Words Worth Remembering: The Real Declaration of Independence
On Tuesday, April 29, 2025, the president sat down with ABC’s Terry Moran for his first broadcast interview since being inaugurated a second time in late January. One moment, in particular, caught the attention of viewers.
“What does this document mean to you?” Moran asked President Trump, pointing to a copy of the Declaration of Independence adorning the Oval Office wall.
“Well, it means exactly what it says,” the president replied. “It’s a declaration. It’s a declaration of unity and love and respect, and it means a lot, and it’s something very special to our country.”
The president was right to say that “it means a lot” and is “something very special.” But he couldn’t have been more wrong about what the Declaration of Independence means—and why it matters.
It was almost as if the president didn’t know how to respond, as if he had never quite paused to reflect on the true gravity of July 1776 and the essential revolutionary character of the document that gave birth to the greatest nation in the world’s history.
Most American presidents have grasped the meaning of the Declaration of Independence.
No one better embodied its true creed than Abraham Lincoln. “I doubt if history affords any example of a life so early, so deeply, and so permanently influenced by a single political truth,” James Garfield said in 1878, “as was Abraham Lincoln’s by the central doctrine of the Declaration of Independence—the liberty and equality of all men.”
Standing in front of Independence Hall in February 1861, during the depths of the secession crisis and just a few weeks before the opening shots of the Civil War, Lincoln put the Declaration front and center in his fight to save the Union.
“I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration,” he said. Lincoln admitted to pondering “what great principle or idea it was that kept [America] together.” It wasn’t “the mere matter of [political] separation,” he said, “but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time.”
The principle “that all men are created equal,” Lincoln concluded, “gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men. This is the sentiment of the Declaration of Independence.”
Lincoln asked, “Can this country be saved upon that basis?” If not, “it will be truly awful.” “I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it,” Lincoln resolved. “I have said nothing but what I am willing to live by, and, if it be the pleasure of Almighty God, die by.”
Years earlier, in 1858, Lincoln explained to Stephen A. Douglas that the founders “did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were then actually enjoying that equality, or yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them.”
The founders “meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all: constantly looked to, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, of all colors, everywhere.”
What was at stake in February 1861 was whether America would continue to dedicate itself to realizing its founding ideals. For Lincoln, saving the Union and fighting slavery were the same goals; the only Union worth saving was the one dedicated to living out the mighty promises of the Declaration. It was the Union of principles, not practicality, for which the revolutionaries had fought, died, and overcome all trials—and so it would be with Lincoln’s America.
In July 1926, Calvin Coolidge fully embraced the Declaration’s inward, spiritual meaning.
“[It is] a great spiritual document,” Coolidge said. “It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conception,” relaying truths which “were in the air that our people breathed,” making it at once both revolutionary and ordinary—in a word, “profoundly American.”
“About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful,” Coolidge said. “If all men are created equal, that is final,” he continued, listing the exact finality of the document’s core principles. “No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions,” and he who denies their truth moves only backward “toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.”
For Woodrow Wilson, as for many progressives, the Declaration was not—indeed could not be—a dead letter, a thing stuck permanently in the past. “Some citizens of this country have never got beyond” the document approved in July 1776, he said in 1913. “Their bosoms swell against George III, but they have no consciousness of the war for freedom going on today.”
For Wilson, the Declaration was a living thing whose preamble was a guide to tackle grievances that changed with the times.
“It is of no consequence to us unless we can translate its general terms into examples of the present day and substitute them in some vital way for the examples it itself gives, so concrete, so intimately involved in the circumstances of the day in which it was conceived and written,” Wilson said.
“Unless we can translate it into the questions of our own day, we are not worthy of it; we are not the sons of the sires who acted in response to its challenge.”
For Martin Luther King, Jr.—as for many of those who were, and still are, forcibly excluded from what Charles Sumner called “the promises of the Declaration”—the document of 1776 was a “promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”
In segregated America, the nation had defaulted on that note. Yet, as King shouted, “The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges”—until, as Lincoln had said, the weight would indeed fall from the shoulders of the oppressed.
That is the true, enduring spirit of the Declaration: the will and the struggle to be free. It is a battle that rages on—and always will.