As Right Makes Might: Abraham Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence

Abraham Lincoln read the Declaration of Independence as a founding document rather than as a historical document. He seldom, if ever, speaks directly about the whole document, or about the connection between the “law of nature and Nature’s God” at the end of the first paragraph and the desire to justify America’s assuming a “separate and equal station” among the nations of the earth. His famous letter to Henry Pierce and Others of April 1859, concludes this way:

All honor to Jefferson — to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men at 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.

By “merely revolutionary” document, he seems to be referring to the first paragraph, which says that the purpose was to justify the revolution. From the perspective of the members of Congress who commissioned Jefferson and the rest of the committee with drafting a Declaration, the famous words of the second paragraph, “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” were hardly incidental. They were fundamental to justifying their actions. If men were not equal, the colonists were on weak ground in complaining about Parliament’s claim that it did not need their consent to rule them. They did not have to explain their reasoning, but Congress wanted to. Hence, John Adams wrote Abigail that the Declaration set “forth the Causes, which have impell’d Us to this mighty Revolution, and the Reasons which will justify it, in the Sight of God and Man.” The accuracy of Lincoln’s characterization of the reasons for including the statement that “all men are created equal” is less important for understanding Lincoln than is the light it sheds on how he read the Declaration, and on the place it had in his understanding of American political life. Many of the men of 1776 were quite self-conscious that, if they succeeded in defeating the King’s armies, they were in the process of founding a country, and they had read histories about how political societies are founded. They were quite aware that the things they did as they broke away, and the way they did them, were likely to shape the character of the American republic moving forward.

In other words, Lincoln was not reading something into the Declaration that was not there. Lincoln focuses on that side of the Declaration, on the impact it was having, and that he wanted it to have as a founding document. That he read it that way says something important about how Lincoln thought about America and about politics. There is not time in a short essay to give a full account of Lincoln’s words on the Declaration, but it’s important to get a flavor of them to get a sense of his thinking. In his March 1860, Speech at New Haven, he said that “to us it appears natural to think that slaves are human beings; men, not property; that some of the things, at least, stated about men in the Declaration of Independence apply to them as well as to us....this Charter of Freedom applies to the slave as well as to ourselves.” Attacks on the ideas “are calculated to break down the very idea of a free government...and to undermine the very foundations of a free government, even for white men, and to undermine the very foundations of a free society.”

In his speech on Washington’s birthday at Independence Hall in Philadelphia in 1861, he declared that

I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.... It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land; but something in the Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time.

In his Inaugural Address, about ten days later, he proclaimed that the American “Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776.” And, most famously at Gettysburg in November 1863, he declared that “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.”

Note that these statements are, in a sense, in tension with his account of how Jefferson adorned a document that otherwise would merely have been a justification of “a struggle for national independence by a single people.” How the people of thirteen British colonies, with no formal legal connection other than their relationship through the King, transformed into a Union and a nation is a fraught question. Even though he held that the Union predated the Declaration, how those united colonies became not just “free and independent states” as the last paragraph of the Declaration states, but instead a nation with a “separate and equal station” among the “powers of the earth” is only part of the problem. How those people came to be a nation is another question.

And that’s the key to Lincoln’s reading of the Declaration. The Declaration helped to establish not merely a Union or Confederation of states, but rather a nation. To put it in terms of Aristotle’s four causes, the founders and the Declaration are the efficient cause of the nation’s being founded, and the ideas of the Declaration are the final cause of the nation. Lincoln chooses to cast the story of our founding as centered on the decision to include the great words of the second paragraph of the Declaration, and to build the American Republic on that foundation.

Near the beginning of his “Thoughts on Government” from April, 1776, a very important pamphlet of the day, John Adams wrote that “the foundation of every government is some principle or passion in the minds of the people. The noblest principles and most generous affections in our nature then, have the fairest chance to support the noblest and most generous models of government.” Adams was pointing to what Lincoln was pointing to, the regime. It is not a coincidence that Adams’s pamphlet, which is presented in the form of a letter, starts the final paragraph with the comment, “You and I, my dear Friend, have been sent into life, at a time when the greatest law-givers of antiquity would have wished to have lived.” Who are these “law-givers?” They are those who found not merely a government, but a regime, a political order as a whole, one that connects the principles at the heart of the regime with the laws. In a modern liberal regime, there is a separation between the state and civil society. And yet those two things are part of a larger whole.

Lincoln understood the Declaration to be a text that served the key role in that. He wrote in January 1861:

The expression of that principle, in our Declaration of Independence, was most happy, and fortunate. Without this, as well as with it, we could have declared our independence of Great Britain; but without it, we could not, I think, have secured our free government, and consequent prosperity. No oppressed, people will fight, and endure, as our fathers did, without the promise of something better, than a mere change of masters.

The assertion of that principle, at that time, was the word, “fitly spoken” which has proved an “apple of gold” to us. The Union, and the Constitution, are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it. 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 principles in the Declaration are what made it our founding document. In Lincoln’s view, at least for Jefferson, the Declaration was self-consciously a founding document. Lincoln was saying that the principles of the Declaration, enshrined by Congress in 1776 at the moment of our independence, were designed to produce citizens like Lincoln.

