Ted Widmer writes:

In 1776, while the ink [on the Declaration of Independence] was still fresh, a young mixed-race veteran named Lemuel Haynes wrote an essay about what the declaration meant to him (it was not discovered until 1983). Another African American, James Forten, was nine years old when he heard the first public reading of the declaration in Philadelphia in 1776, and went on to a long career as an abolitionist. (The constitution inspired far less reverence from Black readers, since it defined enslaved people with a most unequal value: 3/5 of a human being.)

With time, this pattern was repeated. Some people were inspired by the inviting picture painted by Jefferson’s words, offering “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for all. The same words could serve as a spur to action when progress was slow. Women were not mentioned, despite Abigail Adams’s exhortation to her husband, John, to “remember the ladies” during the drafting process. Throughout the 19th century, they argued for their inclusion, and drafted new versions of the declaration to read “all men and women are created equal” (as the 1848 Seneca Falls convention put it).

So attractive was the declaration’s language that it could be repurposed to support completely different kinds of projects. When Texans decided to secede from Mexico and form an independent republic in 1836, they wrote a version of the declaration that justified reliance on slavery. Eleven years later, the opposite message was sent when a group of African Americans founded a new nation, Liberia, on Africa’s west coast. The founding document written by these settlers, now American Africans, was a declaration that excoriated human bondage in no uncertain terms.

These tensions were felt even more keenly in the approach to the civil war. Both sides coveted the patriotic aura of the declaration and tried to claim the authority of different passages. It could plausibly be used to argue for the right to secede, as Jefferson Davis did, or for human equality, as Abraham Lincoln did.

In every sense, Lincoln’s reading was deeper. He had been studying the declaration closely for years. It was, in his words, an “electric cord” tying Americans together. A “beacon” to guide them. A “fountain” to drink from. As the debate over slavery deepened, he leaned in, finding a spiritual meaning in addition to its political message. In a telling note that he wrote to himself, just before his presidency, he borrowed from the Bible to describe the declaration as an “apple of gold”, surrounded by a “picture of silver”, by which he meant the constitution. Both were valuable, but for Lincoln, the “apple of gold”, and the central idea of equality, was the idea that defined the United States. In what may have been his greatest speech, the Gettysburg address, he returned to the declaration’s themes, and suggested that its unfinished “propositions” were finally becoming real, for all Americans. “All” was an essential word for Lincoln; it permitted no lawyerly evasions. [Continue reading…]