brookhiser. he was the historical consultant to the huge hamilton exhibition at the new york historical society. that was 12 years ago now, but it was transformative both in hamilton historiography and in the future of the new york historical society. in addition to curating that show, he wrote a 1999 book , still consulted, alexander hamilton american, as well as books -- my favorite title -- "what would the founders do? are questions, their answers.' our questions, their answers. he is had the dream job that everyone would like, you have one job for a long time as young as he is. he is had it for more than 4 decades. in the same place, he is no senior editor at the national review, for whom he began writing nearly a century ago, half a century ago. pretty extraordinary. he is a winner of the national humanities medal. i have the honor of being honored at the same ceremony with rick eight years ago. it is a pleasure to welcome him for a reunion. that was lincoln forum time in years ago, actually. he has written a wonderful book, : a life of abraham lincoln," and it is a life unlike any other that has been produced because it harkens back to the founding fathers that he learned from the founders themselves. it is a pleasure to welcome richard brookhiser. [applause] richard brookhiser: thank you very much. it is a great honor to be here at the lincoln forum. i'm coming from a different country. gettysburg is a holy place of lincoln country, along with springfield and others, but as harold said, i have spent much of my career in founding fathers country. though they are both in the united states and they both help to define the united states, i think the scholars and fans of these two countries do not talk to each other as much as they should. abraham lincoln talked to the founding fathers all of his life. his most famous utterance with -- about them was with the speech he gave here where he said, our fathers brought forth on this continent, conceived in a new nation liberty. that was in november, 1863. 2.5 years into the civil war. three years before that, february of 1860, the cooper union address, the kickoff off of his first presidential campaign, his new york city debut. a 90 minute speech, half of it was devoted to the framers of the constitution. lincoln argued that a majority of them believed that the federal government had the power to regulate slavery in the territories. he proved it from the laws that they made as lawmakers. in that speech, he said, slavery as they marked it, so let it be again marked as an evil not to be extended. let us speak as they spoke and act as they acted upon us. six years before that, if people , october, 1854, the kickoff of his mature political life, the longest speech he ever gave, three hours. it lays out the themes he will pursue for most of the rest of his life. in that speech, he said a republican road is soiled and trailed in the dust, but it says and the blood is not the spirit of the revolution. this afternoon, i want to focus on the three founding fathers who i think were most influential for lincoln. george washington, thomas paine, and thomas jefferson. a man who is so engaged with the founding fathers, inevitably makes us curious about his own biological father. i will start with thomas lincoln. then there is a fifth father who assumes more and more importance as the civil war grinds on, and that is god the father. thomas lincoln was born in virginia. he was taken to kentucky when he was a boy. it was in kentucky that he married nancy hanks and began his family. daughter sarah was born in 1807. abraham was born in 1809. second son thomas born in 1812, but he dies after three days. in 1816, thomas takes his family to the brand-new state of indiana carved out of the northwest territory. in 1830, they moved again to illinois, which is where thomas lived for the rest of his life. all of his life, thomas was a substances -- subsistence farmer and a carpenter. there was a trend in the mid-20th century i either be an -- to treat thomas as a never do well. one of the first lincoln books i read was a modern library collection of his greatest speeches and letters. there is a long introductory , very goodnn nevins piece of work, but it was certainly very disdainful of thomas lincoln. we do not think that way anymore. we at knowledge -- we acknowledge that thomas lincoln never went broke. he never left bad debts. he served on several juries in his life, a sign of responsibility -- respectability, if not prosperity. he was also a trustee of the frontier baptist church that his family warship in in indiana. he provided a family for his children. his first wife, nancy, died when abraham was 9-years-old. thomas waits one year and then he goes from indiana back to kentucky. he looks up an old acquaintance, sarah bush johnston, who is buying out the window, and he says to her, you have lost your husband, i have lost my wife, i me toou to come back with indiana with their children to help raise mine. she says she has debts to pay. he says, give me the list and i will pay them today. which he does, and they leave the following day. that is the story that is come down to us. he gave his family