This year’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence offers an opportunity not only to celebrate the American founding but also to revisit the ideas and debates that continue to shape the nation.
At UF’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, faculty members are engaged in those conversations every day through their teaching, scholarship and public engagement. These essays, written by Professors Allen C. Guelzo and Paul C.H. Lim, reflect on that spirit of inquiry.
As scholars of history, politics, religion and civic thought, they bring their own perspectives to the American story while inviting readers to consider what the nation’s founding legacy means today.
Lincoln’s Declaration
How our 16th president made the Declaration of Independence the nation’s moral compass
There was never any question in the mind of Abraham Lincoln about the importance of the American Revolution. “Of our political revolution of ’76, we all are justly proud,” Lincoln said in 1842. “It has given us a degree of political freedom, far exceeding that of any other of the nations of the earth.”
But it was the Declaration of Independence which was at the core of the Revolution for Lincoln. At Independence Hall, en route to his inauguration as the 16th President, Lincoln announced that he “never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence” and “would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender” its principles. His longtime law partner, William Herndon, remembered that whenever Lincoln was “eulogizing the Declaration of Independence,” he would stretch both of his hands “out above his head at an angle of about 50 degrees,” as though he was “appealing to some superior power for assistance or support; or that he might embrace the spirit of that which he so dearly loved.”
The most important of the Declaration’s principles was the one Lincoln singled out at the opening of his Gettysburg Address in 1863, that all men are created equal. In 1776, the Revolution’s leaders founded “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated” to this “proposition,” he said. Even earlier, in 1858, Lincoln insisted that this “proposition” was “the father of all moral principle” for the American republic. It was the ground on which anyone around the world who loved liberty could claim to be “blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration.”
But almost as important for Lincoln was the Declaration’s assertion that governments act legitimately only when they act with the consent of the governed. Consent was “the leading principle — the sheet anchor of American republicanism.” And though consent could be obtained in a variety of ways — through elections, town-hall meetings or newspapers — consent itself was non-negotiable. Otherwise, “any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better.”
But that raised an important question: How did Lincoln reconcile the Declaration with the Constitution? The Declaration spoke eloquently about equality and consent, but the Constitution talked about neither. In fact, for many opponents of slavery, the Constitution was defective precisely because it failed to deal with slavery. But Lincoln turned to the Old Testament’s book of Proverbs for an answer. “A word fitly spoken,” Lincoln recalled, is like “an apple of gold in a picture of silver.” The Declaration was “the word, fitly spoken which has proved an ‘apple of gold’ to us,” while the Constitution and the Union it created “are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it.” The Declaration was the heart of the American experiment, but the Constitution adorned and protected it. So, much as he begged his hearers in 1856 to “come to the rescue of this great principle of equality,” he immediately added, “Don’t interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.”
Just as important for many critics since is Lincoln’s reverence for the Declaration’s author, Thomas Jefferson, before all the other revolutionary figures. Today, we have come to understand many of Jefferson’s shortcomings. The man who preached human equality kept over 100 human beings as slaves and sold some of them to pay for his wine cellar. And the man who demanded that consent be the cornerstone of good government made one of those slaves, Sally Hemings, into his mistress and very likely the mother of four of his children, without any trace of consent on her part.
Lincoln understood these problems in Jefferson, and especially Jefferson’s treatment of Hemings. Herndon remembered that the Hemings affair made “a powerful impression” on Lincoln, so much so that “Mr. Lincoln never liked Jefferson’s moral character after that.” But Lincoln drew a sharp distinction between Jefferson’s private vices and public virtues. Whatever moral guilt Jefferson earned by his personal behavior, still “the principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society,” The Sage of Monticello, Lincoln noted, deserved at least some measure of redemption for being “the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence” made “an abstract truth” — that all men are created equal — the first rule of the Declaration. “And so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”
Beyond the Declaration, Jefferson’s writings crop up time and again in Lincoln’s letters and speeches. Even Lincoln’s warning in the midst of the Civil War that Americans must “nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth” is an echo of Jefferson’s warning in 1820, “We are the world’s last hope; and its loss will be on our heads.”
For Lincoln, neither the Revolution nor the Declaration were mere artifacts of a long-gone or irrelevant past. They formed the substance of what he called “our ancient faith,” and that faith served to strengthen him in the hour of the nation’s greatest crisis. And what it did for Lincoln in the Civil War, it may yet do for us in our lifetimes.
Allen C. Guelzo
Professor of Humanities, Hamilton School
aguelzo@ufl.edu
From Exodus to Independence
How biblical ideas helped shape the American Revolution
None of the Founding Fathers were born revolutionaries. They were born British subjects. By 1732, when Georgia received its royal charter, all 13 colonies had been established as part of the British Empire. What unfolded between 1732 and 1776 transformed British colonists into revolutionaries: They declared independence, fought a war and emerged as a sovereign nation, invoking the language of “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence.
As we mark the 250th anniversary of that Declaration, it is worth considering a lesser-known dimension of America’s founding: the role of religion. Religion did not act alone, nor did it replace political theory or Enlightenment philosophy. Rather, it furnished many Americans with the moral and theological vocabulary through which political arguments could become more legible and persuasive. Ideas change history — but only after they transform how people imagine the world: what is possible, desirable and indispensable.
Long before Americans read the Declaration of Independence, they read the Book of Exodus. The story of Israel’s deliverance from Egypt, the crossing of the Red Sea, the giving of the Law and the journey toward the Promised Land provided a powerful framework through which many colonists understood liberty, providence and political oppression.
