*
1776-1819 *
Given
the demands and disruptions of the American Revolution, the Declaration
of Independence does not appear to have affected Members of Congress in
extraordinary ways during the earliest years of the nation.In
1780, Congress formally recognized the Declaration as one of the nation’s
most important constitutional documents, ordering its publication with
the Articles of Confederation and the first state constitutions (Journals
of the Continental Congress, 29 Dec. 1780, XVIII: 1217).Congress
additionally recognized the anniversary of the Declaration, but with few
legislative sessions extending into July, Members of Congress regularly
were free to participate in Fourth of July celebrations in their local
communities.As early as 1782, James
Madison and other non-signing Members of Congress also apparently believed
that they too were personally and solemnly bound by the Declaration “to
maintain” its “Claim of Independence …at the risqué of [their] lives
and fortunes” (Papers of James Madison, 20 Sept. 1782, 5: 144).
Outside
of Congress, the Declaration of Independence was revered both in private
and in public celebrations throughout the Revolutionary years as the original
public statement of the American cause.Its
substantive content, however, was not widely contested or used to justify
much beyond efforts to secure American Independence from Great Britain.There
also is little evidence that delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention
consulted the Declaration when debating, composing, or subsequently ratifying
the new U.S. Constitution(Detweiler,
1962, pp. 559-62).Too much, however,
can be made of these early silences in the historical record, for much
of the Constitution embodies the principles of consent, limited government,
and constitutional change articulated originally in the Declaration.
By
the 1790s, Fourth of July celebrations had become public, ritualized, principally
local expressions of Independence and American nationalism.To
some, the popularity of these celebrations exposed a fuller understanding
of the constitutional significance of the Declaration.As
one Philadelphia newspaper writer argued in 1792, the Declaration of Independence
was “not to be celebrated, merely as affecting the separation of one country
from the jurisdiction of another, but as being the result of a rational
discussion and definition of the rights of man, and the end of civil government”
(Detweiler, 1962, p. 565).Antislavery
advocates also recognized the value of marrying Fourth of July celebrations
with their Declaration-supported arguments against slavery.“Throughout
the 1790s and early 1800s,” historian David Walstreicher reports, Independence
Day celebrations not only were used by these advocates “to damn slavery
or to toast its end,” they “were integral to making the case that slavery
was a national problem that contradicted the nation’s founding ideals”
(Waldstreicher, 1997, pp. 312-13).
American
Presidents and Members of Congress were slower and more cautious in their
early uses of the Declaration.An
early exception occurred when the First Congress debated an impost bill
in 1789.Virginia Representative
Josiah Parker proposed adding a ten dollar duty on slave imports, declaring
his sincere belief that slavery was “contrary to the Revolution[‘s] principles,
and ought not to be permitted.”Parker
admitted “it degrading the human species to annex” the character of a material
good “to them; but he would rather do this than continue the actual evil
of importing slaves a moment longer.”Furthermore,
Parker continued, Congress ought to:
do
all that lay in their power to restore to human nature its inherent privileges
and, if possible wipe off the stigma under which America labored.The
inconsistency in our principles, with which we are justly charged, should
be done away, that we may show, by our actions, the pure beneficence of
the doctrine we hold out to the world in our Declaration of Independence”
(Annals of Congress, 1st Cong., May 13, 1789, pp. 336-337).
Parker’s
proposal initiated a brief but spirited exchange in the U.S. House, which
included discussion of House amendment rules, Congress’s constitutional
authority, the nature of human slaves, the evilness of the slave trade,
the equity of taxing white slavery, the costs and future of slavery, and
the will of the majority.In the
end, at the urging of others including his Virginia colleague James Madison,
Parker agreed to withdraw his original motion.
More
commonly, early Members of Congress and Presidents occasionally found it
useful to recall or echo parts of the Declaration in their public discussions
and writings.In Letters of Helvidius
(1793), for example, U.S. House Member James Madison rebutted Alexander
Hamilton’s expansive view of Executive authority but also repeated the
Declaration’s familiar theme “that every Nation has a right to abolish
an old government and establish a new one.”The
latter idea, Madison authoritatively noted, “was recorded in every public
archive, written in every American heart, and sealed with the blood of
a host of American martyrs.”It
also constituted “the only lawful tenure by which the United States hold
their existence as a nation” (Writings of James Madison, VI: 164).In
his 1796 Farewell Address, President George Washington offered a similar
rendition of the Declaration’s right of constitutional change, stating
“The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make
and alter their constitutions of government” (Washington, Farewell Address,
1796).
Toward
the end of the 1790s, opponents of President John Adams discovered additional
political uses of the Declaration, employing it effectively in their efforts
to build a national opposition party against him and the Federalists.Republicans
transformed Fourth of July celebrations into explicitly partisan affairs
that promoted and exploited Thomas Jefferson’s dual reputation as the Declaration’s
author and the leader of their new political party.Without
their consent and with little recourse, Federalists were recast as Tories
in the new political drama as the Jeffersonian Republicans took advantage
of the Declaration’s original and socially enduring anti-British sentiments.Jefferson’s
victory over Adams in the 1800 Presidential election altered the American
political landscape as well as the symbolic value and political possibilities
associated with the Declaration.For
these first Republicans, Jefferson’s Inauguration on March 4, 1801 represented
“a national revolution, a second Declaration of Independence, and in its
aftermath,” David Waldstreicher contends, “it was described and celebrated
in exactly that way, as another Fourth of July.”Indeed,
Republican orators presented themselves as the rightful heirs to the Revolution,
reading the Declaration in public and listing “the tyrannies of the Federal
reign in the king-accusing syntax of the Declaration of Independence” (Waldstreicher,
1997, p.190).Caught in opposition
to the Declaration and, after 1801, with an unpalatable interpretation
of the Constitution, Federalists were silenced by the new symbolic and
conceptual consensus, never again regaining control of either Congress
or the Presidency.
