Page 10 - Leisure Living Magazine June 2016

Lincoln And The Fourth Of July
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degree of prosperity that we now enjoy has come to us.” We hold annual Fourth of July celebrations, Lincoln said, “to remind ourselves of all the good done in this process of time...and how we are historically connected with it.”
We go from those celebrations in better humor, he said, but “we have not yet reached the whole. There is something else connected with it. We have besides these men – descended by blood from our ancestors – among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe – German, Irish, French and Scandinavian...or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things.
“If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.
“That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”
It became known as his “Electric Cord Speech,” and it furthered Lincoln’s crusade to fight off the assaults on the Declaration of Independence from Douglas and others who tried to relegate it to a graveyard of historical documents with no bearing on the present.
Despite his invocation of the Declaration, Lincoln understood that the Founders weren’t asserting that all men in 1776 were actually enjoying the “inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” He also knew that the
10 |LeisureLiving June 2016
Founders weren’t in a position to make it a reality at that time. But he believed that the assertion in the Declaration of that “abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times,” was a promise to the future.
Lincoln declared that the Founders “meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, 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.”
Happy Fourth of July everyone.
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