Lincoln and the Living Declaration

By Jacob K. Friefeld

Between August and October 1858, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas engaged in seven debates during their U.S. Senate campaign. These debates were a prelude to a showdown in the 1860 presidential election and grappled with topics fundamental to the republic like the nature of slavery and freedom. As Lincoln prepared to debate Douglas, the nation’s most famous political figure, he thought deeply about the context of America’s founding.

The founders harbored grave concerns about the frailty of representative government. In “Federalist No. 9,” Alexander Hamilton points to the tumult and chaos encountered in ancient republics between rarer times of tranquility. Federalists thought the Constitution’s checks and balances safeguarded the nation from dangers that devoured other republics. James Madison saw checks and balances as “safety valves” to release “overheated passions.” More pessimistic, the Anti-Federalists believed the Constitution, with its powerful executive, would eventually devolve into despotism.

From his earliest published speech, Lincoln believed that internal dangers imperiled the American Republic. He worried that too much time had passed since the Revolution and its lessons did not inspire as they once had. He accepted that Americans loved their government but warned “if the laws be continually despised and disregarded,” and if rights are only secured at the whim of a mob, then the people would eventually come to despise their government. Lincoln grappled with the nature of American liberty and its relationship to the nation’s government for the rest of his life—even as he played a key role in expanding the reach of that liberty during the Civil War.

Unlike Madison, who looked to the safety valves in the Constitution to save the republic in perilous times, Lincoln looked to the Declaration of Independence. In a speech at Lewistown, Illinois, four days before his first debate with Douglas, Lincoln laid out the framework of the Declaration as a renewing agent of American liberty.

He praised the founders for erecting “a beacon to guide their children and their children’s children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages.” According to Lincoln, they designed this beacon of self-evident truths so that when someone “should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the people could return to the Declaration of Independence “and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began.”

In this short speech, Lincoln advanced an argument that the Declaration not only represents the central idea of human liberty and the American founding but also stands as a cleansing fountain through which the republic can be renewed when it strays from its core principles.

Lincoln put these principles above any one man or allegiance to any party—even himself. He closed by telling his audience that they should not care for any party or any man’s success, imploring that “it is nothing; I am nothing; Judge Douglas is nothing. But do not destroy that immortal emblem of humanity, the Declaration of Independence.”

As we remember the founding in its 250th anniversary year, let us consider the Declaration not as a document stuck in a remote, lost past, but as a living call to rise to its highest ideals and hold our leaders to its standard.

Jacob K. Friefeld is director of the Center for Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield.

Image from the Library of Congress