Douglass and Lincoln: Appealing to the Declaration

In the nineteenth century, opponents of slavery turned the Declaration's natural rights language into a weapon. On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery, asked an audience in Rochester, New York, 'What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? ' He answered that it revealed 'the gross injustice and cruelty' to which the enslaved were subjected, yet he praised the Declaration's principles as 'saving principles' and expressed hope for the nation.

After the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision of 1857 claimed the Declaration's authors had not meant to include Black people, Abraham Lincoln argued that the founders 'meant to set up a standard maxim for free society', to be constantly approached even if never perfectly attained. In the Gettysburg Address of 1863, Lincoln dated the nation from 1776 and its proposition that all men are created equal. Both men treated the Declaration not as a description of reality but as a natural law standard against which the nation could be judged.