Two
additional uses of the Declaration of Independence before 1820 also deserve
mentioning.In 1811, South Carolina
Representative John C. Calhoun, one of the War Hawks who emerged in the
U.S. House, explained his militant stand against Great Britain in language
and a rhetorical style reminiscent of the Declaration.Calhoun
argued that “War, in this country, ought never to be resorted to but when
it is clearly justifiable and necessary.”Any
alleged causes must be “most urgent and necessary….in the eye of the nation.”According
to Calhoun, “The extent, duration, and character of the injuries received;
the failure of those peaceful means heretofore resorted to for the redress
of our wrongs is my proof that it is necessary.”Moreover,
he added, “the evil still grows, and in each succeeding years swells in
extent and pretension beyond the preceding” (Annals of Congress,
12thCong., 1st sess., December 12, 1811, pp. 476-477;
Burstein, 1999, pp. 238-39).In his
Annual Message to Congress the same year, President James Madison echoed
the War Hawks’ bellicose tone in his recital of a long list of American
grievances against Great Britain, and Congress responded with a formal
declaration of war (Madison, Annual Message to Congress, November 5, 1811;
Fields, 1996, 232-36).
A
second noteworthy use of the Declaration occurred in the aftermath of the
War of 1812, when Congress and the nation’s interests returned to domestic
affairs. In addition to agreeing
to rebuild parts of Washington, D.C. destroyed by the British, in 1817
Congress and President Madison commissioned four large paintings on national
history topics by the noted American artist John Trumbull.The
first and most famous of the commissioned works is “The Declaration of
Independence in Congress, At the Independence Hall, Philadelphia, July
4th, 1776.”By design,
the four paintings were to hang in the new grand Rotunda of U.S. Congress
that was to be built between the House and Senate chambers—a building project
that delayed completion of the Trumbull commission until 1826.In
1818, Trumbull completed his life-size painting of the presentation of
the Declaration and with President Monroe’s approval he displayed it to
almost 21,000 paying viewers in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore
before Congress formally accepted the 12’ by 18’ canvas in 1819.In
November 1826, under the watchful eye of Members of Congress and President
John Quincy Adams, Trumbull’s four paintings finally received their prominent
and permanent places in the Capitol Rotunda (Jaffe, 1975).
*
1820-1876 *
Between
1820 and the 1876 Centennial, the Declaration of Independence was understood
and employed in new and increasingly divisive ways.Most
Americans continued to associate the Declaration with nationalist celebrations
of the American Revolution, but with time fewerand
fewer perceived much if any value in reliving the original document’s anti-British
and monarchical hostilities.With
the conclusion of the 1812 War, foreign threats and invasions also seemed
to grow increasingly distant and improbable for all but the most anxious
nationalists.Shorn from these traditional
uses and conceptual moorings, a variety of individuals and social groups
infused the Declaration with new meanings and uses.Abolitionists
continued to look to the Declaration and its explicit endorsements of the
Creator, human equality and freedom as the great constitutional touchstone
legitimizing their social cause.Other
reformist groups like labor advocates, women’s rights groups, the Temperance
movement, and various religious organizations also turned to the document
as justification for their visions of American society (Foner, 1976).Not
surprisingly, many of these groups wove their social reform agendas into
the discourses and activities associated with annual Fourth of July celebrations,
which had become traditional yet still largely localized social rituals.
Members
of Congress and U.S. Presidents also employed and reacted to the Declaration of
Independence in new and unconventional ways.During
the often contentious debates over the admission of the Territory
of Missouri as a slave state in 1819, Massachusetts Representative Timothy
Fuller (1817-1825) argued that the Declaration’s support of “the glorious
truth, that ‘all men are born free and equal’” was irreconcilable
with not only the extension of slavery in Missouri but that slavery, more
broadly, was irreconcilable with a republican form of government and the
long-term interests of slaveholders and the nation.Fuller
additionally contended that “the whole civilized world are spectators of
the scene” in Congress, and that if Missouri were admitted with slavery,
“Despots and their minion may justly despise, while the wise and good of
every nation must pity our infatuation, or execrate our hypocrisy.”Fuller’s
progressive arguments against slavery, however, ought to be qualified by
his apparent support for a form of second-class status for “freedmen and
their descendents” whom he believed could be given “personal liberty” and
protection “against oppression, but not necessarily” be permitted to participate
“political power,” and therefore “would remain the industrious and happy
laborers in the fields, not of their masters, but their protectors” (Annals
of Congress, 16th Cong., 1st sess., Feb. 24,
1820, pp. 1467, 1487).
In
subsequent debates over the status of Missouri, Pennsylvania Representative
Joseph Hemphill (1819-1826, 1829-1831) employed the Declaration with less
discrimination than Fuller, arguing that neither the Declaration nor the
U.S. Constitution limited citizenship based upon skin color.In
rebuttal to arguments made by Virginia Representative James Barbour who
denied “the rights of citizenship to any free black or mulatto man,” Hemphill
responded “this class of people lived among us, not in the character of
foreigners… this was their native country, and as dear to them as to us.”With
a rhetorical style reminiscent of the Declaration, Hemphill continued his
appeal to Congress and the nation:
“Thousands
of them were free born, and they composed a part of the people in the several
States.They were identified with
the nation, and its wealth consisted, in part, of their labor.They
had fought for their country, and were righteously included in the principles
of the Declaration of Independence.This
was their condition when the Constitution of the United States was framed,
and that high instrument does not cast the least shade of doubt upon any
of their rights or privileges; but on the contrary, I may challenge gentlemen
to examine it, with all the ability they are capable of, and see if it
contains a single expression that deprives them of any privileges that
is bestowed on others./They have
a right to pursue their own happiness, in as high a degree as any other
class of people.Their situation
is similar to others, in relation to the acquirement of property, and the
various pursuits of industry.They
are entitled to the same rights of religion and protection, and are subjected
to the same punishments.They are
enumerated in the census.They can
be taxed, and made liable to militia duty; they are denied none of the
privileges contained in the bill of rights; and, although many of these
advantages are allowed to the a stranger, during his temporary residence,
yet, in no one instance is a free native black man treated as a
foreigner”(Annals of Congress,
16th Cong., 2nd sess., December 11, 1820, pp. 598-99).
