
In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, then a candidate for the Senate, warned that arguments limiting American equality to white men were the same arguments “that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.” Either people — men, in his day — were equal, or they were not. Lincoln went on, “I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it…where will it stop?”
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...illegal immigrants. That phrase performs essential political work. It marks a population as outside ordinary protection. It reassures everyone else that detention is targeted and procedural.
But detention systems do not remain fixed to their initial category. In Germany, early camps held political enemies. Later they held others. The infrastructure did not change. The classification did.
In the Soviet Union, the Gulag expanded through administrative redefinition — new offenses, broader categories, larger quotas. Infrastructure makes expansion easier than restraint.
...Once physical capacity exists, using it becomes easier — politically, legally, bureaucratically. Expansion rarely arrives as a dramatic announcement. It happens through incremental adjustments — new enforcement priorities, revised definitions, widened discretion. Each change appears limited. The cumulative effect is not.
The early presentation of Dachau shows how normalization forms. The system appears orderly, rational, controlled. Harsh realities are hidden. The language is administrative. Observers see what they are permitted to see. By the time the full character of a detention system becomes undeniable, the infrastructure is already permanent.
The guards are trained. The facilities are staffed. The budgets are embedded. The public is accustomed. And most people still believe it exists for someone else. And once places to concentrate detainees outside of the normal legal system reaches scale, they become enduring instruments of state power that can be deployed against anyone.
A detention network built at this magnitude is not a temporary response. It is a structural shift in what government can do. You do not build a system this large for a moment. You build it for an era.