Lincoln and the Declaration
by Allen C. Guelzo
For Abraham Lincoln, the American Revolution was the great event of American history, and perhaps even the hinge of modern history as he understood it. “Of our political revolution of ’76, we all are justly proud,” Lincoln said in 1842. Certainly for Americans, “it has given us a degree of political freedom, far exceeding that of any other of the nations of the earth.” Beyond even American horizons, the Revolution has offered “the world … a solution of that long-mooted problem, as to the capability of man to govern himself.” And with that gift in its hand, the Revolution would surely become “the germ which has vegetated, and still is to grow and expand into the universal liberty of mankind.” In Lincoln’s imagination, the Revolution acquired an almost religious power. Its ideas constituted what he called in his great Peoria speech in 1854 “our ancient faith.”1 In 1861, he would profess a devotion to that “ancient faith” so deep that he would insist that he had “never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence,” and “would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender” its principles.2
Lincoln was not a man of much public emotion. But “if he was … eulogizing the Declaration of Independence,” wrote his longtime law partner, William Henry Herndon, Lincoln would extend “his arms, palms of his hands outward,” and “in his greatest inspiration,” and would hold “both of his hands out above his head at an angle of about fifty degrees, hands open or clenched according to his ideas or feelings … as if appealing to some superior power for assistance or support; or that he might embrace the spirit of that which he so dearly loved.3
It was the idea of the Declaration, much more than the Revolution’s battles and places, which held Lincoln’s attention. His “childhood” reading of Mason Weems’ famous biography of Washington, with its description of “the crossing of the [Delaware] river; the contest with the Hessians; the great hardships endured at that time, all fixed themselves on my memory more than any single revolutionary event.” But even then, what Lincoln distilled from reading Weems’ narrative were the principles of the Revolution. “I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for,” Lincoln reminisced, “something even more than National Independence … something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come.”4
That something, Lincoln expressed in one lapidary paragraph in the message he sent to Congress for its special called session on July 4, 1861. “On the side of the Union,” he wrote, “it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men – to lift artificial weights from all shoulders – to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all – to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” That was for Lincoln the essential purpose of the Revolution. “Our adversaries have adopted some Declarations of Independence,” to be sure; but they are “unlike the good old one, penned by Jefferson,” in that they “omit the words ‘all men are created equal.’”5
That commitment to equality served as the nuclear core of the Republic. He began his most famous utterance – the address at Gettysburg in November 1863 – with the Declaration’s fundamental announcement that “all men are created equal.” This, Lincoln considered the founding “proposition” of the American Republic, and the one whose re-appropriation by the generation of the Civil War would guarantee “a new birth of freedom.” That equality was based on the recognition that, while not everyone was created equal in how swiftly they could run or how eloquently they could speak, they were created equal in their endowment by their Creator with what Jefferson called certain unalienable Rights, among which are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, and which taken together, summed up virtually all that was of importance in political life. Equality thus became, in Lincoln’s words, “the father of all moral principle” in politics, and allowed everyone to claim a kinship to the American Revolution as though “they were blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration.”6
Hard on the heels of that equality proposition, in Lincoln’s mind, was the Declaration’s balancing proposition that in a government of equal citizens, the legitimacy of its government depends upon the consent of the governed. And that was especially important for Lincoln in the 1850s, since the denial of that consent was what lay at the heart of enslaving other human beings. It was the core of Lincoln’s “ancient faith” that “the just powers of governments are derived from the consent of the governed.” Precisely because “all men” are created equal, “no man” should consider himself “good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent.” Lincoln almost exhausted his vocabulary of centrality on this point: it was “the leading principle – the sheet anchor of American republicanism.”7
It is when that consent is unsought, or when consent is waved-away, that governments lose the gem of legitimacy, and at that moment, Jefferson wrote, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government. This is the right of revolution itself, that when a government has lost legitimacy and shows no sign of interest in regaining it, “any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.” This, he added, “is a most valuable, – a most sacred right – a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.” Whenever consent is set at naught and the natural rights of the people tossed aside, “it is the right of any people, sufficiently numerous for national independence, to throw off, to revolutionize, their existing form of government, and to establish such other in its stead as they may choose.”8
This could have posed no small degree of embarrassment for Lincoln in 1861, since the formation of the breakaway Southern Confederacy could be construed in precisely the revolutionary light Lincoln had praised before as “a most sacred right.” And he conceded that the Southern demand for nationalizing slavery was indeed revolutionary – but only in the most perverted sense of the term. “At most, revolution is but a moral right, when exercised for a morally justifiable cause. When exercised without such a cause revolution is no right, but simply a wicked exercise of physical power.”9 The irony of the situation in 1861 was that revolution was precisely the word that the Southern states wanted to avoid. By insisting that they were performing a secession, they could pretend that what they were doing was perfectly legal and continuous with the past – and that therefore all the pre-secession laws concerning slavery in particular remained in force, without interruption. To speak of their withdrawal from the American Union as a revolution might have endangered that continuity. “The sovereign states here represented have proceeded to form this Confederacy,” declared Jefferson Davis on the day in March, 1861, when he was inaugurated as the provisional president of the Confederate States of America, “and it is by abuse of language that their act has been denominated a revolution.” Lincoln, in effect, turned the Declaration back on them: he would grant them the legitimacy of an action they did not dare claim, provided they were willing to take the same chances Washington, Jefferson and the others had been willing to take; but they were not willing to do so, preferring instead to claim a right to secession which simply did not exist.