a second mother, a stepmother. he gave his children an education. lincoln went to two schools in kentucky when he was a little boy, and three more when he was in indiana. these were one room schoolhouse s. they depended on the presence in the neighborhood of some young man who had an education and was strong enough to keep the older boys in line. if you add up all the time that lincoln spent in these schools, it was no more than one year. he did learn how to read, write, and do simple arithmetic. that is the second thing that thomas provided his son. but abraham and thomas never saw eye-to-eye. part of the problem was work. as soon as abraham reached his full growth at 11 or 12 he shot, up. his father would put him to work, not only plowing his own fields, but renting him out to neighbors to clear their fields. all of the money that abraham earned by this work would go to thomas's pocket. this is a common custom at the time. but common customs strike different people in different ways. we know that abraham hated this. he once said that my father learned me to work but never learned me to love him. that is because the work he was doing was not his own, it was for others, for his father. i do not think it is fanciful to say that some of his aversion to slavery comes from this youthful experience. when lincoln turns 21 and becomes an adult, he will leave his family and this will end. of course, that never happens for a slave unless they escape, rebels, or is free. still, lincoln saw a bond before -- between the life he had led and the life that the slaves led. another disagreement between him and his father was education. thomas wanted his son to know how to read and write and do simple math. but that is because those were skills that would be useful for a subsistence farmer or a craftsman to have. that is why he wanted his son to have them. but for abraham, reading and writing were important. they were portals to the world. they were portals to his inner world. they could show him new things. they could allow him to develop his own thoughts. this is something his father never got. his stepmother did get it. she was interviewed as an old lady and she remembered how her stepson learned when he was young. when he was young and adults came to visit and talk about something that was unfamiliar to him, he would not interrupt, he would wait until they were gone and then he would say, what was that? what were they talking about? what did that mean? if you read something and he did not understand, he would write them down and rewrite it in his own words. if you did not have paper, he would write it on a board with charcoal. when he would go up the board, he would clean it up and start over again. his stepmother saw this and encouraged it. thomas lincoln, not so much. nevertheless, abraham did get three things from his father , though he never acknowledged them. one of them was strength. the lincolns were differently built. abraham was over six feet tall. he was thin and lanky. 5/5, 10 inches and solid. both of them were strong. this was important in the communal hazing rituals that every young man had to go through when he moved into a new place. you have to prove yourself against the local tough guy. or his posse. and both comments and abraham had these experiences. they passed the test well enough that they were accepted. that was an important inheritance. the second inheritance was temperance. early 19th century america was a nation of alcoholism. gordon ward, an empire of liberty, estimates that the average adult strength five gallons of hard liquor a year. i have seen another estimate which was 7.5 gallons per year. that is probably done by factoring slaves out of the education because slaves were not encouraged to drink hard liquor. the doctor in new york, dr. samuel mitchell, he estimated that workingmen drink a quart of hard liquor a day. only ruined peoples's help, but they cut them into fights. neither thomas nor abraham drank. i think it kept them clearheaded and out of trouble. the most important thing that abraham got from thomas was storytelling. we know this from his cousins on his mother's side. john and dennis hanks. both of these young men lived for a number of years with the lincoln family. one of them said in later years that thomas was as good a storyteller as abraham. the other said abraham, thomas was even better. who knows, but we do know that abraham was an excellent storyteller. and helped him as a lawyer, a put clients and juries at ease. as a politician, it put audiences at ease. as a politician, it also kept people away. kept them off. one of his cronies from illinois remembered how lincoln handled the crowds that descended upon them in springfield after he won the republican nomination in 1860. everybody in the world was coming to his house and asking for something. he said he heard them all, told them all a story, and send them -- send them all away. [laughter] probably the smarter ones as they were leaving said you know, i did not ask him, but by then it was too late. the story had been its work. he seems to have gotten this from his father. he seems to have learned this. this is what abraham got and