As that’s the plain meaning of Lincoln’s words, it implies that, in his view, statesmen can and, in fact, must try to anticipate the cascading secondary and tertiary impact of their words, deeds, laws, Declarations, and the institutions they create. This analysis suggests how Lincoln was using the Declaration in his own day. Back to Gettysburg. The war was testing “whether any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure.” Note that the nation was “conceived.” Is it possible to have such a founding principle, or were the Tories of 1776 right that the Patriots of 1776 were crazy to think their efforts would succeed?

Lincoln was playing a bit loose with his rhetoric at Gettysburg. The United States was a particular nation, and it had one particular problem concerning the principles of 1776. From the start, it was divided between North and South. To be sure, in 1776, all states had slaves, but the number of slaves in the North was small enough that slavery was not sewn into the warp and woof of society as it was in the South. Anti-slavery discussion had begun, North and South, before 1776. In the North, for example, James Otis’s 1764 pamphlet The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved laced into slavery and racism. Meanwhile, in Virginia, in the early 1770s, Jefferson and his mentor George Wythe would work on emancipationist legal cases. But, given the numbers, the challenge of ending slavery in the South would be much greater.

By the time of the Civil War, much had changed. In Jefferson’s day southern leaders tended not to make a forceful and public case that slavery was good. The argument existed, but it was not so prominent as it had become by Lincoln’s day. Around the time of Lincoln’s inauguration, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens gave his “Cornerstone Speech,” declaring that the men of 1776 were wrong to oppose slavery. Instead, he declared that the Confederacy was an improvement on the founding. Science demonstrated that the way of life made possible by slavery was morally and politically superior.

The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the Constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time....

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics.

By contrast Lincoln held that the Declaration spoke of “a truth applicable to all men at all times.” It was a trans-historical human truth, not a contingent cultural one, and not a truth which modern science has discovered. And yet it was one that only could be at the heart of a regime if the circumstances were right.

Another way of saying this is to suggest that in Lincoln’s view, although the nation was, in principle, created in 1776 at the time of Independence, and was “conceived in liberty;” as a practical matter, the political culture, to use our term for it, was not yet fully in line with those principles. The principle task of American statesmanship from the time of the founding, therefore, was to see to it that the seed of liberty was cultivated and bore fruit. As it matured, the nation would have to cast off many of the old ways of life learned under the King, particularly the way of life built on the practice of buying and selling human flesh. The reason why America could not forever endure “half slave and half free” was that any Union of two such wildly different ways of life was too unstable a mixture, in the regular course of human things, to endure. And the role of a statesman was to recognize that truth and seek to sustain the nation so created.

Lincoln did not see himself as changing anything fundamental in America. He was drawing out, and highlighting for his fellow Americans what their political instincts told them. Given the kind of nation the United States was, the Declaration and the principles it enshrined in our regime had a particular place. In his July 10, 1858, speech, in the midst of the Lincoln–Douglas debates, he linked the Declaration directly to American nationalism. In addition to the lineal descendants of those who fought for independence, he noted:

We have besides these men — descended by blood from our ancestors — among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe — German, Irish, French and Scandinavian — men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration.

Lincoln knew his audience. He was merely drawing out the logical implications of the principles they already shared. Just before concluding the speech, he declares: “If one man says it does not mean a negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man? If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out! Who is so bold as to do it! [Voices — ‘me’ ‘no one,’ &c.] If it is not true let us tear it out! [cries of ‘no, no’] let us stick to it then, [cheers] let us stand firmly by it then. [Applause.]”

Lincoln knew the reaction he would get. He understood his fellow citizens shared a prejudice in favor of the principles of 1776. His job was to remind them, or perhaps to ensure that they recognized that that prejudice was, in fact, a principled thing, not a mere matter of cultural accident. Lincoln’s proclamation that “the principles of Jefferson are the axioms of a free society,” implies that the truths of 1776 were, in fact, truths. But the nature of society is such that most of us, most of the time, don’t think through the logic of our political positions, and instead react passionately. To defend the republic founded in 1776, Lincoln served both as a national teacher and as a political actor in the more common sense of the term.

In his only book, The Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson used the term “statesman” only once. It occurs in his famous Query XVIII, his discussion of the terrible wrong of slavery. “With what execration should the statesman be loaded, who permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriae of the other.” Jefferson, being a careful writer as scholars have demonstrated wrote that book with particular care; that term, dropped into that part of the book, suggests something important. The statesman is a peculiar being. He is half inside the regime and half outside the regime, a stance that allows him to kick the republic back into line when it is in danger of drifting off course. I do not know if Lincoln read that part of Jefferson, but I do believe he saw himself as playing the very role that Jefferson was suggesting. Only in a great crisis, when the roots of the American order were exposed, could a statesman help to complete the founders’ work, and ensure that government of the people, by the people, and for the people would not perish from the earth.

But nations are moral persons. In New Jersey en route to his inauguration in 1861, Lincoln famously said, “I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle.” Peoples have moral responsibilities, and they bear the consequences of their sins no less than individuals. Hence, he concludes his Second Inaugural Address with a theodicy.

If God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

In short, Lincoln’s final word on the subject is to declare that only by completing the work of the second paragraph of the Declaration can the Americans complete the work of the first paragraph of the Declaration.

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