From Declaration to Emancipation: Lincoln and Jefferson

Abraham Lincoln revered Thomas Jefferson’s greatest achievement, the Declaration of Independence, as the cornerstone of his own political philosophy. Yet Lincoln simultaneously rejected Jefferson’s moral failings, particularly his role as a slaveholder, and transformed Jeffersonian ideals into a mid-19th-century vision of freedom and equality. By adopting Jefferson’s credo and reinterpreting it through the lens of emancipation and the Republican party, Lincoln created a bridge between the nation’s founding principles and its “new birth of freedom.” Harold Holzer, one of the nation’s leading Lincoln scholars, examines this complex intellectual and political inheritance.

Harold Holzer is the Jonathan F. Fanton Director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College and the author, most recently, of Brought Forth on this Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration.