We know that Abraham Lincoln believed that the Declaration of Independence was the most important, the most enlightening, and the most meaningful of all documents, ever created for these United States of America. We know this because in his Gettysburg address Lincoln stated that: "Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." This founding principle was of immense importance to Lincoln, because he believed in an America that was truly a country of the people, by the people, and for the people, and consequently this was not a country of a certain, select elite of people, not was this a country by those same people, nor was it a country that had laws and justice unequal for all people. This was the abiding purpose of Lincoln that all Americans were entitled to, by Declaration of Law, to equal justice, to equal law, and to equal liberty within that country blessed by the hand of God.
Lincoln understood well that it was the Declaration of Independence, that would be forever the foundational document of America, that this Declaration was the bulwark against all those that would usurp our God-given inalienable rights, and that therefore as long as we honored the purpose and principles of this Declaration that all true Americans would by natural inclination oppose all tyranny, chicanery, or despots that would attempt to wrest through subterfuge from Americans the very bread created by their own hands. Thomas Jefferson and the signatories to this Declaration by all thirteen colonies confirmed that for all time, and for all those who upheld its divine principles that they would forever pledge their lives and their honor to it, Lincoln believed this no less, and paid for this belief with his martyred life.
During the time of our revolutionary war it was George Washington that led this new nation into the freedom that our Declaration promised for all men, in this, Washington was successful, in establishing these thirteen colonies into the United States of America. However, the great question of slavery that seemed answered by the abolition of the slave trade in 1808, had instead continued to flourish in this land of freedom, whereupon losing the ballot of 1860, the South decided to take the law into its own hands and to challenge not only the authority of our National government, but the very principles upon which this country was founded upon. It was upon Lincoln, in this terrible time of trouble, that this country would decide, whether it would be a house divided, permanently half slave and half free, or it would be all of one or all of the other.
Lincoln would make the stand that those that lose by the ballot, do not, and never should have recourse to the sword to take from their legitimate government that which was not theirs to being with, nor was it legitimate to submit a new government, under the mistaken ideal that one set of men were forever to be rulers over another set of men, who were for reasons of exploitation, considered judicially to not even be men. It was Lincoln that made it his purpose, to defend, to protect, and to enact those true words of our Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal, and thereby to finish the work that had been initiated by our Founding Fathers and blessed by the hand of our Creator.