In the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln offered an interpretation of the Declaration of Independence. In this week’s column, I’m going to examine that interpretation. The matter is of more than a little importance, because the address has become part of the American “civil religion” and those who support this religion want to require all Americans to unite in accepting it. Lincoln’s view of the Declaration is then used to justify draconian measures to root out “racism” in the South, which include the destruction of Southern monuments to Confederate heroes and control of what is taught in Southern public schools. Reconciliation between the North and South is deprecated, to be replaced by hatred of the South.
The interpretation of the Declaration of Independence has generated an enormous historical literature, but I don’t propose to review it here; instead, I will rely on my own understanding of what the Declaration says. One further rule of interpretation has guided me: I will rely only on what the Declaration says and what can be inferred from the circumstances in which it was written. Statements by what the drafters of the document, including Thomas Jefferson, said about it, won’t be used.
Let us now turn to Lincoln’s comments about the Declaration in the opening lines of the Gettysburg Address. He said: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” (“Fourscore and seven” means “eighty-seven” years ago, since a “score” means twenty years; and eighty-seven years before 1863, when the address was delivered, takes us back to 1776).
The first point on which Lincoln’s interpretation can be challenged is the claim that the signers of the Declaration brought forth “a new nation.” But the text of the Declaration says otherwise. Here is what it says:
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. . .
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.—Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.
What is important for our purposes to note is that the Declaration is a unanimous declaration by “the thirteen united States of America” (emphasis mine unless otherwise noted). The “one” in “one people” should be taken as an indefinite article—“a people.” “The people” thus refers to the people of each colony, who now claim to be independent States. This understanding is confirmed by the statements, “they should declare”; “their right”; “their duty”; “their future security”; “these Colonies”; “their former Systems of Government”; and “absolute Tyranny over these States.”
Most decisively, the Declaration concludes:
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.
We next need to ask: is Lincoln correct that the united States of America were “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”? The Declaration does say that among the self-evident truths that “we hold to be self-evident” is that “all men are created equal”; but what does this mean? To answer this, it should be borne in mind that the document is a declaration of “independence.” The claim it makes is that the purpose of a government is to “secure” the “unalienable rights” stated in the declaration; and if a “long chain of abuses” shows that the current government intends to subject a people to “absolute Despotism,” it is the right of the people to “alter or abolish it.” In other words, “created equal” must be understood as the equal right of a people to form a new government. It should not be taken as Lincoln apparently took it, to support measures to uproot Southern institutions in the name of promoting “equality” so that we can have “a new birth of freedom.”
Attention to the circumstances in which the declaration was written offer, in my view, strong support for taking “created equal” to mean “having an equal right to form a new government,” not in some broader sense. For one thing, if “equality” is taken as Lincoln and his followers wish, all of the colonies would be condemning their own governments and institutions, since people in them (and I don’t mean only slaves) did not have equal political and social rights.
Moreover, the document aims to present to a “candid world” the justification for the colonies’ actions. At that time, rebellion was generally condemned; it thus seems hardly likely that in attempting to justify their conduct, the former colonists would appeal to principles which would show that the very powers they were appealing to for sympathetic understanding and support had illegitimate institutions, since in none of them was equality in the broader sense to be found. Indeed, the colonists’ principal ally in the War of Independence was the France of Louis XVI before the French Revolution, which it would be risible to view as committed to equality.
The “civil religion” that exalts the Gettysburg Address ought to be rejected as idolatrous, and we ought instead to be committed to genuine reconciliation of North and South.