Slavery
apologists in Congress aggressively countered these new egalitarian interpretations
of the Declaration of Independence.As
historian Philip F. Detweiler recounts, North Carolina Senator Nathaniel
Macon “warned his colleagues against broad arguments from the Declaration,
maintaining that if the equality clause of the preamble were interpreted
as antislavery spokesmen desired, universal emancipation would result.”Like
others in Congress, Macon further “maintained that the Declaration simply
was not part of the Constitution” and, therefore, it ought not influence
Congress’s decision on the admission of Missouri.Other
Members attacked their non-slave state critics for their recent embrace
of the Declaration.Kentucky Senator
Richard M. Johnson sarcastically asked his Northern state colleagues: “If
your humanity has conquered your prejudice, till you know no color, where
are your magistrates, your governors, your representatives, of the black
population? You proclaim them equal, but you are still their lawgivers.”Still
other Members of Congress found it simpler to dismiss the Declaration of
Independence as filled with “abstract aphorisms” and “theoretical principles,”
which “are not truths at all, if taken literally” (Detweiler, 1958, pp.
604-609).
The
political compromises finally worked out to admit Missouri as a slave state
in 1820 effectively tempered the rhetoric and sectional divisions that
had dominated Congress for more than a year, but they did little to resolve
the differences exposed over the meaning of the Declaration of Independence.These
differences emerged again and again during subsequent years as the great
ideological and ultimately sectional interests struggled both mightily
and subtly to reconcile their political positions with the ideas and language
expressed in the Declaration.In
his first Inaugural Address in 1825, for example, President John Quincy
Adams auspiciously trumpeted: “The year of jubilee since the first formation
of our Union has just elapsed; that of the declaration of our independence
is at hand.”Adams’s “jubilee” year
reference, however, suggested more than an occasion for an especially festive
celebration.Within the Christian
tradition, jubilee years were called periodically as opportunities for
deeper spiritual reflection, pilgrimage and penitential acts.And
as historian Andrew Burstein notes, the jubilee reference certainly would
also have been understood as an allusion to the Hebraic ideal of releasing
enslaved persons from their bondage every fiftieth year (Adams, Inaugural
Address, March 4, 1825; Burstein, 2001, pp. 4, 238-40).
The
jubilee celebrations of the Declaration of Independence that occurred across
the United States in 1826 were followed by news of the coincidental deaths
of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on July 4, 1826—the last two individuals
who had signed the Declaration.The
heightened symbolic import of the Declaration of Independence would have
been difficult for the nation to miss.In
case someone did, President John Quincy Adams explicitly declared: “In
this most singular coincidence, the fingers of Providence is plainly visible!It
hallows
the Declaration of Independence as the Word of God, and is the bow in the
Heavens, that promises its principles shall be eternal, and their dissemination
universal over the Earth”(Peterson,
1962, pp.5-6).
John
Quincy Adams’s public uses of the Declaration of Independence did not end
with the death of his father or his loss to Andrew Jackson in the 1828
Presidential election.As a U.S.
Representative for Massachusetts in the 1830s and 1840s, Adams became of
one of the most vocal and disruptive antislavery voices in Congress.Prevented
by convention and U.S. House debate rules from broaching the topic of slavery
directly, Adams agitated Congress until his death in 1848 by repeatedly
presenting and reading abolitionist petitions and memorials in the House.Many
of these petitions explicitly justified their cause with references to
the Declaration of Independence.Reading
from one petition sent from Boston, Adams demanded the House consider the
petitioners’ request to relocate the federal government from the District
of Columbia to an alternative northern location where the principles of
the Declaration of Independence were “not treated as mere rhetorical flourish”
(Miller, 1996, p. 349).
Other
Members of Congress followed in Adams’s path with similar antislavery uses
of the Declaration.Notably, Ohio
Senator Samuel P. Chase argued during the debates over the Kansas-Nebraska
Bill:
In
1776, the Declaration of Independence, drafted by Jefferson, announced
no such low and narrow principles as seem to be in fashion now.That
immortal document asserted no right of the strong to oppress the weak,
of the majority to enslave the minority.It
promulgated the sublime creed of human rights.It
declared that ALL MEN are created equal, and endowed by the Creator with
inalienable rights of life and liberty (Appendix to the Congressional
Globe, 33rd Cong., 1st sess., Feb. 3, 1854, p.
137).
Congressional
defenders of slavery repeatedly rejected abolitionist petitions and interpretations
of the Declaration and, in 1842, pursued a formal (but failed) effort to
censure John Quincy Adams in the U.S. House of Representatives.In
response to Adams and to the growing sectional conflicts in Congress in
the late 1840s and 1850s, these individuals also devised proslavery interpretations
of the Declaration of Independence.Several
repeated arguments articulated decades earlier during debates over the
admission of Missouri.Illinois Senator
Stephen Douglas, for example, contended that the principles of the Declaration
applied only to the original British colonials and their descendents and
never to free or enslaved African-Americans or, by implication, Americans
with other non-British ancestral backgrounds.Others
like South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun pursued a different interpretative
strategy by denying the Declaration’s truth that “All men are not created
equal.”Calhoun contended that “Men
are not created; there were but two created, one man and one women” and
the latter “was inferior to the man” like infants are neither free or equal
but always “subject to their parents.”Calhoun
thus dismissed the Declaration’s claim of liberty and equality as a “hypothetical
truism” that was not true or necessary to secure Independence.Moreover,
in the minds and mouths of its advocates within and without Congress, the
idea that “all men are born free and equal” had become both “dangerous”
and “productive of so much evil” in the United States and Europe. (Congressional
Globe, 30th Cong., 1st sess., June 27, 1848, p. 876).In
1854, Indiana Senator John Petit extended Calhoun’s dismissal when he declared
the so-called self-evident truth of the Declaration of Independence a “self-evident
lie”-- observing as Aristotle had in his Politics that he saw “one
man born a slave and another a master” (Appendix to the Congressional
Globe, 33rd Cong., 1st sess., March 3, 1854,
p. 310).
