July 4 is rightly celebrated as day on which the thirteen American colonies declared their independence from Great Britain and began a struggle to establish themselves as a free and self-governing nation. But contained in the Declaration of Independence, read at countless events on this holiday, is an idea that remains radical in our own time, “the proposition,” as President Abraham Lincoln called it in his Gettysburg Address, that “all men are created equal.”
Four million people are expected to travel to Gettysburg next week to commemorate the battle that ended there 150 years ago on July 4, 1863. As John Burt of Brandeis University observes in his recent book “Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism,” when it came time for Lincoln to dedicate the Gettysburg National Cemetery, he chose not to speak of the Union or of the U.S. Constitution, but turned instead to the document that arguably led inevitably to the conflict. For Lincoln, the founding fathers had “conceived” and “brought forth” a nation, but it was a project that remained unfinished and would be tested again and again. Is it possible, he asked, that a nation founded on a belief in the right of every person to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” can endure?
In his speech, Lincoln called for “the birth of a new freedom,” a task that would be left for the living once the bloodshed of the Civil War came to an end. In 1863, the great issue was slavery, and to test the country’s dedication to its promise of freedom for all, a war had to be fought. Less violent struggles for women’s rights, civil rights, voting rights, and gay and lesbian rights all lay in the future. But the struggle to define, test, and realize the simple proposition at the heart of the Declaration is not over and continues to this day, as the three cases on which the Supreme Court has ruled this week make clear.
As we celebrate the Declaration of Independence and the freedoms it promises, perhaps a salutary reading of the Gettysburg Address—that brief, sobering reflection of a great president—is also in order. It is a reminder that 150 years later, it is up to “us the living” to remain true to that proposition at the heart of our founding document, and “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
