Thank you for this, Dickon.

Yes thanks for this good work Dickday. You may already have this link but if not you may enjoy
these Lincoln documents.  Lincoln

Well done mate. Beautifully tied together. The Gettysburg address is and has been one of my favorite speeches of all time. If my memory serves me well, and I confess I'm reaching back to a grade school report I made on the GB address, Lincoln composed it on the train ride from DC to the battlefield.

I read Gary Wills book on the ancient constructs Lincoln must have used to create such a beautiful piece of writing. It is a great book, and really gives poeple who love detail, and loves the winding turns of going from source to source to see the grand design of such historic subjects.

I highly recommend anyone who hasn't to read this book.

Also, re: his Assassination, I loved the narrative "MANHUNT." American Brutus is also a good read on Booth.

I have to say that the end of Lincoln's 1st Inaugural, The entire 2nd, and the Gettysburg Address are among the best pieces of writing man has ever produced, and indeed are timeless, and at the pinnicle of human thought and understanding.

Lincoln is an authentic genius, as the late Shelby Foote once put it.

And I am coming back to this DD, for your words on the Constitution. We have read the Declaration every 4th of July in our long and thriving marriage, DD. Most of the time it is hard to finish because we weep over it everytime. I try to remember, as a North American that my document was originally Magna Carta- whicht King John is supposed to have rolled on and chewed the rug when he was forced to sign it, at least so my middle school history teacher told us.

But I have great love and admiration for the Humanistic experiment conceived on these shores during the Age of Reason and I remind my Brit cousins that miraculously it worked! It IS a miracle. Everybody should read David McCullough's Adams and 1776, both of which I am savouring too slowly perhaps but the story is wonderful.

Thank you, Professor Day. I had not made that connection, yet it is so obvious (once you’ve made it so).

This explains how Lincoln used his rhetorical skills as much as military might to revolutionize America (or rededicate it to original goals) and repair the country with new aspirations and challenges using something of a sleight of hand to make the Declaration our bedrock of principles. Do you think his premature death enabled the reversals that took place post-reconstruction.

I've always felt that slavery of the 17th-18th centuries was not, in and of that time, America’s greatest disgrace. Historically, I don't believe it matched the utterly inexcusable shamelessness of Jim Crow laws and lynching lasting well into the 20th century, almost 100 years after emancipation. Those of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, many of our parents and relatives carry as much a burden for that disparity of justice than perhaps those of Lincoln's time.

Jim Crow segregation (spearate but unequal) vs. equality of opportunity were not opposing ideologies fought out on battlefields, but crimes carried out in silence, enforced in secrecy or by secret clans. They were crimes of convenience and conformity, accepted as expedient and rationalized as being what works (birds of a feather) or just "the way it is." They were rationalized away just as some of those we commit today are.

I would rather 100 million school children each morning recite the preamble to either of these documents than a robotic pledge of allegiance to one nation under God, indivisible. They could then actually discuss and understand what these things mean to us. Again, thank you kindly.

If TPM existed during Lincoln's time, what would TheraP's posts be like?

Lincoln usurped far more power to the executive than Bush/Cheney. He directly disobeyed the Supreme Court and Congress in suspending habeas corpus during war time. And what about military tribunals??

DD, once again my mere words here can't possibly convey how I feel about this remarkable post. You have interlocked those three important documents as beautifully as I've ever seen.

You say that this piece has been in the works for 20 years. I understand that completely. Sometimes the thought is so important you feel an obligation to do absolute justice by it. So, congratulations. You have done it to perfection.

My fear is that it will be lost on these pages. Wonderful things disappear much too quickly here. I would like to place it on my little blog, where it will stay in the sidebar for a while. Is that okay with you?

Wow, DD! Excellent work! I am (once again) in awe of your thinking and writing. I would like to suggest once again that 2010 be declared the year of the Constitution, and a national conversation starting January, dividing it up into sections so people will really read and take it in. You make me think that it should also be the year of the Declaration of Independence; it would enrich the conversation even more.

Thanks for yet another stellar contribution.

Thanks very much for making these connections. One thing I would add is that the expansion of rights and protections across the history of the United States have not just "happened." Over and over again they have come into being by the unflagging efforts of people - not just elected politicians. Democracy is not a passive endeavor where the goodness and generousity of leaders bestows gifts of "freedom" and equality upon the citizenry.

Your presentation of the links between the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Amendments, and the Bill of Rights is most excellent. And everyone of them were fought for by the people.

Actually, DD...

" It took a hundred years to put these rights into our hands. I suppose nothing happens over night."

It took a hundred years to WRITE these items. Most black Americans would say we are still waiting for these rights to be in our hands without the threat someone attempting to chip away at them. And I will not dare to speak for Native American brothers and sisters. It took Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson to give them the force of law through the 1950's and 60's with the desegregation of schools, the military, public housing, employment and most importantly voting and electoral representation. However, since Bakke v. University of California (1973), the courts and legislatures have done little but roll back the laws that have attempted to redress the wrongs which have burdened black Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities.

Lincoln did -- for whatever were his motivations -- what should have been done in the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, the Constitution and the (original) Bill of Rights.

Jefferson's prose declaring "all men" created equal often rings hollow knowing that this Virginians held slaves until his death, that he could father children with his slave concubine Sally Hemmings and keep them as slaves working his Monticello plantation. Knowing that Jefferson's home state of Virginia is the state which made it legal to enslave every man woman and child in perpetuity, thus enslaving their children, their children's children, their children's children's children for no reason than the color of their skin. That fugitive slave laws would return them to this fate if they had the temerity to escape. That a slave was not a man, but a commodity -- every part of him or her had some worth to some white person, but the slave could not value his or her own person. George Washington's dentures were not fancied of wood, but of the good teeth of his slaves which he had extracted from their mouths for use in his.

That all manner of laws were subsequently made and abridged to deprive these people -- my people -- of their rights. That Supreme Courts of learned men offered us separate accommodations which would never have been confused with "equal." That "activist judges" determined it was just fine and dandy to enforce a new kind of slavery -- economic and social slavery -- once the literal shackles had been removed.

Forgive me if I do not wax poetic. I see the timidity lurking in those words. I know the harsh reality of their effects. I know preicous few who have really been inspired by the "fierce urgency of now," and far more who moved with "all deliberate speed," who did not understand "justice delayed is justice denied."

For people whose ancestors first set foot, unwillingly, on this continent before it was conceived to be a nation of men and laws in 1619, or whose ancestors this land belonged to orginally, before it was dedicated to the proposition of anything more than outpost or colony, we say, "if only it had taken 100 years for the right things to be done. If only..."

Thanks for posting yet another piece that allows us to pursue a heady dialogue.