For July 4th, Consider Lincoln's Message

By Ed Epstein

Washington, D.C.

Thursday, July 3, 2025

As the nation on Friday marks the Fourth of July holiday, celebrating the 249th birthday of the Declaration of Independence, it is important to listen to the words of Abraham Lincoln, whose core belief was that the nation constantly had to renew itself to live up to the Declaration's pledge that all people "are created equal."

In February 1861, President-elect Lincoln left his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, on a long, circuitous railroad journey to Washington, where he would take the oath of office on March 4. On February 22, Washington's birthday, he was in Philadelphia and spoke at Independence Hall, where the Continental Congress had adopted the Declaration in 1776.

"All the political sentiments I entertain have been drawn, so far as I have been able to draw them, from the sentiments that originated and were given to the world from this hall. I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments of the Declaration of Independence," Lincoln said.

This belief was nothing new for Lincoln. Going back to his earliest political speeches in the 1830s, he had made it clear that the Declaration was the foundation of his politics. As a lawyer, Lincoln revered the Constitution, but for him it was the Declaration that gave America its driving spirit.

But he knew that equality for all was not a fact. Rather, it was a challenge that each generation had to work anew to bring about.

In 1858, as he ran for the U.S. Senate in Illinois against the powerful incumbent, Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln implored voters to never forget the Declaration's message.

"Now, my countrymen, if you have been taught doctrines conflicting with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence, if you have listened to suggestions which would take away from its grandeur and mutilate the fair symmetry of its proportions, if you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated by our charter of liberty, let me entreat you to come back," he said in Lewiston, Illinois, on Aug. 17, 1858.

"Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of the revolution," he added.

The Lincoln Group is joining with other Lincoln-related groups to ensure that Lincoln's views of the Declaration as a living document and on the broader founding of the United States are a part of the discussion about what America means as the nation marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration in 2026.

Photo from the National Park Service