did not get from thomas lincoln. thomas dies in 1851. abraham names his son after him. he names a horse after him, old tom. [laughter] after he is elected before he goes up to washington, he visits his father's grave. he sees that there is no stone on it. he says, i have to put one on. he never does. that was the end of his relationship with his biological father. if we do not get everything we need or want from our parents, and none of us ever dies, we -- and none of us ever does, we have to look elsewhere. we have to look for substitutes or surrogates. for a boy or a young man in early 19th century america, the handiest surrogates were the founding fathers. many of these men were still alive when lincoln was young. he was born one month before thomas jefferson left the white house at the end of his second term. jefferson was followed by eight years of james madison, followed by eight years of james monroe, the fat -- the last founding father president, and this takes us up to lincolns teens. by the time lincoln is in his 20's, this generation of men who wrote the constitution are dying. none of them ever came to kentucky, indiana, or illinois. lincoln never went to the east coast where they lived until after they were gone. if you wanted to meet these men, the only place he could do it had to be in books. the first founding father he met was the greatest of them all, george washington. he met them in a book called, "the life and expletive general george washington" by mason locke weems. he was an ordained clergyman, but he made his living as a n itinerant publisher and seller of books. he would go up and down the east coast with his stock, many printed by himself, some of them written by himself. he had met george washington once. he paid one visit to mount vernon and sent him one letter about his book business. he turned this link on the title page of his washington biography where he identifies himself as the parson of mount vernon parish. [laughter] and hes no such parish was never the parson of it, but he did see that i biography a that a biography of george washington would be a bust seller. washington dies in 1799. he comes out with his book in 1800. he has a second edition in 1808, the year before lincoln is born. this is the book that lincoln reads as a boy, probably as early as kentucky. weems is one of those writers like james fenimore cooper or h.p. lovecraft, sentences are not very good, but the stories are terrific. the proof is that we all know one of them. the story of washington and the cherry tree has entered the national mythology. you all know it. when george is younger, he is given a hatchet by his father augustine, and c is swinging it around he accidentally slashes the bark of one of his father's prized cherry trees. the father sees what happened. he goes to his son and he says, george, do you know how this happened? george says i cannot tell a lie, i did it with my hatchet. and then his father says, come to my arms my boy. what you have said is more valuable to me than gold. this story is teaching a double lesson. it is teaching children or young adults to tell the truth. it is also teaching parents, if your child tells the truth about some mistake he has made, do not beat him up, but praise him for it, because that will encourage him to be honest. lincoln was not inspired by the stories of george washington as a good boy, he was inspired by his stories of washington as a great man. we know this because lincoln said so himself in 1861 when he was on his way to his first inauguration. he leaves springfield in the middle of february and he takes a train trip through the northeast and he swings down to washington, d.c. the country is falling apart. six states have already seceded. the day he arrived in washington, texas, the seventh, will have joined them. he is trying to show the flag in the northeast, i am going on, the country is going on. when he passes through trenton, new jersey, the capital of the state, he gives an address to the new jersey state senate. in there, he refers to the book. he says, i remember it from my first days of learning how to read. he says that of all the battles that weems describes, the one that made the greatest impression on him was the battle here at trenton. this was washington's counter attack at the end of 1776. this was after four months of catastrophic defeats. washington had lost the battle of long island, lost the battle of white plains. the british had chased him out of new york. they had chased him across central new jersey and across the delaware river into pennsylvania. they rested on the jersey shore. they got, come the spring, they will wrap up the campaign and the war and destroy his army. but washington takes his army back across the delaware in a nighttime attack. he attacks an enemy garrison at trenton, capturing 900 prisoners. that is not the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning, the first sign that this revolution may not end in disaster. lincoln describes it to the new jersey senate. he refers to the struggle with the allied german troops that the british had brought over. he talks about the crossing of the river and the sufferings of the man. if we read wemms' accout, -- account, we go on to see this is the very thing that weems spends paragraphs describing. lincoln says, even though i worked, i thought there must be something more important than independence that these men struggled for. something that would be of importance to all men at all times. he explains what that is, the liberties of the people. again, if we go back to the book, that is exactly how weems frames the battle of trenton. after he describes the crossing of the delaware, the continental army still has a march of several miles before they come to trenton. weem introduces on allegoricals figure, a woman hovering over the troops. she is the spirit of liberty. weems says she has been chased out of europe. she has come to the new world as a refuge. her enemies have followed her with navies and soldiers. who will defend her? only this ragged band of man. the words he puts into washington's mouth when he encourages his men to charge, all that i ask you to remember is what you are about to fight for. in 1861, lincoln remembered. weems had said the battle of trenton was the struggle for the fate of liberty of the world. lincoln thought he was engaged in the same struggle as george washington. the second founding father that comes across lincoln's path is thomas paine. he sits oddly among this group. he is an englishman who came over here in his 30's. he never had a political office. he was briefly a secretary of a congressional committee. he was the great journalist of the american revolution. in january 1776, he published a pamphlet, "common sense," which argued for independent six months before congress declared it. he sold 100,000 copies in the population of it was shared and 3 million. read aloud to a number of other people. i have seen an estimate that as many as one in half about the adults in america read or heard "common sense." at the end of 1776, he writes an essay, the american crisis, he wrote it during washington's retreat across new jersey before the battle of trenton. thomas paine was in one of washington's camp's. he wrote it on a drum head and then he hurried to philadelphia to get it printed, and washington had it read aloud to his troops. the opening sentence of this essay is i think the greatest opening sentence that will ever be in journalism. it is "these are the times of the triumph of the soul. he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of men and women." when the american soldiers attacked trenton, they said that these are the amends that affect us all. that was the fact that thomas -- that was the effect that thomas paine's words had. after the war, thomas paine almost destroys his reputation by writing "the age of reason." it is a ferocious attack on religion. thomas paine was not an atheist. theodore roosevelt would later call him a filthy little atheist. that was not true. thomas paine always said i believe in one god and no more. he argues and "the age of reason" that it is a system set up to terrify and enslave mankind. he makes a number of hits at islam, judaism, and in the religion he himself grew up in, christianity. in his book, he explains the moment where he says that he first came to this conviction. he says when he was 7 or eight-years-old, someone and his family gave a reading at home of a sermon on the substitutionary atonement. which is the christian doctrine that christ died for our sins. paine remembers that he left the room and he walked down some steps into the garden. he writes, i revolted at the recollection of what i had heard. i thought to myself that it was making god almighty act like a passionate man that killed his son when he could not revenge himself any other way. as i was sure a man would be hanged that did such a thing, i could not see for what purpose they preached such strong, such -- they preached such sermons. lincoln seems to have read paine in illinois, new salem, and later when he moves to springfield in his early 20's. he has just left the nest. he has left his father and his father's church. like many twentysomethings, he thinks this is just terrific. the religion he was brought up in is all nonsense. it is full of contradictions and holes. jesus christ was an ordinary , and legitimate child. you do not have to trouble yourself with any of this. lincoln is so enthralled that he --tes of pain-like paine-like pamphlet. he reads it when he was acting as the postmaster of the jobs he , one held earlier in his 20's when he was trying to figure out what to do. frontier postdocs visitors -- frontier post officers did not have offices. they would set up a desk in someone's store and people would bring in their letters or come to pick up their mail. most of what the postman did was read everyone's newspapers and shoot the breeze with his friends. [laughter] you can imagine lincoln doing this in the store of a man named samuel hill. and time his friends about this wonderful pamphlet he has written, which will explain that jesus christ being an illegitimate child. mr. hill asked to see the pamphlet. lincoln gave it to him and h ill rooted in the stove. lincoln was already interested in politics. mr. hill knew that you