Lincoln Defends the “Immortal” Declaration

(The following is part 7 of a series on the American Revolution, which began with the serialization of chapter 7 of my book Defeating Slavery: Hamilton’s American System Showed the Way; that chapter dealt with the Declaration of Independence. Having concluded the serialization in part 4, (Parts 1, 2, and 3 can be found on the blog), I have moved on to some of the debate about the Declaration, which will help us appreciate its uniqueness. Two weeks ago we heard from one of its British opponents, and last week from the formerly enslaved Frederick Douglass. Now we move on to Abraham Lincoln.)

By Nancy Spannaus

Aug. 17, 2024–There was perhaps no more ardent supporter of the Declaration of Independence than Abraham Lincoln. He saw the Declaration as the moral foundation of the nation, upon which the Constitution was based. Thus, no matter how much the United States population fell short of its ideals, the moral commitment to the proposition 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” represented the standard for the nation. It was a positive commitment upon which a “more perfect Union” had to be built, and a unique accomplishment for mankind.

To Lincoln, the Declaration was the “electric cord” which linked Americans together, regardless of their race or country of origin.[1]

The most thorough exposition of Lincoln’s view of the Declaration can be found in his seven debates with Democratic Party candidate Stephen Douglas in the 1858 Senate campaign, and a thorough review of them is well worth the effort. The core issue of those debates was the interpretation of the Declaration: Did it include all people, or just white men? Lincoln summed it up this way in the Alton debate: The Democratic Party wants to “dehumanize the negro—to take away from him the right of ever striving to be a man … to make property, and nothing but property of the Negro in all the states of this Union.”

That is the real issue.  That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent.  It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. … The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. … It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’  No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.

Setting the Moral Standard

But in this post, I focus on Lincoln’s speech in Lewiston, Illinois in 1858. This speech preceded the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which began a few days later, and contains this memorable passage:

The Declaration of Independence was formed by the representatives of American liberty from thirteen States of the confederacy—twelve of which were slaveholding communities. We need not discuss the way or the reason of their becoming slaveholding communities. It is sufficient for our purpose that all of them greatly deplored the evil[2] and that they placed a provision in the Constitution which they supposed would gradually remove the disease by cutting off its source. This was the abolition of the slave trade. So general was conviction—the public determination—to abolish the African slave trade, that the provision which I have referred to as being placed in the Constitution, declared that it should not be abolished prior to the year 1808. A constitutional provision was necessary to prevent the people, through Congress, from putting a stop to the traffic immediately at the close of the war.

That the slave trade was put on the road to extinction was a sign of broad opposition, according to Lincoln.Now, if slavery had been a good thing, would the Fathers of the Republic have taken a step calculated to diminish its beneficent influences among themselves, and snatch the boon wholly from their posterity? These communities, by their representatives in old Independence Hall, said to the whole world of men: “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.” This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures. Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man.

In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon to guide their children and their children’s children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began—so that truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being built.

Now, my countrymen, if you have been taught doctrines conflicting with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence; if you have listened to suggestions which would take away from its grandeur, and mutilate the fair symmetry of its proportions; if you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated by our chart of liberty, let me entreat you to come back. Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of the Revolution. Think nothing of me—take no thought for the political fate of any man whomsoever—but come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of Independence.

You may do anything with me you choose, if you will but heed these sacred principles. You may not only defeat me for the Senate, but you may take me and put me to death. While pretending no indifference to earthly honors, I do claim to be actuated in this contest by something higher than an anxiety for office. I charge you to drop every paltry and insignificant thought for any man’s success. It is nothing; I am nothing; Judge Douglas is nothing. But do not destroy that immortal emblem of Humanity, the Declaration of American Independence.

A Beacon to Follow

Much more could be said.  Nearly all Lincoln’s speeches in the 1860 presidential campaign concerned the meaning of the Declaration.  He insisted, over and over again, that that document included all people, including the black man. The fact that measures to eliminate slavery had not succeeded did not lessen that truth: the Declaration had set the standard, the beacon, which had to be followed.

Next Installment: A Modern Reading of the Declaration

[1]For more of the context of this statement, click here.

[2] Recall the statement I cited from Alexander Stephens in Part 4, where he confirmed this statement.

Tags: Abraham Lincoln, American Revolution, Declaration of Independence, slavery