Lincoln faced a more technical challenge in reconciling the differences between the Declaration and the other great document of the Revolutionary era, the Constitution. The Declaration might be the source of all his sentiments, but the Constitution was the nation’s supreme law and it said nothing about anyone being created equal; if anything, it gave a squeamishly reluctant legitimacy to slavery through the three-fifths clause and a timed allowance for the continuation of the trans-Atlantic slave-trade. Hence, abolitionists, from William Bowditch to Wendell Phillips, solved this conundrum by tossing the Constitution aside, or, in the example of William Lloyd Garrison, burning it. It only seemed logical, then, to abolitionists that “to swear to support the Constitution of the United States” was a desecration of “the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence.”10
But not to Lincoln, for whom principle always had to walk hand-in-hand with law, especially when law was the product of the same hands which had made the Revolution and the Declaration. It was bad enough that “an increasing number of men … for the sake of perpetuating slavery, are beginning to assail and to ridicule … the declaration that ‘all men are created free and equal.’” He recoiled at the slavemasters who, “to aid in making the bondage of the negro universal and eternal,” have “assailed, and sneered at, and construed, and hawked at, and torn” the Declaration, “till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it.” But it was worse still when the opponents of slavery were singing the same song, but about the Constitution. Even if it was true that abolitionists’ “faces are set Zionwards,” too many of them were “utterly lawless” and “the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with.”11
If anything, Lincoln struggled to bring the Declaration and the Constitution into harmony, as though both had been created as part of a single revolutionary plan. Much as he appealed to his hearers in 1856 to “come to the rescue of this great principle of equality,” he immediately added, “Don’t interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.” But the most potent image he summoned to explain his understanding of the Revolution’s two primary papers was a biblical one, from the twenty-fifth chapter of Proverbs: the apple of gold in the picture of silver which together compose a word fitly spoken. The Declaration was “the word, ‘fitly spoken’ which has proved an ‘apple of gold’ to us,” while the Constitution and the Union it created “are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it.”12
Nevertheless, even Lincoln acknowledged that the Declaration had at least some measure of precedence. “The picture was made, not to conceal, or destroy the apple; but to adorn, and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple – not the apple for the picture.” The proposition to which the republic was dedicated was the Declaration’s announcement that all men are created equal, and even though “without the Constitution and the Union, we could not have attained … our great prosperity,” Lincoln saw that “there is something back of these, entwining more closely about the human heart,” and, Lincoln insisted, “That something is the principle of ‘Liberty to all’” which found its “most happy, and fortunate” expression in “our Declaration of Independence.” The question for him, and for much of his presidency, was just how far the Declaration’s precedence stood ahead of the Constitution.13
In the end, Lincoln had no formula beyond a biblical metaphor for harmonizing the Declaration and the Constitution. What he did have as guides, however, were the examples of the Revolutionary leaders, and in particular the example of Thomas Jefferson.14 And it is certainly strange to consider the pride of place Lincoln grants to Thomas Jefferson when it is remembered that Lincoln was fully aware of Jefferson’s moral hypocrisy in the case of Sally Hemings. This, according to Herndon, made “a powerful impression on his mind,” so much so that “Mr. Lincoln never liked Jefferson’s moral character after that.”15
But Lincoln drew a sharp line of distinction between Jefferson’s private vices and public virtues, just as he did for Zachary Taylor and Henry Clay. Whatever moral guilt Jefferson earned, still “the principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society,” and the Sage of Monticello deserved at least some measure of redemption for being “the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence … had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to‑day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling‑block to the very harbingers of re‑appearing tyranny and oppression.” And even Lincoln’s famous warning that Americans in 1862 must “nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth” is almost certainly a borrowing from Jefferson’s exhortation in 1820, “We are the world’s last hope; and its loss will be on our heads.”16
Lincoln’s reverence for the Declaration (and its author) was one of his most remarked-upon traits. “No man has seen more clearly or felt more deeply than Mr. Lincoln,” wrote the North American Review in an 1865 tribute to Lincoln, “that … the cause in which we are contending … is the defence of human rights against the attacks of those who practically deny them.” The revitalization of the nation’s principles which he hoped would ensure a new birth of freedom was rooted thickly around the fundamental proposition of America’s revolutionary Declaration.17 Anything less than that falls short not only of the Revolutionary past, but of Abraham Lincoln’s promise for the future.
