“I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence,” President-elect Abraham Lincoln declared in Philadelphia in February 1861, standing in front of Independence Hall. The previous month, Lincoln had adapted language from the Book of Proverbs to emphasize to a Southern correspondent the place of the Declaration in his own thought. He wrote that “the expression of that principle [of Liberty for All], in our Declaration of Independence…was the word ‘fitly...

Source: Wall Street Journal July 04, 2019 09:22 UTC