Warfare represented only one aspect of the American Revolution, and hardly the most important one. “What do We mean by the Revolution?” John Adams later asked Jefferson. “The War? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an Effect and Consequence of it. The Revolution was in the Minds of the People.” Adams found evidence of this revolution in “the Records of thirteen Legislatures, the Pamphlets, [and] Newspapers in all the Colonies…by which the public opinion was enlightened and informed concerning the Authority of Parliament over the Colonies.” While Adams saw this revolution in popular opinion beginning before 1776, it surely culminated in 1776 with new state constitutions, pamphlets by Paine and others, and a flow of newspaper articles, including those reprinting Jefferson’s words from the Declaration of Independence. Through arguments advanced in these documents over the course of 1776, a fight for rights and reconciliation became an American war for liberty and independence.
Declaring independence, as Common Sense pleaded, the colonies proposed, and Congress proclaimed, gave a clear goal for the patriot cause. Colonists might oppose taxation without representation or reject the authority of Parliament to pass laws binding them in all cases whatsoever without knowing what concessions would constitute victory. By equating liberty with independence, patriots gained a definite objective and a fixed end point for their struggle. In 1776, independence replaced liberty as the patriot battle cry, but to Americans at the time the two words carried a common meaning: freedom under popular rule.
Four score and seven years later, in his 1863 address at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln singled out 1776 as the year when the United States was “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Lifting whole phrases from the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln elevated 1776 over 1787, when the founders framed the Constitution, or 1791, when the states ratified the Bill of Rights, and placed human equality on a par with individual liberty in the pantheon of American values. In doing so, he followed a generation of American abolitionists and women’s rights advocates as reflected in William Lloyd Garrison’s 1833 Declaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Society and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s 1848 Declaration of Sentiments, both of which appealed to the legacy of 1776 in asserting rights to human equality under law.
As Lincoln understood the Declaration of Independence, the promise of “certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” applied to all. “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence,” he professed. For Lincoln, it was an aspirational document of ongoing relevance that “contemplated the progressive improvement in the condition of all men everywhere” and not merely “an interesting memorial of the dead past.” Its proclamation by Congress gave enduring meaning to 1776.