Others
contributed to a third proslavery interpretation of the Declaration of
Independence, one that employed the document to describe the U.S. Constitution
as a voluntary compact between independent, sovereign states.This
contractual view of the United States as a compact was not an innovation
of the Antebellum era as its lineage can be traced back to the Articles
of Confederation and to early national era debates over the nature of the
American Union.By the 1850s, however,
advocates of this view employed the Declaration to redefine both the powers
of the national government and the nature of relations between the states
under the U.S. Constitution.In his
1855 Annual Message to Congress, President Franklin Pierce pronounced this
contractual interpretation of the Union “the constitutional theory of our
Government.”According to Pierce’s
historiography, before the voluntary formation of“a
confederation of independent States” each state“assumed
the powers and rights of absolute self-government…wholly without interference
from any other” state.“In the language
of the Declaration of Independence,” Pierce noted, “each State had ‘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’.”As a result, the states created
“a Federal Republic of the free white men of the colonies, constituted,
as they were, in distinct and reciprocally independent State governments.”For
Pierce, therefore, the U.S. Congress was only a ”congress of sovereignties”
in which “cooperative action” required a static “balance of power” secured
by “the separate reserved rights of the States and their equal representation
in the Senate.”Moreover, according
to this President, “each [state] solemnly bound itself to all the others
neither to undertake nor permit any encroachment upon or intermeddling
with another’s reserved rights” (Pierce,
Annual Message to Congress,
December 31, 1855).
As
the secession crisis began to unfold in late 1860, President James Buchanan
extended this contractual interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.Buchanan
blamed the present crisis on “the long-continued and intemperate interference
of the Northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern States,”
and he proposed that the natural recourse “against the tyranny and oppression
of the Federal Government” was “the right of resistance.”Without
legal precedent or warrant from the U.S. Constitution, Buchanan argued
this right “exists independently of all constitutions, and has been exercised
at all periods of the world's history.”Moreover,
he continued, “it is embodied in strong and express language in our own
Declaration of Independence” (Buchanan, Annual Message, December 3, 1860).
The
election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 was a signal event in the development
of the Presidency as well as the use and influence of the Declaration of
Independence.In his first Inaugural
Address in March 1861, President Lincoln dismissed the interpretations
of the Declaration and the U.S. Constitution advanced by secessionists
and his two Presidential predecessors.In
response to their compact theory of the Union, Lincoln inquired “if the
United States be not a government proper, but an association of States
in the nature of contract merely, can it, as a contract, be peacefully
unmade by less than all the parties who made it?One
party to a contract may violate it—break it, so to speak; but does it not
require all to lawfully rescind it?”Lincoln
further argued: “The Union is much older than the Constitution.It
was formed, in fact by the Articles of Association in 1774.It
was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776,”
the Articles of Confederation in 1778, and the U.S. Constitution in 1787.As
a result, “It follows from these views that no State upon its own mere
motion can lawfully get out of the Union.”For
Lincoln, therefore, “acts of violence… against the authority of the United
States, are insurrectionary or revolutionary” attempts to overthrow the
national government which he openly recognized as a “revolutionary right”
retained by the people along with their “constitutional right” to amend
the U.S. Constitution through its Article V procedures(Collected
Works of Abraham Lincoln, March 4, 1861, IV: 262-71).
Lincoln’s
careful distinctions and conclusions deserve fuller attention because they
reflect not only on the influence of the Declaration upon him but his resolve
during the secession crisis and his understanding of the Union and U.S.
Constitution throughout the Civil War.In
his Inaugural Address, Lincoln successfully turned the contractual exchange
logic of the compact interpretation against its advocates simply by asking
if “any right, plainly written in the Constitution, has been denied?”“Think,
if you can,” he challenged his listening and reading audiences, “of a single
instance in which a plainly written provision of the Constitution has ever
been denied.”Without any demonstrated
violation, Lincoln portrayed the secessionists and those who advocated
breaking the original compact as revolutionaries—that is, individuals acting
outside of the law.This distinction
was important---and became more so for rallying Unionists after Fort Sumter
as Lincoln made clear in the first official Message he sent to Congress
on July 4, 1861.In this Message,
Lincoln pointed out that the secessionists unlawfully had broken the explicit
terms of the U.S. Constitution, and they were attempting to accomplish
this without just compensation.As
Lincoln put it:
The nation
purchased, with money the countries out of which several of these States
were formed.Is it just that they
shall go off without leave, and without refunding?The
nation paid large sums…to relieve Florida of the aboriginal tribes. Is
it that she shall now be off without consent, or without making any return?The
nation is now in debt for money applied to the benefit of these so-called
seceding States, in common with the rest.Is
it just, either that creditors shall go unpaid, or the remaining States
pay the whole?….Again, if one State may secede, so may another; and when
all shall have seceded, none is left to pay the debts.Is
this quite just to creditors?Did
we notify them of this sage view of ours, when we borrowed their money?If
we now recognize this doctrine, by allowing the seceders to go in peace,
it is difficult to see what we can do, if others choose to go, or to exhort
terms upon which they will promise to remain (Collected Works of Abraham
Lincoln, IV: 435-436).
