It is often asserted that the egalitarian rhetoric of the American Revolution,
a rhetoric crystallized by the Declaration of Independence’s claim
that “all men are created equal,” necessarily doomed US slavery. The
values of the Declaration, as Winthrop Jordan has stated, are logically and
morally incompatible with the institution of slavery and thus inexorably
“require the complete abolition of slavery.”1 According to this account,
the only reason the birth of America and the death of race-based slavery
was not immediate is that this nation’s founding principles failed to be
“taken at face value,” their obvious meaning misunderstood, distorted, or
disavowed.
Given the assumption that slavery obviously distorts the ideals of
America, it is not surprising that the history of the United States is often
imagined in terms of the progressive revelation of the clear and explicit
meaning of this declaration. In his magisterial study of US citizenship,
Rogers Smith, for example, has explored the extent to which an ascriptive
political tradition, one that establishes political identities on the basis of
race, gender, and religion, has competed with this nation’s liberal tradition
and worked to block the expression of the Declaration’s ideals of
freedom and equality.2 Similarly, Garry Wills has argued that Lincoln’s
genius was to promote the Declaration of Independence rather than the
more ambivalent Constitution as this nation’s foundational document.
Lincoln did so, according to Wills, because “[p]ut the claims of the
Declaration as mildly as possible, and it still cannot be reconciled with
slavery.