"He had defined an ideal in the Declaration, using words to transform principle into policy, and he had lived with the reality of managing both a war and a fledgling government," Meacham writes.
One of our first sins as a country was abandoning an ideal of the Declaration of Independence: "all men are created equal". When it came time to write our Constitution, we included a three-fifths clause that said if you fit the slave profile, then you only count as three-fifths of a person.
The first two times refer to the nation's dedication to two ideals mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, the original ideal of "liberty" and the ideal that became central to the Civil War: "that all men are created equal".
Despite the high-minded ideals of the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution of 1783 was a bloody business.
True originalism must take seriously that, in the 19th century, the ideals of the Declaration of Independence invaded the Constitution and changed the meaning of the American experiment.
Addressing the honorees, who hailed from 30 countries, Mr. Bush spoke of the path to citizenship, Jefferson's legacy and the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, written 232 years ago.
Ownership, entrepreneurship, individualism and upward mobility -- the heart of Lincoln's vision -- can be Republican principles and ideas that are as timeless in America as the ideals within the Declaration of Independence itself.
Then, more recently, there came an era in which, disappointed in the self-interest and flaws of human creators, we tended to imagine that ideas were intrinsically damaged by their clouded origins, the way the ideals of the Declaration of Independence or the United States Constitution were imagined as diminished because of their slave-holding authors.
Because the egalitarian ideals of the Declaration of Independence clearly contradicted the still profitable and pervasive practice of racial slavery, it was vitally important that the enslaved be regarded as subhuman, lest the whole corrupt edifice completely collapse.
But, throughout history, our abolitionists, suffragettes, and civil rights leaders called on our nation, in reality, to live up to the nation's professed ideals in that Declaration.
Black Americans and other non-white citizens have the privilege and responsibility of affecting every facet of American life because our country strove to live up to the ideals in the Declaration of Independence.
