Page 9 - Leisure Living Magazine June 2016

Lincoln And The Fourth Of July
By Justice Paul Pfeifer, Ohio Supreme Court
This coming month, Americans everywhere will celebrate the Fourth of July, the Declaration of Independence, and the Founders who created this magnificent country.
We naturally associate certain names – Washington, Jefferson, Adams – to the holiday. We don’t, however, tend to think of Abraham LincolnontheFourth.ButLincoln–whilenota Founder – forged a strong tie to the Revolutionary generation and its principles.
In his most well-known speech – the
as a “rebuke and stumbling-
block” to slavery. As Rich Lowry
has written, Lincoln “wielded it as a rhetorical weapon, made it a rallying cry, and established it” by the end of the Civil War “as national gospel.”
In 1858, Lincoln gained national prominence when the Illinois Republican Party nominated him to run against Stephen Douglas for the United States Senate. Lincoln eventually lost that campaign, but in accepting the nomination, he gave “one of the most incendiary speeches in American history.” He told the convention that
Gettysburg Address that time with his famous opening: “Four score and seven years ago, our Fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation...”
By going back
87 years, Lincoln
was specifically
referencing the
Declaration of
Independence. By
the mid-1850s,
Lincoln had
come to see the
Declaration as his guidepost, “his political chart and inspiration.” But he knew that America was not living up to what he called the Declaration’s “ancient faith,” – that “all men are created equal.”
In an 1859 letter to a Republican festival in Boston marking the anniversary of Jefferson’s birth, Lincoln wrote: “All honor to Jefferson – to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”
The great dividing issue of Lincoln’s day was, of course, slavery. And Lincoln used the Declaration
www.LeisureLivingMagazine.com
– Lincoln harkened back to
slavery had made the United States “a house divided against itself,” and that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”
Shortly thereafter, Douglas gave a speech – with Lincoln in attendance – in which he expressed his disagreement with Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech. According to Douglas, Lincoln’s
assertion that America couldn’t exist “half slave and half free” was inconsistent with the “diversity” in domestic institutions that was “the great safeguard of our liberties.”
Afterwards, Lincoln invited Douglas’s audience to return the next night for his reply. And so, on the evening of July 10, 1858, a crowd gathered to hear Lincoln’s memorable response to Douglas. The entire speech is too long to recount here, but at one point, Lincoln once again invoked the Declaration of Independence and its promise of equality.
He said that in the 1770s, we find a race of men “we claim as our fathers and grandfathers; they were iron men, they fought for the principle that they were contending for; and we understood that by what they then did it has followed that the
Continued on page 10
Celebrate Independance Day
June 2016 LeisureLiving | 9