On his way from Springfield to his inauguration in Washington, D.C., Abraham Lincoln paused for a series of impromptu speeches,

including one at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on February 22, 1861.

He said there, quote, I am filled with deep emotion at finding myself standing

here in the place where we're collected together the wisdom, the patriotism, the devotion to principle,

from which sprang the institutions under which we live.

I can say, he continued, that all the political sentiments I entertain have been drawn so far

as I've been able to draw them from the sentiments which originated and were given to the

world from this hall, Independence Hall, in Philadelphia.

While seeming to speak of, by reference to the institutions of America, while seeming to speak of the Constitution,

Lincoln really had all along been speaking also of the Declaration of Independence,

the most fundamental of American institutions in the old sense of the term, Institutio, meaning

education. He confirmed that to great cheering in his next climactic sentence.

I have never had a feeling politically, he said, that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.

One might almost say the same thing about American democracy itself,

that all its political feelings somehow spring from the

sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Ordinary Americans, even today, know or have

a feel for the declaration better than they do for the Constitution. Nothing is more common than to see, quote, all men are created equal, unquote, being

attributed to or identified with the Constitution, which in a deep sense it is, although

in a more accurate sense it is not. American citizens have deep-seated attachments to the Declaration that they don't quite have for the Constitution,

except insofar as they commit this patriotic mistake of confusing the two.

Though our countrymen may be bad historians, they are good political scientists.

The political sentiments of the Declaration constitute us as a people in a more fundamental way than the Constitution does.

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