would not go far in politics if you write pamphlets explaining that jesus christ is an ordinary illegitimate child. rumors of this pamphlet did reappear in 1846 when lincoln did run for congress. fortunately, the pamphlet had long ago been burned up so lincoln was spared any direct evidence of it. lincoln's religious views would change over the years. the one thing he learned from paine that he never outgrew is how to use humor to make serious argument. he did not have to learn humor from paine because he already knew it from thomas lincoln. his father had time had to tell cash had taught not to tell stories, most of them funny stories. paine showed how to use humor in making serious arguments. which is something that is harder to do. paine was a master of it. his usual technique was to take a complex idea and reduce it to its essentials and make it ridiculous. when paine writes of the virgin birth, a principle of christian the elegy written about for hundreds of years, paine is not interested in any of that. he simply says, if a girl today was the said she was made pregnant by a ghost and then an angel told her so, which he be -- would she be believed? he dismisses all of the theology and reduces the virgin birth to a domestic accident or crisis. similarly, lincoln when democrats with accuse him and other republicans for being race mixers, lincoln would respond, just because i do not want a black woman for a slave does not does not me i have to have her for a wife. i can just leave her alone. he is taking the miasma of sexual desire, fear, and repulsion and just this missing -- just dismissing it. i can just leave her alone. he is also leaving his audience with a thought. if you leave the black woman alone, aren't you also leaving her free? he is using humor to make a rather subtle and serious points. i think thomas paine was the first man he saw using those techniques. the third founding father was important to lincoln was thomas jefferson. jefferson was a very complex man. brilliant, a great writer, no other founder wrote better. thomas paine and benjamin franklin right as well but they write very differently. jefferson can do the million-dollar sentence. he can do it in a public document. he can drop it into a letter. you could wake him up in the middle of the night and he might utter such a thing. but jefferson is also complicated. he can be manipulative, he can be devious -- often unconsciously devious. he can also lose heart as he ages. his enemy, alexander hamilton, says he knew no man more likely to temporize. certainly, jefferson backs off on his youthful anti-slavery barter. the jefferson that was important to lincoln was the young jefferson, the 33-year-old man when the continental congress has given the assignment of writing the public statement of why they are declaring independence. in this document, the first of the self evident truths, he says that all men are created equal. lincoln would turn to this again and again from the 1850's and 60's. in 1859 he is invited by a group of republicans in boston to come there to address the celebration of jefferson's birthday. he cannot come because of his legal practice, but he sends a statement. he clearly label -- labors over this because he knows it will be published that he wanted to be just right he says of jefferson that he expressed the axioms and definitions of a free society. he goes on to say, all honor to jefferson who had the coolness and the forecast to us -- insert into a revolutionary document, an abstract truth that should be applicable to all men at all times. washington was the hero who fought for liberty, jefferson was the man who explained and expressed it. 's lincoln -- lincoln's greatest tribute to jefferson was here in gettysburg, because fourscore and seven years ago is 1776. he said that was the beginning of the american project. he said that was who we are and what we are all about. he goes on to quote that all men are created equal as the proposition to which we are dedicated. the gettysburg address was given as the dedication to a funeral. there was a lot of death and lincoln's life and his younger brother that he was three. his sister sarah died when he was 20. his mother died when he was nine. his sweetheart died when he was in his early 20's. one of his friends said we had to hide their razors that lincoln was so depressed by this. lincoln knew that his grandfather had been killed by an indian. he did this because his father thomas had been there. abraham was working in his field when an indian shot and killed him from the edge of the woods. he came out to scoop up young thomas and one of the other lincoln boys and went back to the cabin and shot and killed the indian. thomas told the story over and over again. abraham said it was a legend in my own family. that abraham served in one indian war himself, black hawk war in the late 1830's in northwestern illinois. he never fought in a bottle, but he neverthought -- thought in a battle, but he did see a man who had just been scalped. in the center of every head was the spot the size of a similar dollar -- silver dollar. he said blood was everywhere. this was an average experience of death in