On Independence Day, Americans across the nation will gather with friends and family to enjoy cookouts, pool parties, picnics—and, of course, fireworks. It is a good thing to celebrate the nation that Abraham Lincoln once called “the last, best hope of earth.” But we would do well to reread the Declaration of Independence with our loved ones and to remember what the words mean.
In the 1850s, as the United States was careening toward Civil War, Abraham Lincoln urged his fellow citizens to remember the words of the Declaration and to abide by their ideals. When the Supreme Court declared in the Dred Scott decision in 1857, that the words of the Declaration did not include black men and women, Lincoln countered that “the Declaration contemplated the progressive improvement in the condition of all men everywhere.” The principles of liberty, equality, self-government, and inalienable rights were placed into the Declaration not to secure independence from Great Britain, he said, but “for future use” and to augment “the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”
Many in Lincoln’s day (and today) contended that phrases like “all men are created equal” in the Declaration, or “We the People” in the Constitution, only included white men. In response, Lincoln showed ways that conditions were better for black Americans at the time of the Founding than they were by the time of the Civil War. In one of his most pointed examples, he reminded his audiences that black men had the right to vote in at least five states during the founding era. (In fact, recent historical scholarship has shown that as many as twelve states had no race-based restrictions for voting—and black men with property voted in a number of states in the early republic, just as white men with property did.) As Lincoln once put it to a Kentucky slaveholder, “On the question of liberty, as a principle, we are not what we have been.” Ironically enough, he thought Americans were more devoted to liberty when they were surrounded by slaves.
Democrats like Sen. Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois argued that the Declaration only applied to white men who were living in the American Colonies in 1776. If that were the case, Lincoln countered, then “the Declaration is of no practical use now—mere rubbish—old wadding left to rot on the battlefield after the victory is won,”—and there was little reason “to celebrate the ‘Fourth.’” To a Kentucky slaveholder, Lincoln wrote in 1855, “The fourth of July has not quite dwindled away; it is still a great day—for burning fire-crackers!!!”
Lincoln understood that the principles of the Declaration were a special gift to the world—and throughout his adult life in politics he encouraged Americans to abide by their founding creed. In a brief, impromptu speech at Independence Hall on George Washington’s birthday in 1861, Lincoln declared “that all the political sentiments I entertain have been drawn, so far as I have been able to draw them, from the sentiments which originated and were given to the world from this hall. I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” Since his boyhood, Lincoln read stories of the Revolution and had “often pondered over the dangers which were incurred by the men who assembled here, and framed and adopted that Declaration of Independence,” as well as “of the army who achieved that Independence.” The “great principle or idea” that motivated them was “that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men.” Warned that he might be killed en route to his inauguration as president, Lincoln added, “I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender” that great principle.
Sadly, Lincoln would eventually die at the hand of a white supremacist who could not bear to think of a nation in which all men and women received equality under the law.
Jonathan W. White is professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University and a fellow with the Jack Miller Center. His latest book is “A Great and Good Man: Rare, First-hand Accounts and Observations of Abraham Lincoln.”
Lucas Morel is professor of politics and head of the Politics Department at Washington and Lee University. He earned his Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University.
