Shortly before leaving Springfield for his inauguration in 1861, President-elect Abraham Lincoln made notes for his own use on the nearly impossible task before him: preserving the Union. Lincoln anchored his deepest beliefs in the Declaration of Independence, a belief he would make manifest in his Gettysburg Address on Nov. 19, 1863. The Declaration was in his mind as he prepared to leave for Washington, D.C. Lincoln wrote to himself that “we could not, I think, have secured our free government, and consequent prosperity” without the Declaration and then, in an echo from the Book of Proverbs, he noted that the Declaration was “the word, ‘fitly spoken’ which has proved an ‘apple of gold’ to us.” The “Union, and the Constitution,” he continued, employing the exact biblical metaphor, “are the picture of silver subsequently framed around it. … The picture was made for the apple — not the apple for the picture. So let us act, that neither picture, or apple shall ever be blurred, or bruised or broken.”
“The Declaration is more important than the Constitution,” Harvard professor and political theorist Harvey Mansfield told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published this past weekend. “The apple of gold is in the frame of silver,” Mansfield said. “[T]here’s a difference between the revolutionary fervor in the Declaration and the political prudence in the Constitution, and the former was the precondition of the latter.”This weekend, we hold up the Declaration and celebrate its enduring appeal across all lands and since the time it sprang from Jefferson’s pen. But it cannot stand alone without the “frame” of the Constitution that protects it, even as the principles of the Declaration inform good and sound analysis and application of the Constitution. Which is why even as we salute the revolutionary fervor of the framers and the sacrifices made by them and the patriots of long ago, we ought to resolve to honor as well the Constitution rather than plot its dismemberment. Portrait of Abraham Lincoln. (AP Photo) | AP
