Stephen Douglas, the author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, were at bottom an argument about the Declaration. Lincoln’s historic debates with Illinois Sen. In the ensuing crisis, it became a staple of his rhetoric. Prior to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, overturning the Missouri Compromise and allowing slavery into all the territories if the people wanted it, he referred to the Declaration in public only twice. Lincoln made precisely this use of the Declaration. Lincoln praised him for possessing the foresight “to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and 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.” No ringing philosophical statements, no invocation of “unalienable rights.”īut Thomas Jefferson’s handiwork was meant for the ages. The Declaration, according to Lincoln, easily could have enunciated the practical reasons for our split from Britain, and left it at that. In the prelude to and during the Civil War - the 150th anniversary of which we mark this year - Lincoln clung to the Declaration as the fundamental statement of the nation’s purpose. Let us turn and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution.” It was the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution, that animated Lincoln’s project to return mid-19th-century America to our “ancient faith.” For Lincoln, the path of salvation for a country torn by contention over slavery ran through the past: “Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. When Abraham Lincoln began his speech at the dedication of the Gettys burg cemetery in 1863 with those words redolent of the King James Bible, “four score and seven years ago,” he referred back to 1776, not 1787.
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