Lincoln’s
first Inaugural Address is significant for a second but more easily overlooked
distinction.Lincoln expressly argued
that the Union began with the Articles of Association in 1774 and not in
1776 with the Declaration of Independence.This
dating scheme clearly aided Lincoln’s argument about the supremacy of the
Union over the individual states, although it also dislodged the Declaration
from a privileged constitutional or symbolic association with the Union’s
origins.For Lincoln, however, the
relevance and value of the Declaration of Independence for the Union was
exposed in the separation of the document’s accidental historical associations
from its more important substantive content.Unlike
many of his Presidential predecessors or Members of Congress, President
Lincoln did not invoke the Declaration as a mere authority or rhetorical
prop to bolster an argument nor did he value it because for many it remained
a symbolic proxy for the still revered origins and “fathers” of the American
Revolution.Rather the transcendent
qualities that Lincoln extracted from the Declaration of Independence,
entwined with his understanding of Union and the U.S. Constitution, and
made the focal points of his Presidency were the guide of his thinking
and public speaking throughout the 1850s and the principal motivation for
his run for the Presidency in 1860.Indeed,
in a revealing pre-Inaugural speech Lincoln gave at Independence Hall in
Philadelphia, the President-elect boldly declared (to a cheering audience)
that he “never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments
embodied in the Declaration of Independence” (Collected Works of Abraham
Lincoln, IV: 240).
But what
were the ‘transcendent’ qualities expressed in the Declaration of Independence
that so inspired the last decade of Lincoln’s public life?Lincoln’s
public speeches and private writings—especially between 1854 and his first
Inaugural Address--offer an extensive and accessible resource for answering
this most important question, and for this reason alone these works deserve
to be revisited and studied as often as The Federalist Papers.Among
these works, one of the earliest and most important was an extended public
speech Lincoln gave in 1854 in Peoria, Illinois, where he appeared in a
debate with Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas.In
the U.S. Senate, Douglas had been the principal author of the recent Kansas-Nebraska
Act and the architect of Congress’s repeal of the 1820 Missouri Compromise.In
his Peoria speech, Lincoln expressed his moral opposition to “the monstrous
injustice” of human slavery in terms of his “ancient faith” in the principle
that “all men are created equal.”This
principle extended and was bound to a second one also expressed in the
Declaration: “that no man is good enough to govern another man, without
that other’s consent,” which Lincoln called (as Jefferson did before him)
“the sheet anchor of American republicanism.”Yet
for Lincoln the Declaration of Independence supported not simply the familiar
idea that “the just powers of government are derived from the consent of
the governed” but a more activist and universalistic imperative: “Allow
ALL the governed an equal voice in the government, and that, and that only
is self-government” (Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, II:
255, 266).Any extension of slavery
thus was morally unjustifiable and a constitutional abandonment of the
Declaration’s redemptive vision of humanity and its capacity for self-government.In
a 1857 speech, Lincoln contended that the founding fathers well knew this
vision did not accurately described existing conditions but they nevertheless
expressed it “so that enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances
should permit,” intending it to be “a stumbling block to those who” subsequently
“might seek to turn a free people into the hateful paths of despotism”
(Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, II: 406).In
his 1854 Peoria speech, Lincoln eloquently expressed his commitment to
this vision this way:
Little
by little, but steadily as man’s march to the grave, we have been giving
up the OLD for the NEW faith.Near
eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal;
but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration,
that for SOME men to enslave OTHERS is a “sacred right of self-government.”These
principles can not stand together.They
are as opposite as God and mammon; and whoever holds to the one, must despise
the other.When Pettit, in connection
with his support of the Nebraska bill, called the Declaration of Independence
“a self-evident lie” he only did what consistency can candor require all
other Nebraska men to do.Of the
forty odd Nebraska Senators who sat present and heard him, no one rebuked
him.Nor am I apprized that any Nebraska
newspaper, or any Nebraska orator, in the whole nation, has ever yet rebuked
him…. Let no one be deceived.The
spirit of seventy-six and the spirit of Nebraska, are utter antagonisms;
and the former is being rapidly displaced by the latter.”/…. Our republican
robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. Let us turn
and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution.Let
us turn slavery from its claims of “moral right,” back upon its existing
legal rights, and its arguments of “necessity.” Let us return it to the
position our fathers gave it; and there let it rest in peace. Let us readopt
the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy
which harmonize with it. Let north and south—let all Americans—let all
lovers of liberty everywhere—join in the great work.If
we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have saved
it, as to make, and keep it, forever worthy of saving.We
shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people,
the world over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generation”
(Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, II: 2: 275-276).
Toward the end of his long
journey to Washington, D.C., President-elect Abraham Lincoln offered another
important, pre-Inaugural expression of his understanding of the Declaration
and its significance.In his brief
Independence Hall speech in Philadelphia, he publicly committed himself
to these words:
I have
often inquired of myself, what great principle or idea it was that kept
this Confederacy so long together. Itwas
not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the mother land;
but something in that Declaration giving liberty, [3] not alone to the
people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time. (Great
applause.) It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights
should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have
an equal chance. (Cheers.) This is the sentiment embodied in that Declaration
of Independence.Now, my friends,
can this country be saved upon that basis? If it can, I will consider myself
one of the happiest men in the world if I can help to save it. If it can'tbe
saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful. But, if this country
cannot be saved without giving up that principle---I was about to say I
would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it(Collected
Works of Abraham Lincoln, IV: 240).
Others,
to be certain, shared or would come to grasp Lincoln’s understanding and
vision of the Declaration of Independence.Yet
as the 1856 caning of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, the American
Civil War, Lincoln’s assassination, and the protracted efforts and failures
of Congress’s Reconstruction programs ably testify, the practical means
and methods adopted to further the establishment of this vision--as circumstances
would permit--proved inadequate for the intended task, too difficult and
costly to implement, and too unpopular to sustain.Ironically,
the Centennial celebrations of the principles of Declaration in 1876 preceded
the negotiated abandonment of federal supervision of Reconstruction after
the next Presidential election.
