Abraham Lincoln  "Preserver Of Truths"  February 12, 1809 - April 15, 1865

To President Abraham Lincoln, the Declaration of Independence was the most sacred of the documents handed down to Americans by the founding fathers. In the Declaration he found the very "central idea" of the principles upon which the nation was founded: the self-evident truths that all men were created equal and are endowed with inalienable rights, and that the power of government was derived from the people governed.

Lincoln believed those fundamental concepts gave the United States "the noblest political system the world ever saw." Time and again during the Civil War, Lincoln told his country that it was for the preservation of those ideas as a symbol of liberty for the rest of the world- as much as it was for Union- that the country was going through the horrors of a seemingly endless war.

Lincoln perceived the conflict in its global dimensions. There were many Europeans who believed that anarchy and civil war were to be expected in a popular government and that inherent weaknesses doomed any nation founded on so unstable a concept as rule by the people. Lincoln, however, possessed unshakable convictions that America had to be a beacon of human liberty for the rest of the world, that the great experiment begun by the founding fathers must not fail, but survive and prove that people could rule themselves.

Lincoln told Congress on July 4, 1861, that the attempt at resolving the issues at stake in the war "embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy- a government of the people, by the same people- can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes."

"The central idea of this struggle," Lincoln told his young secretary John Hay, "is the necessity that is upon us, of proving that popular government is not an absurdity... If we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves."

Fascinating Fact:  Lincoln told Congress that if the Union lost the war, it would "practically put an end to free government upon the the earth."


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