- Lincoln interpreted the Declaration as a living document.

He saw the Declaration as setting out an agenda for the nation to become a more just one over time.

- And he wanted that equality to apply to all Americans, including enslaved people.

- The Confederacy views the Declaration as a model for secession.

- [Emily] Because they wanted to continue to have the institution of slavery in the Southern states, and Lincoln wanted to abolish slavery.

(curious music) (moves to lively music) (moves to gritty music) ♪ Oh ♪ - Lincoln became a household name during a series of debates with Stephen Douglas for the Illinois Senate seat.

And in these debates, Stephen Douglas presented a view of the Declaration of Independence that Lincoln felt was limited.

When the Southern states decide to secede from the Union after the election of Abraham Lincoln as president, they turn to the Declaration of Independence as their model.

- In order to create the Confederate States of America, they all issued statements explaining why they were leaving the Union.

The Mississippi Ordinance of Secession opens up with explaining, we believe in slavery; it's the most important thing in the world to us.

- South Carolina and some of the other Confederate States, When they seceded, included excerpts from the Declaration of Independence statement on the right of a nation to break free from another nation.

They rejected openly the promise of equality.

- George Wythe Randolph becomes one of the leading figures in the Confederacy.

And he's an interesting figure because he's Thomas Jefferson's grandson.

- All but one of his granddaughters will become staunch Union supporters and will be very critical of their brothers and their sister who side with the Confederacy.

In one of George Randolph's letters, he'll describe the Declaration of Independence, and he'll say, this is just ridiculous that all men are created equal.

If it was meant literally, it would mean that prisoners in jail would be just as equal as I am.

- He actually meets with President Abraham Lincoln on the day that the first shots of the war are fired at Fort Sumter.

And you have to imagine that was a fascinating meeting between these two different people with completely opposite interpretations of the Declaration of Independence.

The Union Army included a mix of people.

There were certainly people who believed strongly in the cause of abolition, but there were also people who were fighting to maintain the United States and fighting out of loyalty for President Abraham Lincoln.

- The enlisted troops of the Confederate Army are everyday people of the states that seceded, and even some people from other states that didn't secede, because they supported the the cause of the Confederacy.

- The Confederacy is really interesting because there were opportunities for the largest property owners to not serve in the Confederate Army.

They could pay for other people to serve in their stead.

And so you would think that the people who had the most to lose if the Confederacy lost the war would want to fight, and in some cases they did.

But in other cases, you had poor people who were working in similar conditions to the enslaved and free Black laborers in the South.

- Frederick Douglass has this incredible quote in his speech that is commonly known as "What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?"

The question of who the Declaration applies to and who decides that are all kind of captured in that one statement by Douglass.

- One, I think, very important thing to remember regarding Lincoln is that he grew up in an environment that was pretty racist.

Frederick Douglass was so disappointed in Abraham Lincoln that he thought about moving out of the country because he thought that Lincoln was beginning to compromise with respect to the issue of slavery.

- When Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, the one thing that he wanted to do was completely cripple the South's ability to rely on its own enslaved labor.

The entire South was completely and utterly dependent on slavery.

It was the point of their entire economy.

- Lincoln's primary reason was to affect the economy of those that were in the Confederate States.

At the end of the day, if you cripple their economy, you cripple the Confederates at large.

- And so by issuing this Emancipation Proclamation, which did go out to many of the enslaved people across the South, Lincoln was calling for them.

He was calling for them to leave.

He was saying that slavery will not exist after this war is over.

- We can see the influence of the Declaration of Independence on Abraham Lincoln's entire career, all the way through the presidency and his famous Gettysburg Address.

- "Four score and seven years ago," "a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

This is one of Lincoln's most famous quotations, and he's directly referring to the Declaration of Independence.

- Ultimately, the Confederacy falls, the Union Army wins, and the UDC, the Daughters of the Confederacy, then try to rehabilitate the image of the Confederate cause.

They're the women who are related to Confederate soldiers.

They step up after the Civil War and try to reclaim the memory of the Confederacy.

They really latch onto, for instance, the Declaration of Independence, the memory of the revolution, and they argue that the Confederacy is actually the rightful heir of that revolutionary legacy.

And the Daughters of the Confederacy then push that idea forward.

They write novels.

They write textbooks.

They do public kinds of events and celebrations.

They also raise funds to put, you know, statues around.

- So the Lost Cause was reshaped throughout decades of activism, raising Confederate monuments and having all sorts of events where they celebrate the Confederate government, celebrate the Confederate leaders, and consistently say that this was not an immoral cause dedicated to enslaving people of African descent, but rather it was this glorious cause that the white South fought in order to maintain regional autonomy in what they often call states' rights.

- When there was the big push in recent years to remove a lot of those monuments throughout the South, the defenders of those monuments argued that they were monuments of war.

But the large majority of them were constructed in the 1920s and 1930s.

- The Confederate flag today is often invoked by people that believe in this Lost Cause.

I think that Black people are so offended when they see the Confederate flag because it represents the pain of all of our ancestors and what we've had to live through in this country.

- Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence, it's such a strong bond.

He is very much inspired by the Declaration of Independence as a unifier for this new nation.

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