early 19th-century america. the disease, wars -- large ones like the 1812 or are the mexican war or smaller indian wars. the civil war was not normal. the civil war turned out to be something else. one of the first armed encounters took place in alexandria, virginia. it was in april of 1861. it was just down the potomac from washington. there is a banner flying from the main hotel. you could see it from the white house with a spyglass. a party of union soldiers were sent to recover the city and the hotel. it was led by a former law student of lincoln's from springfield. he accompanied lincoln on his inaugural train trip to washington dc. as he was running up the stairs to tear down the rebel banner, he was shot and killed by the owner of the hotel. at the end of 1861, another friend of lincoln's from illinois is in a battle. baker was a man in whig politics. it moved to oregon to become a senator and he introduced into the crowd at his first inauguration. baker served in a battle in december of 1861 where he is killed. lincoln is described at baker's funeral as weeping like a child. 1862, william mcculloch, another illinois man asked lincoln's help in getting into a regimen at the beginning of a war the reason that he had to for help is that he was 50 years old and only had one arm. he had lost his arm in a farming accident, but he still wanted to fight for liberty in this country. lincoln helped them. he is killed in northern illinois -- northern mississippi in the run-up to vicksburg. it is to his daughter, that lincoln writes an elegant letter about how suffering can only be diminished by time. only time will cure it. he does not tell the doctor that time will bring more suffering, she will figure that out herself to sometimes what lincoln experiences is not death, but injury. he and his wife make many benefits to military hospitals during the war. on one of these, he is accompanied by another illinois man. he had moved to california and become a reporter for the sacramento union. they sent him back to washington to cover the lincoln administration and the war. he has very good access. dispatches make interesting reading. and one of them he describes a visit to a military hospital with lincoln. as lincoln is moving down the road, ahead of them is a charitable woman distributing track. one of the shoulders best -- one of the soldiers picks up what was put on his bed and tosses it down. lincoln comes up to him and says, she's just trying to be helpful. he says, she gave me a pamphlet on the sin of dancing and both of my legs have been shot off . this as the shape of a joke. it could be one of lincoln's joke. but the joke is on lincoln's soldier of course. if you multiply this by 10, 1000, 100,000 -- this is the civil war. all of these deaths, across the commander in chief desk. he has about every one of them, even only as a statistic. lincoln has to think, why does this happen? any man that is not a brute or a fool have to ask that question. lincoln had a very logical mind. he was also a determinist. he believed that everything that happened had a cause. one of his little catchphrases was that the motive was born before the man. everything you do as a cause. that also has a cause. chains of causation go back before you were born so that everything you do has already been put in play. if you follow all of these causes back to their source, to the first cause, you come to god. lincoln never disbelieve in god. thomas paine didn't. lincoln did. but he is confronting -- lincoln did not. but he is confronted with a problem that death is willed by god. his final thoughts on this matter he reveals in the second inaugural. the second inaugural is not his shortest speech. in the third paragraph he addresses the question directly. fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray that the mighty scorch of war may speedily pass away. yet if god wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by 250 years of unrequited toil's will be some end until every drop of blood shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3000 years ago, so still it must be said, the judgment of the lords are true and righteous altogether. the first thing that struck me about that paragraph when i came him to write about it was the math. the math was fourscore and seven from 1863 to equal 1776. that's jamestown the first , colony to import slaves. the founding fathers disappear from this speech. the only major speech in which there is no mention of them. they are a dimensionless point into identity years of the national sin of slavery. the other thing that struck me about this is how far lincoln has come from thomas paine. thomas paine had been revolted at the thought that god could kill his own son in order to save man from him. but now lincoln scott is killing hundreds of thousands of son to expiate the sin of slavery. the moral calculus of this paragraph is outrageous. this is a great speech. it is certainly the greatest speech that lincoln ever wrote, but we must never move this over and pretend there's anything easy about it. there's a fourth paragraph. it is only one sentence long. with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right