Heeding Lincoln on His Birthday:  Let Us Re-Adopt the Declaration of Independence and Its Principles

         Celebrations this week of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday should include his advice in an October 16, 1854, speech in Peoria, Illinois, at a juncture not dissimilar from the circumstances that torment our nation today. Polarization and division, violence, voter intimidation and murder, and the spreading racism, exacerbated by enactment of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which permitted the extension of slavery, set the stage for Lincoln to emerge from retirement in politics to condemn the new law and declare slavery immoral. He characterized it as “monstrous injustice” that betrayed the foundational principles of the United States. Lincoln’s “Peoria Speech,” marked his historic ascension as a national leader and, ultimately, as a giant whose voice speaks to us across the ages.

      Lincoln, perhaps the most gifted of America’s rhetoricians and a literary artist whose style strikes the “mystic cords of memory,” unlike any other president, or politician, for that matter, appealed to his audience in terms that resonate in our time. He said, “Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and –with it—the practices and policy which harmonize with it.” He appealed to all regions of the nation and added, “let all lovers of liberty everywhere, join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union, but shall have so saved it, as to make and to keep it forever worthy of the saving.” As readers know, Lincoln’s presidency was devoted to saving the Union, in a form “worthy of the saving.” His words in Peoria were but prologue to his epilogue.

     For Lincoln, the majesty of the Declaration of Independence, which he called the “sheet iron of the republic,” lay in the self-evident proposition that “all men are created equal.”  This was, for him, the foundation stone of America and the bedrock of his own moral and political philosophy. He saw in this first principle a pledge of future actions, a statement of aspirations beyond achievement in the Constitutional Convention, to be fulfilled upon the occasion of America’s political maturity. Lincoln’s conviction on this score, influenced by his embrace of the Golden Rule, was manifested in his own declaration: “as I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.”  His opposition to slavery, preeminently a function of his moral code, was illuminated by the calculus of logic and his commitment to the principles and values of democracy.

      Lincoln’s plea for re-contracting American society in accordance with the Declaration of Independence as the fundamental charter of the nation, invoked a high standard for the salvation of the nation. If “lovers of liberty” pledge to restore the principles of the Declaration, beginning with remembrance and renewal of the self-evident principle that “all men are created equal,” then America will have saved the “Union” in a manner “forever worthy of the saving.”  Such a union could not be worthy of the saving if it remained “half slave and half free.”  Lincoln’s moral compass, which taught him to identify and pursue what he discerned to be right required, consistent with the Golden Rule, respect for the rights of others, which was a necessary predicate to protect our own rights. This distillation represented a commitment to democratic governance– “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

      Lincoln’s system of thought, built upon the pillars of the Golden Rule and the principle that “all men are created equal,” shunned Machiavellian values that embraced the philosophy of might makes right, the ends justify the means and other facets of autocratic rule. A nation “worthy of saving,” he believed, should be grounded in the principles of the Declaration, not one governed by acts of brute force that ignored equal justice. Born and raised in an antislavery ethos in Kentucky and Indiana and influenced by the transcendentalism of American writers such as Emerson and Thoreau, Lincoln believed in the convictions of conscience. His conscience taught him that all men “are created equal,” and throughout his career, guided by principles of pragmatism that, occasionally, for reasons of war, tempered his conscience, he sought to make that self-evident principle a living reality for the nation. Though Lincoln was unsuccessful in making it the conscience of the nation in his lifetime, his words, wisdom and efforts speak to us today and inspire Americans to seek it in ours.