The Battle of Gettysburg was fought from July 1-3, 1863. More than 7,000 soldiers died, with total casualties — including wounded and missing — reaching approximately 50,000 across both armies. That November, in his address dedicating the cemetery there, Abraham Lincoln would say that the Union victory did nobly advance the unfinished work of a nation conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. The remaining question was only whether the nation at large could, inspired by those soldiers, now increase its own dedication to the cause.
That is our question too. Can we rededicate ourselves to the cause of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal?
Lincoln also called the Declaration of Independence the apple of gold, held up in a frame of silver, which was the Constitution. He was drawing on Proverbs, where the word of a wise man fitly spoken is said to be an apple of gold held up in a frame of silver.
I’ve been working on, writing about, and speaking about the Declaration of Independence for more than 25 years — more than a tenth of the life of our nation. For that matter, I am astonished to reflect that I have been alive for more than a fifth of the life of the nation. My mother and father have been alive for nearly a third of the life of the nation. We are still that young as a country! In America years — a concept like dog years — we might think of ourselves as still little more than a pimply, hormonal teenager, still developing our frontal cortex.
Across those years of reflection, I have come to understand what Lincoln meant when he called the Declaration of Independence the apple of gold. It was low-income night students in a class I taught in Chicago more than 25 years ago who gave me the critical insight. The Declaration tells an economical story of human agency. A group of people looked around and diagnosed their circumstances. They found them wanting. They determined to set out in a new direction, first laying out some principles to guide them. Then they clarified their diagnosis of the ills they faced, chose action steps, and set out. My night students were in my class because they, too, had surveyed their circumstances and found them wanting, and had determined to set out in a new direction. They resonated immediately to the Declaration of Independence, connecting to its story of agency.
Astonishingly, I also learned that few of them had encountered the Declaration of Independence before my course. Their inheritance — a golden apple — had been withheld from them. Why? Most generally because a generation of people had decided that a text attributed to Thomas Jefferson, who held people in bondage, could not be taken seriously as the founding text for our nation.
But, of course, Thomas Jefferson was not the solo author of the Declaration. Nothing in democracy is ever a solo act. The committee that he chaired also included John Adams from Massachusetts and Benjamin Franklin from Pennsylvania. Adams never held people in bondage and always was against enslavement. Franklin had held people in bondage earlier in his life but had repudiated the practice by 1776.
Before the end of the Revolutionary War, both Massachusetts and Pennsylvania would abolish enslavement, drawing on the principles and language of the Declaration, and lay the foundation for abolitionism. (Vermont did so as well, though it was still its own country at the time.) In that Revolutionary period, free and enslaved Black Americans like Prince Hall and Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman also seized on the idea that all people are created equal to describe their own deeply felt and held sense of agency.
I’ve also written at length elsewhere about how the word “men” was meant in a universal sense at the time. And the contrast between the lofty principles and the slow start to abolition, the continuation of enslavement throughout most of the country, the ongoing subordination of women, and the expropriation from and suppression of Native Americans all require acknowledgment and explanation.
Yet Lincoln was right to observe that without the principle that all people are created equal, there could be no moral justification for revolution. Without that principle, it was little more than a power grab. Without that principle, it would condemn people to nothing more than an ongoing brute-force struggle over who had power. The Civil War, in other words.
But with that principle firmly in place, something else would be possible — a government for the people, because it was by the people. That, in incredibly economical summary, is the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. It is what we commit ourselves to when we acknowledge and embrace the principle that all people are created equal. We are equal in all of us being people with purposes, trying to make tomorrow better than yesterday. That striving communicates our natural right to and need for freedom — to steer our own lives in our private spheres and to steer our collective lives together with others in the public sphere. We can all have freedom only when we commit to that collective steering.
The golden apple is the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence, which communicates the standards and principles of popular self-government, grounded in the proposition that all people are created equal. This is our collective inheritance:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Right now, a chorus of voices from all over the country and all sides of the political spectrum is calling out that government is not currently for the people. There are crises in housing, health care, child care, and prices. There is forever war and there are technological overlords restructuring our economy and society willy-nilly. There are limits on the freedom to form new businesses and to deploy one’s lifelong savings for investments of one’s own choosing in a timely fashion. There are challenges to the health of young people and limits on their opportunity. And there is incredible wealth accruing to those who hold power simply because they hold power.
Facing these clear indicators that our government is not currently “for the people,” Lincoln would ask us to consider whether it is also by the people. If it is not, that is where we need to focus our energies.
And indeed our government is not currently by the people — because of corruption, and because of the restriction of the right to vote. On the latter point, thanks to gerrymandering, closed primaries, and low-turnout primaries, 60 million Americans no longer have a meaningful vote in federal elections.
To rededicate ourselves to this nation — conceived in liberty, and already several times rededicated to the proposition that all people are created equal — requires us to embrace the hard work of fighting corruption and broadening the suffrage. We must form a movement on both fronts, joining the people who are leading those fights. On the first front, they are American Promise and Issue One. On the second front, they are the Coalition for Healthy Democracy and FairVote (disclosure: I’m involved with all of them).
Yes, we are in a time when we need increased devotion to the cause of government that is for the people because it is by the people. We have much to be proud of as Americans on this Fourth of July — if also nearly as much to lament — but our goal should be to give future generations more to be proud of than to lament. That requires devotion to the principle that all people are created equal.
The golden apple. Pass it on.
The principles are applicable widely great write.
It would be nice to know what Lincoln would say today. Lincoln declared the Declaration an "apple of gold" and the “Union, and the Constitution” a mere “picture of silver." But that was well before Lincoln's last vital years--and well before they bore their most precious fruit. In the years after Lincoln's comparison of the worth of the Declaration and the worth of the Constitution, Lincoln and many other Americans did much to cause our Constitution to far surpass the Declaration.
In 1866 (160 years ago and 90 years after the Declaration of Independence), the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Schuyler Colfax declared that Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment was “the gem of the Constitution . . . because it is the Declaration of Independence placed immutably and forever in our Constitution.” The 14th Amendment clarified what citizenship means: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States" are entitled to all "the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States," which includes "equal protection of the laws." Thus, our Constitution (not merely the Declaration) said that all men have equal rights, privileges and immunities. But even Speaker Colfax overlooked vital aspects of our Constitution.
Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment (arguably) is “the gem of the Constitution" because in fact and in law (the paramount law of the land) it declared far more by "our Constitution" than was declared in "the Declaration of Independence." Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment declared that all citizens have equal rights, privileges and immunities. It established that, according to the paramount law of the land, i.e., in law created by the People speaking for themselves, much more than merely that all men are equal and have equal rights. It established that all citizens born or naturalized in the U.S. are equal and have equal rights regardless of arbitrary factors such as skin color or sex.
The 14th Amendment led to the 15th Amendment, then the 19th Amendment, then the 24th Amendment and then the 26th Amendment. Those amendments, in turn, led SCOTUS toward radical revisions in thinking about the scope and meaning of the 1st Amendment. In part because of the foregoing, I can't help but wonder what Lincoln would say today about the relative worth of the Declaration and the Constitution.
I have no doubt that you're right that he would again say, as he did at Gettysburg in 1863, that "from [our] honored dead we" should "take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion" and we, the living should "highly resolve that [our] dead shall not have died in vain" and "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
I don't doubt that he also would say what he said in 1859 (3 years after the abominable SCOTUS decision and opinions in Dred Scott in 1856):
"The people—the people—are the rightful masters of both Congresses, and courts—not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert that constitution."