American Insights: Lincoln’s Pledge—and Ours
The words of the Psalmist were on his mind. “If I forget thee,” Abraham Lincoln thought, speaking not at this moment of God’s Law but of the doctrine of the Declaration of Independence (the same thing anyway), “let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”
Standing in front of Independence Hall on a brisk Friday, February 22, 1861, Lincoln was living in the gravest time the Union had known since its uniting by sword, fire, and principle in the summer of 1776. At root, he understood that it was not the Union alone that was endangered, but the Union of 1776—the Union of principle and not merely of practicality.
“Soberly, it is now no child’s play to save the principles of Jefferson from total overthrow in this nation,” he declared in 1859. The Declaration—the entire cornerstone of American democracy—was being expunged and rewritten to satisfy the designs of men who clung to the wealth and power of Southern slave society.
In front of Independence Hall, Lincoln spoke briefly but powerfully about what it meant to stand where he stood on such a day of unparalleled consequence.
“I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence,” he began. “It was that which gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men. This is the sentiment embodied in that Declaration of Independence.”
America was at a crossroads. The people could either surrender the very ideals that conceived and birthed the country or stand firm in what Lincoln called the “ancient faith”—that all are created equal, endowed with natural rights, and that legitimate government flows from the consent of the governed.
“I have said nothing but what I am willing to live by,” Lincoln concluded, “and, in the pleasure of Almighty God, die by.”
For Lincoln, the Declaration was a living document, not a dead relic. Its words, he told Stephen Douglas in 1858, “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.”
On what would have been Lincoln’s sixty-ninth birthday, Congressman James Garfield said: “I doubt if history affords any example of a life so early, so deeply, and so permanently influenced by a single political truth, as was Abraham Lincoln’s by the central doctrine of the Declaration—the liberty and equality of all men.”
In 1876, The New York Times remarked that America at one hundred years was “a century of trial.” America at 250 is no different. From the shots of Lexington and Concord to the blood-stained beaches of Normandy; from the cries of the enslaved to the resounding voices of abolition; from the Edmund Pettus Bridge to Inauguration Day 2009, America has been a story of triumph and tragedy, existing, as ever, simultaneously.
In 250 years, Americans have witnessed independence declared, slavery challenged and ultimately overcome, women gaining the right to vote, and the election of a Black president and a Black female vice president. A nation once conceived in the purity of liberty and in the sin of slavery became, in time and with forward steps, the freest democracy the world has ever known.
Yet the times suggest that what we have achieved pales before what we have not yet achieved. The presidency has been reduced to a reality show, and Congress and the Supreme Court have seldom been as unpopular as they are today. But the fabric holding together the national soul is not the three branches of government or even who occupies them—it is the words and spirit of a Declaration that, in Thomas Paine’s phrase, would “begin the world anew.”
America at 250 is an America still wrestling with itself. Perhaps it always will be. The battle between better selves and worst impulses—the innate spirit of inclusion existing alongside the specters of nativism and division—is as old as the republic itself.
Whatever may be said of America, it must be said with truth that America is not in a state of being, but ever in a state of becoming. We are not exceptional because of who we innately are; we are exceptional because of who we have chosen to be. And if one word best describes the American experiment, it is overcome.
At every turn, there were those who sought to make the American reality more reflective of the American ideal—from Benjamin Franklin signing an abolitionist petition in 1790, to Susan B. Anthony reading aloud a women’s declaration of rights in the summer of 1876, to John Lewis leading students across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Let us live such lives that the same might one day be said of us that Garfield said of Lincoln. Let it be said that in times of peace, we held to the Declaration. Let it be said that in times of strife and turmoil, we held to the Declaration. Let it be said that when others chipped away at its meaning—excluding group after group from its universal promises—we held to the Declaration.
And let it be said that we did so with grace, not pride or anger; with strength rooted in justice, not vengeance; and with heart, soul, and steps aimed toward the promised land—a land finally at peace with its better self, its highest ideals more realized than ever.