The Influence of the Declaration of Independence on the Civil War and Reconstruction Era

The Declaration of Independence continues to be a central focus of attention both in our historical literature and in the defining of our national identity. In this issue of History Now, five distinguished scholars examine the impact of Jefferson’s Declaration on Abraham Lincoln and on the African Americans of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. As you read the essays, you will see that these scholars do not always agree on the arc of Lincoln’s commitment to the notion of equality. But you will realize that they do agree on the impact the Declaration had on the formation of his political ideology and on his policies as president. Taken together, these essays demonstrate how closely woven together were the struggle by Lincoln to preserve the union and the struggle by African Americans to win emancipation and social equality.

In “Abraham Lincoln’s ‘Apple of Gold’: The Declaration of Independence,” Professor Harold Holzer argues that the Gettysburg Address held the Declaration to be America’s preeminent founding document. This was a departure from Lincoln’s earlier emphasis, in his inaugural address for example, on the Constitution. For the first fifteen years of his political career, Holzer notes, Lincoln barely mentioned the Declaration. For Lincoln, as for many of his nineteenth-century contemporaries, the Declaration and the Constitution existed in “unavoidable contradiction.” Lincoln favored the sentiments of the Declaration, arguing that it approached the sublime, while the Constitution was the product of compromise and thus of imperfection. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln maintained that the Declaration offered its guarantees to all. Lincoln managed to wrest the Declaration from the Democrats who were the rightful descendants of Jefferson’s own party. He made the Declaration the exclusive property, so to speak, of the Republican Party. In the process, it became, as historian Lewis E. Lehrman put it, “the bedrock upon which Lincoln . . . built his philosophical and political reasoning.” As president, Lincoln hoped to reconcile the Declaration and the Constitution, to harmonize them. In a private note, Lincoln spoke of the Declaration as an “apple of gold” for Americans while the Union and the Constitution were the “picture of silver” framed around that golden apple. By the time he celebrated Washington’s birthday at Independence Hall in 1861, he was ready to declare that his every political feeling sprang from the Declaration of Independence. Looking deep into the future, Lincoln warned that, if the principles embodied in the Declaration were forgotten or forsaken, despotism might follow as a tyrant arose.

In her essay, “Self-Evident Truths: Black Americans and the Declaration of Independence,” Professor Leigh Fought carries us back to the Declaration’s origin year, 1776. Even then, Black writers pointed out the irony of a slaveholder proclaiming “all men are created equal.” Decades later, in 1852, Frederick Douglass pointed out that same irony—and the hypocrisy that spawned it—when he asked, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” Fought points out that African Americans of the Revolutionary era placed their hopes for equality on the White men in power, petitioning legislatures to end slavery. Some, like Elizabeth Freeman, chose to use the court system to achieve freedom. In Maryland, a southern state less sympathetic than New England states proved to be, a free Baltimorean, Benjamin Banneker, appealed directly to Jefferson to honor the principles of the Declaration. In the nineteenth century, as propertyless White men achieved suffrage and as women began to critique their disenfranchisement, African Americans took every opportunity to point to other nations who honored those principles far better than the United States. Despite the end to slavery after the Civil War, despite the civil rights struggle led by Martin Luther King Jr., and despite the election of a Black president in 2008, Fought reminds us that racial inequality continues to make the “self-evident truth” that all of us are created equal more of a promise than a reality.

In “‘All Should Have an Equal Chance’: Abraham Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence,” Professor Jonathan W. White argues that the Gettysburg Address reflects Lincoln’s lifelong admiration for the Declaration’s principles. Even as a young man, Lincoln measured American political morality by its adherence to the principle of equality. Lincoln feared that, if Americans turned their back on the founders’ principles of liberty, equality, and government by consent, the nation would not survive. White concedes that Lincoln did not advocate full political or social equality for African Americans, yet he did insist that Jefferson’s Declaration contemplated the improvement of the condition of all men everywhere. By 1857, Lincoln was urging his audience to recognize that Black Americans deserved certain rights currently denied them. He mentioned by name and experience the two daughters of Dred Scott, referring to them as citizens. As president-elect, in a speech honoring George Washington’s birthday, he declared that all his political commitment arose from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration. And in his inaugural address in March 1861, Lincoln appealed to both the North and the South to remember their shared revolutionary heritage and give up any thought of civil war. During the war, President Lincoln took steps that were short of emancipation but attacked slavery at its roots. He worked to end the transatlantic slave trade; he abolished slavery in the District of Columbia; and he offered financial compensation to border states to abolish slavery. By January 1863, he was prepared to abolish slavery as a “military necessity.” Like Black leaders during Reconstruction, Lincoln insisted that the Declaration, not the Constitution, established the fundamental American ideas of liberty and equality. As White puts it: “The United States was, therefore, established on ideas, not structures of government.”

In his essay, “The Declaration of Independence as Mission Statement in the Age of Lincoln,” Professor Adam I. P. Smith adds to our understanding of the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln, he writes, argued that the ideas of America he expressed in this famous address were not radical or new but were mainstream assumptions of a majority of Americans living in the free states. But northern conservatives disagreed. Men like the Reverend Nathan Lord, president of Dartmouth, insisted that slavery was part of God’s natural order. To most northern citizens, the equality of all men was “a self evident truth,” but it was not necessarily a statement of reality when it came to political rights. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Douglas considered the Declaration in a way that skirted racial equality. He said the Declaration enshrined popular sovereignty with no implication for racial equality at all. Jefferson, a slaveholder himself, surely was declaring every White man, whatever his origins or wealth, to be equal to any other. On this point, Smith argues, Douglas probably spoke for the majority. Was Lincoln’s insistence that equality meant racial equality a radical notion? Lincoln argued not. The Revolution and its central principles were part of a long tradition of English liberty, with roots not only in English politics but in the Christian past.

In “‘Revered by All’: The Declaration of Independence in the Reconstruction Era,” Professor Douglas Egerton carries the story from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to the amendments to the Constitution during the Reconstruction era. While political figures like Andrew Johnson worked to limit a social and racial revolution, Black activists labored to see realized the Declaration’s ideals. Black veterans formed Union League Clubs, demanding voting rights and citing the promise of equality in the Declaration. Like abolitionists before them, they elevated the Declaration over the Constitution as the source of American identity. The Union League chapters were effective. Black ministers and artisans helped to draft southern constitutions that embodied the principle of equality. Egerton notes that the Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1868, was not a miracle worker. Although African Americans benefitted (at least on paper and temporarily), Native Americans suffered from exclusion. They were not covered by the Amendment’s protection and their legal status remained murky until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.

As always, this issue contains additional resources from the archives of the Gilder Lehrman Institute for teachers and history buffs. These include previously published History Now issues on related topics, spotlighted primary sources from Gilder Lehrman Collection, and videos. The issue’s special feature is a presentation by Lucas E. Morel, the John K. Boardman, Jr. Professor of Politics and head of the Politics Department at Washington and Lee University, on his book Lincoln and the American Founding, given on Zoom as an installment of the Institute’s Book Breaks series.

Nicole joins me in wishing you a happy and healthy rest of the summer and a hope that your upcoming school year will be the best ever!

Carol Berkin, Editor
Nicole Seary, Associate Editor