" What had been done in
Canada was to let the conquered French retain their own
laws--which was not tyranny but magnanimity. Another clause of
the Declaration, as Jefferson first wrote it, made George
responsible for the slave trade in America with all its horrors
and crimes. We may doubt whether that not too enlightened monarch
had even more than vaguely heard of the slave trade. This phase
of the attack upon him was too much for the slave owners of the
South and the slave traders of New England, and the clause was
struck out.
Nearly fourscore and ten years later, Abraham Lincoln, at a
supreme crisis in the nation's life, told in Independence Hall,
Philadelphia, what the Declaration of Independence meant to him.
"I have never," he said, "had a feeling politically which did not
spring from the sentiments in the Declaration of Independence";
and then he spoke of the sacrifices which the founders of the
Republic had made for these principles. He asked, too, what was
the idea which had held together the nation thus founded. It was
not the breaking away from Great Britain. It was the assertion of
human right. We should speak in terms of reverence of a document
which became a classic utterance of political right and which
inspired Lincoln in his fight to end slavery and to make "Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness" realities for all men.
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