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Quarterly The Declaration Heard Around the World

Jun 15, 2026 Stephen Holmes

The American founders’ understanding of political community was ethnically and racially restrictive in ways that Americans have since repudiated. But the Declaration of Independence’s underlying logic and treatment of rights and what it takes to secure them remains as cogent as it was 250 years ago.

BERLIN—Abraham Lincoln was wrong. By asserting that “all men are created equal,” the authors of the Declaration of Independence did not mean to say, as Lincoln later claimed, that nonwhites should be given equal rights with whites “as fast as circumstances should permit.” In his 1857 remarks responding to the US Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, Lincoln argued that the founders meant “to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow.”