While Confederates and their sympathizers would also appeal to the declaration as the South broke from a supposedly tyrannical Union, it was Lincoln’s reading of the document that would endure. So, too, would his framing of America, in the words of the Gettysburg Address, as a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” and ever striving to fulfill that founding ideal—“the unfinished work,” he said of the fallen at Gettysburg, “which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”
There’s little evidence that Lincoln considered expanding the rights of women an especially important part of completing that “unfinished work,” and most who shared his views didn’t. But feminists and suffragists also took up the language of the declaration for their cause—the “Declaration of Sentiments” adopted by the attendees of the convention of Seneca Falls in 1848 asserted that “that all men and women are created equal” and detailed “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.” And although it’s passed from memory even on the left, the declaration was also an especially important symbol for the early labor movement and its supporters. The Fourth of July, the historian Philip Foner wrote in We, the Other People, his regrettably named compilation of declaration-inspired documents, “was a day of parades, banquets, and festivals—a day for renewing the Spirit of ’76, for dramatizing the demands of the working class.”
In 1883, for instance, a weekly in San Francisco went as far as to advertise that a Fourth of July event would include the reading of “a celebrated COMMUNIST manifesto entitled ‘The Declaration of Independence’” which had been “written by a certain SOCIALIST named Thomas Jefferson.” “The gist of the Declaration is contained in the ‘self-evident’ clause,” the announcement read. “It is Justice, Reason, Truth. It is Socialism. For every man having the self-evident and inalienable right to the means of living has the right to receive the FULL product of his own labor … and his proportionate equal share of all the means of life created by past and dead generations and left by them here when they died, and now held by the thieves, robbers, nobles and tyrants of the world.”
Gradually, however, the left’s deepening ties to an international workers’ movement shaped by Marxism and class-based critiques of the American founding came to discourage appeals to the declaration and nationalist rhetoric more broadly, though there have been exceptions in the last half-century.
Meanwhile, condemnations of American racism—which the left’s invocations of the founding had rarely mentioned initially—from the Civil Rights Movement and the identity movements of the late twentieth century also influenced progressive perceptions of the document in different directions, from Martin Luther King Jr.’s rendering of the declaration as part of “a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir” to Black Power writings like the National Committee of Black Churchmen’s “Black Declaration of Independence,” which proclaimed that “the history of the treatment of Black People in the United States is a history having in direct Object the Establishment and Maintenance of Racist Tyranny over this People.”