“Temperance Address” (February 22, 1842), “Speech at Lewistown, Illinois” (August 17, 1858) and “Speech at Peoria, Illinois” (October 16, 1854), in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. R.P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 2:276, 547.
Herndon to Ward H. Lamon (March 6, 1870) and to Jesse W. Weik (February 11, 1887), in Herndon on Lincoln: Letters, ed. D.L. Wilson & R.O. Davis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 117, 233; “Speech on the Sub-Treasury” (December 26, 1839), “Speech at Peoria, Illinois” (October 16, 1854), “Speech at Vandalia, Illinois” (September 23, 1856), “Farewell Address at Springfield, Illinois”(February 11, 1861) and “Speech in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania” (February 22, 1861), in CW, 1;170, 2:267, 378, 4:190, 240.
Herndon to Truman Bartlett (July 19, 1887), in Herndon on Lincoln: Letters, 439-40.
“Address to the New Jersey Senate at Trenton, New Jersey” (February 21, 1861), in CW, 4:235-6; Weems, The Life of Washington: A New Edition with Primary Documents, ed. Peter Onuf (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996), 68-9.
“Message to Congress in Special Session” (July 4, 1861), in CW, 4:438. Technically, the Southern secession ordinances most often used the words of the Constitution’s preamble – We the people of…. – rather than the Declaration of Independence, but it is true that the word equal does not appear in any of them.
“Speech in Chicago, Illinois” (July 10, 1858), in CW, 2:499-500; Lucas E. Morel, Lincoln and the American Founding (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2020), 30.
“Speech at Peoria, Illinois” (October 16, 1854), in CW, 2:265-66.
“Speech in United States House of Representatives: The War with Mexico” (January 12, 1848) and “Call for a Kossuth Meeting” (January 5, 1852), in CW, 1:438, 2:115.
“Speech in United States House of Representatives: The War with Mexico” (January 12, 1848), “Speech at Springfield, Illinois” (October 4, 1854), “’A House Divided’: Speech at Springfield, Illinois” (June 16, 1858) and “Message to Congress in Special Session” (July 4, 1861), in CW, 1:439, 2:241, 245, 461-2, 4:255, 425, 440.
Bowditch, Slavery and the Constitution (Boston: Robert F. Walcutt, 1849), 150; Phillips, The Constitution a Pro-slavery Compact: Or, Extracts from the Madison Papers (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1845), v-vi, 111.
“Eulogy on Henry Clay” (July 6, 1852) and “Speech at Springfield, Illinois” (June 26, 1857), in CW, 2:130, 404; Lincoln to John Hay, in Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, ed. D.&V. Fehrenbacher (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 217.
“Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois” (January 27, 1838), “Speech at Kalamazoo, Michigan” (August 27, 1856) and “Fragment on the Constitution and the Union,” in CW, 1:112, 2:366, 4:168-69.
“Fragment on the Constitution and the Union,” “Opinion on the Admission of West Virginia into the Union” (December 31, 1862) and “To Erastus Corning and Others” (June 12, 1863), in CW, 4: 168-9, 6:27, 265.
Madison makes an appearance as the “Father of the Constitution” in Lincoln’s 1843 “Campaign Circular from Whig Committee” (March 8, 1843), in CW, 1:312. Otherwise, Madison is mentioned only as part of a Revolutionary line-up in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, where Lincoln appeals to “Washington, and Jefferson, and Madison” as examples of how slavery had been intended for “ultimate extinction.” See “First Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois” (August 21, 1858), in CW, 3:18-19. John Adams, likewise, merits only a passing mention as proof that “Republicans hold to the same principles which Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison and their compeers held.” See “Speech at Beloit, Wisconsin” (October 1, 1859), in CW, 4:484. Alexander Hamilton only appears in Lincoln’s documents as the grandfather of Lewis McLane Hamilton, whom Lincoln recommends for a commission in 1862. See “To Edwin M. Stanton”(August 18, 1862), in CW, Supplement 2:57.
Herndon to Theodore F. Dwight (December 30, 1866), in Herndon on Lincoln: Letters, 65.
“To Henry L. Pierce and Others” (April 6, 1859) and “Annual Message to Congress” (December 1, 1862), in CW, 3:375-6, 5:537; Jefferson, “Opinion on the Constitutionality of a National Bank” (February 15, 1791), in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. P.L. Ford (New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 1895), 5:285; Jefferson to Caesar A. Rodney (October 9, 1820), in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, ed. T.J. Looney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 16:342.
“Abraham Lincoln,” North American Review 100 (January 1865), 8; Brookhiser, Founders’ Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 244; Morel, Lincoln and the American Founding, 27.