Existing comment:
From Political Statement to Sacred Document
Over the course of the nineteenth century, many reform groups from abolitionists and women's rights advocates to labor unions and temperance supporters wrote their own versions of Jefferson's opening paragraphs to highlight their issues and grievances. In the antebellum years, both Northerners and Southerners found justification for their causes in the Declaration.
No one, however, transformed the meaning of the Declaration of Independence more completely than Abraham Lincoln When he affirmed as Gettysburg, "all men are created equal," he took a political announcement of independence and forever fused it with the principle of human equality. In the wake of Lincoln's resounding words, the Declaration of Independence became a sacred document and the guiding moral code for the nation. |