that god gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him and for his widow and orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. when i came to write about that, i saw how many of the verbs and verb phrases are two syllables long. strive on, finish, bind up, care for, do all, achieve, cherish. it has to wear them -- rhythm of walking. it is as simple of walking and as hard as walking. thank you. [applause] >> we have the microphone in the aisle. audience member: thank you. many of us see lincoln as a man of destiny. you think he saw himself that way? richard: he certainly hoped so. there's the famous quotation about his ambition being in unrest. he certainly saw early in the 1850's i slavery -- as slavery is becoming an inflamed issue, he reflects on the anti-slavery movement in england which had climax 30 years earlier. he has the famous meditation on how all the men who opposed them and their forerunners must struggle by candles. he is hoping that he will be more like the previous two rather than the other people. he does reflect at certain points that his career is not going very well. one term in congress and that is it. here is stephen douglas who is younger than he is and every prize they can come to an ambitious man in illinois is coming his way. lincoln figures out a way to turn that to his advantage. he rides on douglas's shoulder and slipstream and uses douglas to move ahead. that has to be proven. is that destiny for hard work? it depends on how you look at it. audience member: thank you. audience member: you mentioned both washington and jefferson as both founding fathers that wired lincoln. both of them were slaveholders plantation elite. you did not mention hamilton, who was anti-slavery, it as having any significant influence on lincoln. is there anything to say about that? richard: i am a hamilton guy and i looked and i looked. i really wanted to find something. you have to remember what happens to hamilton's reputation. he is killed in 1804 by the vice president of the united states. one of his greatest enemies, thomas jefferson, is president for eight years. another former friend than an enemy, james madison, is president for eight years. john quincy adams gets four years. and then andrew jackson is a states rights democrat. he is also no fan of hamiltons. his reputation goes into eclipse and he is still remembered in new england and new york city. webster does give some speeches about hamilton. we know that link and webster's speeches, so maybe there was some contact there. lincoln does not refer to him, partly because there's no percentage in doing that in illinois. if you are going to look for a week predecessor, there's another that was better. i do not see any connection. audience member: i think you may know the book, "the quartet." he starts in on the thesis of the arithmetic of four score and seven years ago. as you know, the end of the declaration of independence speaks of united colonies creating free and independent states. i would appreciate your comments on that thesis. richard: this is a very contested point. it has been throughout american history. certainly, our independence does not begin with the constitution, it begins with the revolution. lexington and car card -- concorde are in april of 7075. -- april of 1875. for the longest time we say we are fighting against the ministerial army. finally, we draw that conclusion and in the formal declaration is the one that jefferson writes. lincoln's relation to the declaration and the constitution is interesting. he always presents himself to the man who adheres to both. there are contemporaries of his who say they like the constitution, but the declaration is the radical i in the sky document. abolitionist love the declaration and hate the constitution. lincoln will never go in either or action. he says, i adhere to both of them. his cooper union address, he is not looking at the men who wrote the declaration, he is looking at the framers of the constitution he is always presenting himself as a man a both. at the civil war goes on, he comes to cite the preamble and the phrase "we the people," and what that might mean. he is the guy who is looking at both. audience member: i thought the phrase that all men are created equal is something that lincoln wanted to hang onto? richard: yes, of course. he says it. he says the definition and the axiom. audience member: i do not have a question just a comment. magnificent. thank you. [applause] richard: thank you. audience member: that is about the same thing i was going to say. i heard the same speech at our forum in september, and i have to tell you it was even better listening to it a second time. richard: thank you very much. >> join us sunday at 6 p.m. eastern for live coverage from the smithsonian national museum of african american history and culture. we talked with members of congress about their significance. >> can you tell us what the new african-american museum on the national mall means to the country? >> i am excited about the opening of the museum. this,eally excited about having been so many years in washington. to see the complete story of america. you can't