Notes

Plan of the Book

there is not 1 but 3 Declarations:

1. Jefferson’s (edited)
2. Congress’s (signed)
3. ours (the symbolism and myth that have formed around the document through history)

these differences are “underrated and misstated” (author’s thesis)

“It is not surprising that we should misunderstand the Declaration. It is written in the lost language of the Enlightenment. It is dark with unexamined lights.”

Abraham Lincoln was the one to “[recontract] our society on the basis of the Declaration as our fundamental charter” in 1863

Prologue

“The nation is conceived by a mental act, in the spirit of liberty, and dedicated (as Jesus was in the temple) to a proposition. The proposition to which it is dedicated forms the bridge back from Lincoln to Jefferson, from the Address to the Declaration—’the proposition that all men are created equal.’”

Lincoln in 1854 Peoria address:

Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and—with it—the practises and policy which harmonize with it. Let North and South, let all America, let all lovers of liberty everywhere, join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union, but shall have so saved it, as to make and to keep it forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it, that the succeeding millions of free happy people, the world over, shall rise up and call us blessed to the latest generation.