However
partial the successes, Congress’s initial determination and actions to
reconstruct the Union after the Civil War manifested the influences of
the Declaration of Independence.Many
of these efforts were conceived and led by Charles Sumner in the U.S. Senate.In
1865, for example, the Massachusetts Senator rejected Lincoln’s plan to
recognize the once rebellious but now subdued State of Louisiana, privately
asserting “We shall insist upon the Declaration of Independence as the
foundation of the new State governments; and the argument will be presented,
not merely on the grounds of Human Rights, but of self-interest” (Sumner
to George Bancroft, Feb. 28, 1865, Selected Letters of Charles Sumner,
1990, 2: 270).Congress agreed with
Sumner, refusing to admit any of the former slave states until their state
constitutions recognized the Declaration’s principles and only after they
ratified the Reconstruction Amendments Congress had proposed to add to
the U.S. Constitution.Congress subsequently
has required each new state admitted into Union since the Civil War to
adhere to the principles of the Declaration of Independence in their state
constitutions.
Senator
Sumner’s unfailing attachment to the Declaration, “the great touchstone”
of his efforts to “bring the Constitution into avowed harmony with the
Declaration of Independence,” compelled or influenced other significant
although often vigorously contested legal and constitutional changes.One
of these changes was the1868 Expatriation Act.In
this Act, Congress extended the Declaration’s rights to naturalized American
immigrants, declaring voluntary expatriation “a natural and inherent right
of all people, indispensable to the enjoyment of the rights of life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness” (Congressional Globe, 40nd
Cong., 2nd sess., July 27, 1868, pp. 223-24).Other
changes bearing Sumner’s commitment include, at least in part, the Thirteenth,
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the 1866 and 1875 Civil Rights Acts,
the Enforcement Acts, and his theory of constitutional interpretation by
which “the Constitution can never be interpreted in any way inconsistent
with the Declaration” (Congressional Globe, 42nd Cong.,
2nd sess., January 31, 1872, p. 728).
*
1877-1926 *
The
failure of Sumner and others to make the Declaration of Independence a
“living letter instead of a promise” did not diminish the document’s social
or political importance in later years, yet it did leave open the possibility
for new applications of the Declaration between 1877-1926.National
immigration policy was one area in which Members of Congress vigorously
battled over the meaning and relevance of Declaration of Independence.The
original Declaration had indicted King George for restricting American
population growth by “obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners;
refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising
the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.”Consistent
with these principles, Congress and the states actively encouraged population
growth, foreign immigration and naturalization, and affordable westward
lands for settlement for much of the nineteenth century.As
a Member of Congress explained to his Tennessee constituents in 1814:
The
declaration of our independence, in terms peculiar to the bold and just
conceptions of its author, has established the principle upon a basis that
ought not—that cannot be shaken…./In the pursuit of this happiness,man
has no bounds but the limits of the world.He
may pursue it in whatsoever region, or in whatsoever direction or course
his hope, his judgment, or his caprice, may direct him” (Thomas K. Harris
to the Freemen of the Third Congressional District, in the State of Tennessee,
April 15, 1814, Cunningham, 1978, III: 876).
Attitudes
toward unfettered immigration had shifted by the mid-1870s, especially
with regard to Chinese immigrants.In
1882, Congress and President Chester Arthur responded by enacting three
major immigration laws; one of these laws, the Chinese Exclusion Act, barred
Chinese laborers for ten years.“Congressional
debates over Chinese exclusion,” political scientist Rogers Smith observed,
reveal “that exclusionist congressmen redefined or even decried the nation’s
liberal traditions in favor of grim but popular” arguments based upon “evolutionary
theories as well as economic and republican concerns.”Opponents
of these exclusionary acts contended that the restrictions undermined republican
and Christian principles, in addition to the rights to life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness identified in the Declaration of Independence.With
either deep sarcasm or historical ignorance, Massachusetts Senator George
Hoar suggested the “doctrine that free institutions are a monopoly of the
favored races” was a proposition “of quite recent origin.”As
Smith further noted, Hoar “pointed out that many had condemned blacks as
racially unfit for citizenship and that experience had proven otherwise”;
he therefore suggested “the Chinese would assimilate adequately if they
were freed from discriminatory state laws that now enchained them in menial
trades and ghetto existences” (Smith, 1997, pp. 359-60).Open-immigration
opponents defended their positions with more restrictive interpretations
of the Declaration of Independence.Several
Members of Congress contended the Declaration did not guarantee “the rights
of entry” into the United States, while others resurrected older racialist
interpretations that its principles applied only to white males.Other
Members pursued similarly worn dismissals of the Declaration as “sentimentalist,”
“speculative and Utopian.”And as
several others had before the Civil War, Missouri Representative Aylett
Buckner stepped forward to proclaim the Declaration’s principle that “all
men are created equal” was “absolutely false” (Smith, 1997, p. 361).
Congressional
and Presidential views of the Declaration of Independence also influenced
the development of other national policies.In
April 1898, the United States declared war against Spain on the grounds
that the people of Cuba “are and of right ought to be free and independent.”After
the War, however, Members of Congress contested the meaning of the Declaration
as they debated the future of the nation’s recently acquired island territories,
which included Hawaii by annexation in 1896, and Puerto Rico, Guam, the
Philippines, and Cuba from Spain by conquest.Missouri
Senator George Vest reminded his colleagues that any thought of “govern[ing]
millions, without their consent, as mere chattels” contradicted the principles
of the Declaration.” Vest and others, therefore, argued between the options
of granting statehood and full citizenship rights for the inhabitants of
these territories and permitting them to become independent (Peterson,
1962, pp. 266-67).Other
Members felt compelled to propose different interpretations of the Declaration
of Independence to justify their plans for these individuals and territories.Although
the Declaration made full endorsement of colonial status impossible for
Members of Congress, Rogers Smith notes, Congressional imperialists expressed
no reservations when they contended that the Declaration applied only to
individuals “capable of self-government”
(Smith, 1997, pp. 432-33).Different
national policies on these citizenship and territorial issues ultimately
were devised by Congress and various Presidents: Cuba and the Philippines
became independent in 1902 and 1946 respectively; the residents of Puerto
Rico and Guam received U.S. citizenship and unincorporated but self-governing
territorial status in 1917 and 1949, and Hawaii became the Fiftieth State
in 1959.
