Why did Lincoln call the Declaration "a stumbling block"?

For the next week at least, I want to write about Lincoln’s evolving views on the Declaration of Independence. It was a document that he not only revered but also read —a combination that eludes many politicians. In fact, nobody in American public life has thought more deeply or written more eloquently about the meaning of the Declaration and its promises of natural rights than Lincoln. And in my opinion, nothing better illustrates his commitment to these principles than his strange-sounding decision to label the Preamble of the great document as “a stumbling block,” not just once but twice in the late 1850s.

I wrote about both episodes in Boss Lincoln. In June 1857, just months after the US Supreme Court announced its controversial Dred Scott decision, Lincoln sat in the Illinois state capitol building listening to Senator Stephen Douglas speak about the impact of the case. Douglas claimed that Chief Justice Roger Taney’s ruling against Dred Scott was a rebuke to Republicans and what he considered to be their wild assertions about natural rights or “higher law,” warning that if these radicals had their way, then state governments would eventually be forced to “authorize negroes to marry white women on an equality with white men.” It was the worst kind of fear mongering and race-baiting, though nobody in the audience seemed surprised. One of Lincoln’s friends noted with disdain that Douglas was trying to save his own political future (thrown into jeopardy by a decision that invalidated the territorial doctrine of “popular sovereignty”) by desperately trying to prove that “the only issue now before the people was that of negro equality.”1

Lincoln was determined to respond and did so within two weeks from the same podium in Springfield. He said it was time to get “frank” about the meaning of the Declaration. Yes, Lincoln said, “the authors of that notable instrument” did intend “to include all men” in their vision of natural rights, though he acknowledged, without “declar[ing] them equal in all respects.”

They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.

Many scholars quote those lines as a way to capture Lincoln’s sense of the Declaration as a progressive promise. But most leave out the passage that came next and which included the “stumbling block” phrase.

The assertion that ‘all men are created equal’ was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration, nor for that, but for future use. Its authors meant it to be, thank God, it is now proving itself, a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism. They knew the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant when such should re-appear in this fair land and commence their vocation they should find left for them at least one hard nut to crack.”2

Consider the hard wisdom of those remarks —declaring equality not simply as a stirring promise but as a blunt threat —a “stumbling block” and “hard nut to crack”— for anyone in the future who might want America to go backward toward tyranny and despotism.

And then two years later, when he was invited to Boston for an event celebrating Jefferson’s birthday, Lincoln repeated this view of the Declaration as a kind of red line against would-be despots. “All honor to Jefferson,” he wrote on April 6, 1859:

…to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.

Neither of these antebellum public statements quite carry the elegant weight of “Four score and seven years ago” or some of Lincoln’s other more poetic meditations on the Declaration and its Preamble, but they still have great force and resonance for today. Anyone who is heading into our 250th anniversary (twelve score and ten) fearing that democracy is under attack or that the rule of law has been undermined in recent years should find solace in Lincoln’s tough-minded invocations. Our Declaration truly has been “a hard nut to crack” and “a stumbling block” for tyrants of many shapes and sizes. And it will remain so in the days —and elections— to come.

NOTE TO READERS: Past performance by Abraham Lincoln (or any historical figure) is not indicative of future results. But it’s worth thinking about and arguing over. This article is part of the series Lincoln’s Speeches and about topics pulled From the Headlines.