And yet it’s not the writings of Lemuel Haynes or the Seneca Falls Declaration that got you and me to believe—regardless of my calling it untrue—that our nation was literally founded not in 1788, with the creation of the Constitution that established the national government, or in 1791, when that Constitution took effect, but in 1776, with the Declaration of Independence. It’s not they who gave us our vision of men gathered in the assembly chamber of the State House in Philadelphia deciding together, with a high, shared purpose, to create a new nation, and to dedicate that nation to a world-shaking proposition, giving the United States an exceptional historical purpose, and putting that purpose on paper by defining legitimacy in government as the promotion and protection of human equality.
We believe that story because Lincoln told it at Gettysburg. If we didn’t believe it, if we had to believe what’s true—that as far as the Congress of 1776 was concerned, it wasn’t bringing forth a nation, had no intention of making equality the basis of anything, and meant something quite different, in its preamble, from all that—we might feel a vertiginous sense of loss, not only of the ideal but also of the failure of the ideal. The ideal and its failure have formed the comfort zone, the safe space, for our mainstream public discussions of the founding. A lot of the current debate devolves on a contest between those who call the founding ideal a lie and those who defend the founders for a least having an ideal, even if they failed to live up to it. What would happen to that dispute if there were no ideal at all?
To me, Lincoln’s fiction—a fiction so powerful that it became a reality, changing a country, a world, and even, like Superman spinning the Earth the wrong way on its axis, changing the past itself—is so outlandish, so dazzling, that I can’t effectively clarify my impressions. Thanks to Holton and others, I now know the underlying idea wasn’t original. From Lemuel Haynes to the signers at Seneca Falls and beyond, people had been casting the equality proposition as philosophically nation-making. Yet it was Lincoln who had to stand up and actually put a real nation back together, in a sense rescue it from literal dissolution, on this fictional basis, which I find I have to call not just fictional but poetic, epic, theatrical, even musical. Logic isn't the thing here. Stop making sense, as the old song has it.
