Another Glorious Fourth

Allen C. Guelzo:

‘How long ago is it—80-odd years?” Abraham Lincoln asked the crowd that had marched to the White House to celebrate the twin Union victories in the Civil War, at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. When he stood on the portico of the executive mansion to ask that question on July 7, 1863, it had actually been 87 years “since on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.’ ” Now, he wondered, wasn’t there something almost providential to be seen in how “a gigantic Rebellion...which is an effort to overthrow the principle that all men were created equal,” had met with two stunning defeats on that anniversary? ....

“When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim that ‘all men are created equal’ a self-evident truth,” Lincoln wrote in 1855. No longer. Although the Fourth of July “has not quite dwindled away,” he wrote, now it is good for nothing more than “burning fire-crackers!” As he said in 1857, what was the point of celebrating the Fourth if the Declaration was now treated as “mere rubbish—old wadding left to rot on the battlefield”?

But then, in quick order, came Lincoln’s election to the presidency in November 1860, the secession of the slave states to form the Southern Confederacy, and the attack on the U.S. garrison in Fort Sumter. When Lincoln called Congress into special session in 1861 to deal with the emergency, the date he selected for its assembling was July 4. And no wonder, since the Confederacy represented a direct repudiation of everything the Fourth of July once stood for. The war, he said at the special session, “presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes.”

No wonder Lincoln was so jubilant in 1863 when news of the Union triumph at Gettysburg (on July 3) and the surrender of the Confederate citadel of Vicksburg (on July 4) clustered around the Fourth. The rebellion that denied “all men are created equal” had now “turned tail and run,” as Lincoln said during his July 7 speech. But the ultimate vindication of the Fourth of July would come four months later, at the dedication of the national cemetery at Gettysburg for the Union dead of the battle....

From the moment of the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln made it clear that Americans trace their origin not to a race, a heritage or a religion, but to the creed enunciated on the Fourth of July—that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The close of the Civil War was, in large measure, Lincoln’s victory. But it was also the victory of the Fourth of July, and that victory is with us still. (more)

Allen C. Guelzo, "Abraham Lincoln Remade the Fourth of July," WSJ Opinion, July 1, 2026.