Lincoln's 4th of July Message and the Declaration of Independence

Not July 2^nd when independence was voted for (probably to the chagrin of John Adams) nor August 2^nd when the Declaration was signed, but July 4^th (the date the Declaration was approved) is the day that the United States celebrates its independence from Great Britain.

Therefore, in part because of the symbolic importance of the day and the because of the opportunity to have a special session of Congress approve measures already taken after the fact, it was on July 4 of 1861 that Lincoln’s message to Congress occurred. In describing secession as a “farcical pretense,” Lincoln appealed to the Declaration, “the good old one, penned by Jefferson” over the declarations of the Southern “adversaries.” Lincoln asked why the Southerners had not included the words “all men are created equal.” For the answer he needed to look no further than his friend Alexander H. Stephens who had become the Vice President of the Confederacy.

Stephens in his “Cornerstone Speech” on March 21, 1861, said about the Constitution of the Confederate States that it “had put to rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.” Stephens noted that Thomas Jefferson had been right that the question of slavery would unmake the Union but he was wrong in believing “that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically.” Any thoughts during the Founding or after it that slavery might somehow pass from existence in the United States were wrong said Stephens because “[t]hey rested on the assumption of the equality of the races.” The Confederate government on the contrary was “founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.” According to Stephens this inequality was a “great physical, philosophical and moral truth.”

Stephens had provided Lincoln with as direct a statement as one could wish for to answer his query and yet Lincoln did not make reference to the speech. In fact, as Frederick Douglass rightly notes, the July 4^th message of Lincoln does not speak of slavery. Douglas Wilson states that, as Douglass would understand later, a critical reaction to the lack of antislavery language in the message is exactly what Lincoln sought to provoke. Douglass would much more forcefully say the words which Lincoln would reserve for the Second Inaugural, namely, that slavery was the cause of the war. Whereas Lincoln qualified his statement with “somehow”, Douglass in 1861 said “[e]very reflecting man knows, and knows full well, that the real source and centre of the treason, rebellion and bloodshed under which the country is now staggering as if to its fall, is slavery. Every one knows that this is a slaveholder’s rebellion, and nothing else.” This is not to say Douglass needed a Lincoln message to speak out against the “self-deception” that slavery was not to blame for the war. In his Douglass’ Monthly in June Douglass declared that the “very stomach of this rebellion is the Negro in the condition of a slave. Arrest that hoe in the hands of the Negro, and you smith the rebellion in the very seat of its life.”

The Declaration of Independence, like Lincoln’s message, does not mention slavery. The reason for the omission in the Declaration is because Jefferson was overruled by his fellow slave holders in the Congress and the passages against slavery (including the description of slavery as “War against human Nature itself”) were cut. Nevertheless, it was the Declaration without mention of slavery which Lincoln would elevate to Constitutional status in the Gettysburg Address: “Four score and seven years ago our forefathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In closing the Gettysburg Address Lincoln refined words from his July 4^th message (“government of the people, by the same people”) into his exhortation “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Lincoln also used the Declaration in his message to run a connecting thread through the Union. From 1776 to the present, the Union was perpetual, the states united, said Lincoln. No “sophism” or “drugging the public mind” of the South could change that fact.

Unlike the “same Bible” which was read and “same God” who was prayed to and invoked for aid by the North and the South, July 4^th and the Declaration of Independence which is commemorated on that the day was emptied of content for the Confederacy as much as for the Great Republic of Rough and Ready. Happy birthday, USA!