U.S.
Presidents also used and were influenced by the Declaration of Independence
in other ways.Two Presidents, in
particular, deserve attention for their interpretations and uses of the
Declaration.Like Lincoln and Sumner,
President Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) repeatedly articulated his belief
that declarations of rights needed to be translated “into definite action.”Like
the Progressives of his time, Wilson also believed that the Declaration
“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.”Domestically,
Wilson proposed that his “new declaration of independence” was a fight
against the tyranny of “political machines” and “selfish business” interests
who exploited “the people by legal and political means” (Wilson, 1914,
JK271.W6 1914, p??). Internationally,
Wilson proposed extending the application of the Declaration’s natural
rights beyond America’s borders.In
his words:
“My dream
is that as the years go on and the world know more and more of America,
it will also drink at the fountains of youth and renewal; that it will
turn to America for those moral inspirations that lie at the basis of all
freedom; that no country will ever fear American unless it feels that it
is engaged in some enterprise which is inconsistent with the rights of
humanity; that America will come into the full light of the day when all
shall know that she puts human rights above all other rights and that her
flag is not only of America, but of humanity./What
other great people has devoted itself to that exalted ideal? To what other
nation can all eyes look for an instant sympathy that thrills the whole
body politic when men anywhere are fighting for their rights?I
do now know that there will ever be a declaration of grievances and of
independence for mankind, but I believe that if any such document ever
is drawn up, it will be drawn in the spirit of the American Declaration
of Independence./American has lifted
high the light which will shine unto all generations and will guide the
feet of mankind to the goal of justice, liberty and peace” (Independence
Hall, Philadelphia, PA, July 14, 1914, Tourtellot, ed. p.72).
Calvin
Coolidge (1923-1929) was another U.S. President who demonstrated novel
appreciation and uses of the Declaration of Independence.Coolidge’s
view of the Declaration was as expansive as Wilson’s although its focus
was directed inward to the individual, whose rights “were so clearly asserted
in” and whose “wrongs” were guarded against by the Declaration.“Through
it all,” Coolidge contended, “runs the recognition of the dignity and worth
of the individual, because of his possession of those qualities which are
revealed to us by religion.It is
this conception alone which warrants the assertion of the universal right
of freedom.America has been working
out of the modern effort to provide a system of government and society
which would give to the individual that freedom which his nature requires.”“The
end sought” by these Declaration inspired efforts “has been to create a
nation wherein the individual might rise to the full stature of manhood
and womanhood” (53-54).
Coolidge’s
understanding of the Declaration also differed from Wilson’s in a second
noteworthy way.Whereas Wilson sought
to lead the nation to engage and to remake the world in his image of the
Declaration’s principles, Coolidge’s use of the Declaration counseled transformations
of a more personal nature, directed as he once said “to satisfy the longing
of the soul” (1924, p. 51).Like
Lincoln and other Presidents before him, Coolidge also attributed the nation’s
economic successes to the Declaration’s principles.For
Coolidge, adherence to these principles required a fuller awareness and
recognition of their spiritual foundations.“Equality,
liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man,” he declared, “are not
elements which we can see and touch.They
are ideals. They have their source and roots in the religious convictions.They
belong to the unseen world.Unless,”
therefore, “the faith of the American people in these religious convictions
is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish.We
can not continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause”
(Coolidge, 1926, 451).Thus despite
the economic prosperity that marked his Presidential tenure (1923-1929),
Coolidge cautioned:
We live in an age
of science and of abounding accumulation of material things.These
did not create our Declaration.Our
Declaration created them.The things
of the spirit come first.Unless
we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may
appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp.If
we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us,
we must be like minded as the father who created it.We
must not sink into a pagan materialism.We
must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy.We
must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed.We
must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame,
the altar fires before which they worshipped (Coolidge, 1926, 454).
*
1927-1976 *
During
the final fifty years covered by this study, 1927-1976, the uses and influences
of the Declaration of Independence upon Congress and the Presidency require
less recovery not only because they are more familiar and accessible, but
because they have been ably studied by a number of scholars.These
uses and influences, however, are no less significant or expansive in their
conceptual innovations or constitutional consequences than those identified
in previous eras.Among others, two
uses deserve explicit recognition--although neither one escaped strident
and sustained opposition.The first
use of the Declaration took its initial form shortly before the 1932 Presidential
election.In a speech before the
Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Franklin Roosevelt articulated his
vision of a new, more energetic national government.As
Presidential scholar Sidney Milkis observes, FDR argued that the function
of the national government was “to assist in the development of an economic
declaration of rights, an economic constitutional order.”In
this new order, “a resurgent executive would play the principal part in
identifying new problems and searching for methods by which those problem
might be solved (Milkis, 1998, p.190).
