The following was the opening presentation by David J. Kent at a panel discussion on “Lincoln and the Declaration,” held by the Lincoln Group of D.C. on April 7, 2026. (The full title of the event was “Making America Worth Saving: Lincoln’s Empowering Reverence for the Declaration of Independence.”) The other panelists were Edna Green Medford, Jeffrey Boutwell, Thomas Horrocks, and John O’Brien. A video recording of the full panel discussion can be found here.
David J. Kent is Immediate Past President of the Lincoln Group of DC, and the author of many books on Abraham Lincoln, Nikola Tesla, and Thomas Edison, including Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America, and most recently, Lincoln in New England: In Search of His Forgotten Tours.
Mr. Kent has graciously given American System Now permission to reprint his April 7 presentation.
by David Kent
Abraham Lincoln had been out of political office for five years when in 1854, Senator Stephen A. Douglas pushed through passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The Act opened all the western territories gained from the Mexican War to the possibility of slavery and repealed the Missouri Compromise that had barred slavery from the northern territories remaining from the Louisiana Purchase. The Act codified Douglas’s contention that the white residents of a territory could elect to have slavery if they so wanted it. To Lincoln, this Act reversed the intent of the Founders who had thought they had put the nation on a path toward the ultimate extinction of this most abhorrent institution. The Kansas-Nebraska Act jarred Lincoln back into politics, leading him to seek a political office where he could rekindle the Founders’ belief in the fundamental principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence.
On October 16, 1854, Lincoln gave a speech in Peoria, Illinois, that laid out his critique of the Kansas-Nebraska Act on moral, political, legal, and historical grounds. He reiterated and updated these concepts in an early 1860 speech in Hartford, Connecticut, during his second speaking tour of New England. Both speeches are long, but the following provides some key points relevant to the nation’s founding.
Lincoln gives a detailed overview of the legal and historical precedent for the federal policy of restricting slavery. He shows that Douglas is denying the reality that “the policy of prohibiting slavery into the new territories” originated with Thomas Jefferson. It was Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, who proposed the idea of ceding the northwest territories to the federal government and barring slavery from the region. Contrary to Douglas’s assertions, the federal government had worked hard to limit the expansion of slavery, noting not only the Northwest Ordinance (1787) but also the ending of the International Slave Trade (1808), the Missouri Compromise (1820), the Wilmot Proviso and the Compromise of 1850, the latter of which included ending the slave trade in the federal territory of the District of Columbia. Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act reversed the intent of the Founders.
Lincoln also questioned Douglas’s claims of indifference to whether slavery expanded or not, arguing:
This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty—criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.
Lincoln points out that the Framers intentionally used euphemisms like “persons held to service or labor” instead of the words, “slave” or “slavery.” He explains why:
“Thus, the thing is hid away, in the constitution, just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time.”
The Founders, Lincoln is saying, created a framework under which future leaders could eventually end slavery. He continues:
“But this is not all. The earliest Congress, under the constitution, took the same view of slavery. [While they couldn’t eliminate it at that time,] They hedged and hemmed it in to the narrowest limits of necessity.”
Whereas the Founders sought to put slavery on a path to its ultimate extinction, the Kansas-Nebraska bill brought it back. Once slavery was called a “necessary evil” that through the reality of its existing presence required its forbearance in order to create a constitutional Union, the South now calls slavery a “positive good” and threatens to destroy that Union unless the North speaks and acts as if slavery were right. No, Lincoln argues, slavery IS wrong and we should return to our “ancient faith” of the Founders’ intent rather than replace it with the “new faith” of popular sovereignty.
Lincoln goes on in his speech to reiterate the shift:
But NOW [slavery] is to be transformed into a “sacred right.” … Henceforth it is to be the chief jewel of the nation—the very figure-head of the ship of State. Little by little, but steadily as man’s march to the grave, we have been giving up the OLD for the NEW faith. Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for SOME men to enslave OTHERS is a “sacred right of self-government.” These principles cannot stand together. They are as opposite as God and mammon; and whoever holds to the one, must despise the other.
Lincoln goes on to give an example of how the South has reversed the Founders’ intentions:
When [Indiana Senator] Pettit, in connection with his support of the [Kansas-] Nebraska bill, called the Declaration of Independence “a self-evident lie,” of the forty odd [pro-Kansas-] Nebraska Senators who sat present and heard him, no one rebuked him. Nor am I apprized that any [Kansas-] Nebraska newspaper, or any [Kansas-] Nebraska orator, in the whole nation, has ever yet rebuked him. … [And yet] If it had been said in old Independence Hall, seventy-eight years ago, the very door-keeper would have throttled the man, and thrust him into the street.
Let no one be deceived, Lincoln continues. The spirit of seventy-six and the spirit of [Kansas-] Nebraska, are utter antagonisms; and the former is being rapidly displaced by the latter.
Fellow countrymen—Americans south, as well as north, shall we make no effort to arrest this?
Lincoln goes on to point out that our allies around the world are warning us of our internal dangers. They:
“express the apprehension” that the one retrograde institution in America, is undermining the principles of progress, and fatally violating the noblest political system the world ever saw.” This is not the taunt of enemies, but the warning of friends. Is it quite safe to disregard it—to despise it? Is there no danger to liberty itself, in discarding the earliest practice, and first precept of our ancient faith? In our greedy chase to make profit of the negro, let us beware, lest we “cancel and tear to pieces” even the white man’s charter of freedom.
Lincoln calls for the United States to return to the principles of the Founders in words that should resonate with all Americans today:
Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution. Let us turn slavery from its claims of “moral right,” back upon its existing legal rights, and its arguments of “necessity”….Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. Let north and south—let all Americans—let all lovers of liberty everywhere—join in this great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving.
Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Declaration of Independence, Founding Fathers