The
substantive breadth of FDR’s speech comes to light against the backdrop
of prior uses of the Declaration.Whereas
Parker, Hemphill, Adams, Lincoln, Sumner and others had earlier envisioned
extending the rights identified in the Declaration to Americans without
regard to skin color; and Lincoln, Vest, Wilson and others envisioned these
rights in Lincoln’s words as a “hope to the world” for “all lovers of liberty
everywhere,” FDR reinterpreted the original list of rights in the Declaration
to include a new set of economic rights, placing the responsibilities for
the fulfillment of these rights upon the national government.Thus,
as Milkis notes, “the most significant aspect of the departure from” the
conventional understanding of “natural rights to programmatic liberalism
was the association of constitutional rights with the extension, rather
than the restriction, of the programmatic commitments of the national government”
(Milkis, 190).FDR’s four-term tenure
as President is filled with other additional elaborations of this interpretation
of the Declaration of Independence.One
of the clearest statements is his 1944 State of the Union speech, where
FDR asserts “it is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine
the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of
an American standard of living higher than ever before known.”Roosevelt
continued:
This Republic had
its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of
certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech,
free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches
and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty./As
our Nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy
expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality
in the pursuit of happiness….In
our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We
have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis
of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station,
race, or creed. / Among these are: The right to a useful and remunerative
job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation; The right
to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; The
right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which
will give him and his family a decent living; The right of every businessman,
large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition
and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; The right of every family
to a decent home; The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity
to achieve and enjoy good health; The right to adequate protection from
the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, andunemployment;
The right to a good education. / All of these rights spell security. And
after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation
of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being (Roosevelt,
1944 Annual Message to Congress).
The
second noteworthy use of the Declaration of Independence during this era
contributed to the advancement of national civil rights reforms in the
second half of the twentieth century.Although
with numerous Presidential and Congressional heirs, one original source
of this use of the Declaration can be traced back to President Harry Truman.As
Presidential scholar Garth Pauley observes, Truman addressed the issue
of civil rights on numerous occasions in his first two years as President
and he appointed the 1946 Committee on Civil Rights, which subsequently
issued its historic To Secure These Rights report.It,
however, was Truman’s 1947 Lincoln Memorial speech to the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) that signaled a critical
turning point in his Presidency and ultimately the nation’s and the national
government’s commitment to civil rights reforms (Pauley, 2001, 43-52).
Truman began this speech by noting “the long history of our country's efforts
to guarantee freedom and equality to all our citizens.”Truman
marked this history from the earliest, “inspiring charters of human rights--the
Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the
Emancipation Proclamation” to the recent work by American “representatives,
and those of other liberty-loving countries on the United Nations Commission
on Human Rights” who were “preparing an International Bill of Rights.”
Given
“recent events,” which included the heightened threat of communism, Truman
noted the pressing importance of ensuring the enjoyment of civil rights
by every American.Like FDR before
him, Truman advocated a more active role for the national government in
achieving this result.Truman’s
concern, however, extended beyond economic rights and conventional conceptions
of civil rights that emphasized “only the need of protection against the
possibility of tyranny by the Government.”Truman
made clear: “We must keep moving forward, with new concepts of civil rights
to safeguard our heritage” and “the Federal Government” must become “a
friendly, vigilant defender of the rights and equalities of all Americans”
so that each individual would “be guaranteed equality of opportunity” and
freedom from “discrimination because of ancestry, or religion. or race,
or color. ”For Truman, this new
understanding of and commitment to civil rights also meant that:
We must not tolerate
such limitations on the freedom of any of our people and on their enjoyment
of the basic rights which every citizen in a truly democratic society must
possess. Every man should have the right to a decent home, the right to
an education, the right to adequate medical care, the right to a worthwhile
job, the right to an equal share in the making of public decisions through
the ballot, and the right to a fair trial in a fair court (Truman, 1947
NAACP speech, June 28, 1947).
Truman
defended his new vision of civil rights in subsequent statements, speeches,
and executive actions.One of the
fullest and most concise statements was his February 2, 1948 Civil Rights
Message to Congress.In this Message,
Truman not only invoked the Declaration as the inspiration for this new
vision, he specified a set of national policies priorities that, with the
similarly inspired assistance of Members of Congress and Presidents Kennedy
and Johnson in the 1960s, initiated a critique and reframing of the law
and administration of civil rights in the United States.In
this Message, Truman argued:
The
founders of the United States proclaimed to the world the American belief
that all men are created equal, and that governments are instituted to
secure the inalienable rights with which all men are endowed. In the Declaration
of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, they eloquently
expressed the aspirations of...mankind for equality and freedom....
We
believe that all men are created equal and that they have the right to
equal justice under law.We believe
that all men have the right to freedom of thought and of expression and
the right to worship as they please.We
believe that all men are entitled to equal opportunities for jobs, for
homes, for good health and for education. We believe that all men should
have a voice in their government and that government should protect, not
usurp, the rights of the people. These are the basic civil rights, which
are the source and the support of our democracy….
The
Federal Government has a clear duty to see that Constitutional guarantees
of individual liberties and of equal protection under the laws are not
denied or abridged anywhere in our Union. That duty is shared by all three
branches of the Government, but it can be fulfilled only if the Congress
enacts modern, comprehensive civil rights laws, adequate to the needs of
the day, and demonstrating out continuing faith in the free way of life.
I recommend, therefore, that the Congress enact legislation at this session
directed toward the following specific objectives: 1. Establishing a permanent
Commission on Civil Rights, a Joint Congressional Committee on Civil Rights,
and a Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice.2.
Strengthening existing civil rights statues.3.
Providing Federal protection against lynching.4.
Protecting more adequately the right to vote.5.
Establishing a Fair Employment Practice Commission to prevent unfair discrimination
in employment.6. Prohibiting discrimination
in interstate transportation facilities.7.
Providing home-rule and suffrage in Presidential elections for the residents
of the District of Columbia. 8. Providing Statehood for Hawaii and Alaska
and a greater measure of self-government for our island possessions.9.
Equalizing the opportunities for residents of the United States to become
naturalized citizens.10. Settling
the evacuation claims of Japanese-Americans (Johnson, Civil Rights Message
to Congress, February 2, 1948).
Conclusion