The revolutionaries were not inventing a new language of freedom. They inherited and adapted an ancient biblical pattern from Exodus: oppression, divine judgment, deliverance and covenant responsibility, both civic and religious. Colonial Americans learned to think about liberty through religious language before they argued for political independence. By 1776, biblical ideas, Protestant theology and Enlightenment political philosophy had become intertwined in crucial ways that shaped the Revolution. Those forces continue to shape conversations about liberty, conscience and the proper relationship between political and religious authority.
During the Revolutionary War (1775–83), the faithful British subjects and the British sovereign all prayed to the same God, yet for diametrically opposite outcomes. This was not simply a conflict between religion and belief and political ambition. It was a conflict among people who shared a religious inheritance but interpreted the vectors of political authority divergently.
The lesson of Exodus was that God was not apathetic to human suffering caused by oppressive political power. Yet Romans 13 from the New Testament raised another crucial question: If civil authority is truly ordained by God, when may rulers be resisted? Many Protestant thinkers argued that government is indeed established by God, but it is also accountable to God. When godly rulers became ungodly tyrants, abusing their entrusted authority, resistance by subjects could become a moral obligation, rather than an act of lawless rebellion. After all, Acts 5:29 recorded the early Christian Founders declaring that their sense of ultimate allegiance was not human authorities but God.
The Scottish theologian Samuel Rutherford expressed this argument powerfully in Lex, Rex (1644) — Law is King (not King is Law!) — which became one of the key texts in Reformed political thought. His emphasis on limited government and resistance to tyranny formed part of the intellectual inheritance of Presbyterian leaders such as John Witherspoon, a signer of the Declaration and president of Princeton.
The Declaration’s appeal to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” did not emerge in a vacuum. Many Americans understood natural law through a biblical lens. Because human beings were created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26–27), they possessed a dignity that no king or Parliament had bestowed — and therefore no king or Parliament could rightly take away. Liberty, in the colonial imagination, was not a gift of government. It was a gift from God.
The central challenge facing the colonists was not whether rebellion was desirable, but whether resistance to the Crown could be justified in light of their long-standing convictions about law, government and obedience to God. In fact, the revolutionaries argued that they were defending the guarantee of individual protection from tyrannical encroachment, as guaranteed in the ancient British constitution and the rights of Englishmen to oppose ministerial corruption and parliamentary overreach, both of which they saw in several oppressive acts enacted by the British Crown and Parliament — the Stamp Act (1765), the Townshend Act (1767) and the Intolerable Acts, including the Boston Port Act and a new Quartering Act (1774). They bristled under these oppressive edicts.
The Founders were not born revolutionaries. They became revolutionaries only after concluding that fidelity to God, conscience and the rule of law required resistance to political power. Whether one agrees with their conclusion or not, their journey reminds us that the American Revolution was not merely a political event. It was also the culmination of a long moral and religious conversation about the source of liberty itself and the recipients thereof.
Yet the promise of 1776 was not fully realized in Philadelphia. The words “all men are created equal” and the claim to an “unalienable Right” to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” remained an unfulfilled promise. It was not until Jan. 1, 1863, when Abraham Lincoln signed the presidential executive order of the “Emancipation Proclamation” that a greater correspondence between the ideal of founding principles and their embodiment became visible.
As a first-generation American, I can honestly — and proudly — say this bold experiment in pursuing life, liberty and happiness for all people is what drew me to these shores from Seoul, South Korea, in the winter of 1983 as a teenager. It continues to inspire faith, hope and love as I now teach and serve at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School.
Paul C.H. Lim, Ph.D.
Professor and Associate Director, Hamilton School
paul.lim@ufl.edu
A Sense of Place
Hamilton School’s future home breathes new life into a historic campus building
One of the University of Florida’s most recognizable historic buildings is preparing for a new chapter.
The former UF Infirmary, a Collegiate Gothic landmark on the National Register of Historic Places, is being transformed into the future home of the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education. The project represents more than a renovation. It is an effort to connect the university’s future with its past, creating a space designed explicitly around the school’s mission of sustained inquiry, discussion and civic engagement.
Since its creation in 2022, the Hamilton School has grown rapidly, attracting faculty from leading universities and establishing programs focused on history, political thought, law, economics and literature. Until now, however, the school has operated from multiple locations across campus. The renovated infirmary will provide a permanent home designed around the educational experience the school seeks to foster.
The building itself offers a powerful symbol of continuity. For generations of Gators, the infirmary served as a place of care and recovery. Its new role shifts from healing bodies to cultivating minds, while preserving the architectural character that has made it a familiar part of the campus landscape. Renovation plans call for maintaining the building’s historic exterior while creating modern teaching and gathering spaces within.
Designers have emphasized natural materials, warm lighting and inviting communal spaces. Rather than the sleek glass-and-steel aesthetic common to many contemporary academic buildings, the new Hamilton School intends to create an atmosphere influenced by historic centers of learning. School leaders have pointed to the residential colleges of Oxford and Cambridge as inspiration for spaces that encourage students and faculty to linger, converse and engage deeply with ideas both inside and outside the classroom.
The renovated facility will include seminar rooms, reading and study spaces, faculty offices and a lecture hall capable of hosting larger events. A bright winter garden and central lobby will serve as gathering places for formal and informal exchanges. Throughout the design, light serves as both an architectural feature and a metaphor for the school’s educational mission, creating spaces intended to inspire curiosity, reflection and leadership.
The project has benefited from support from the State of Florida and university leadership, who view the restoration as an investment in both historic preservation and academic innovation. Hamilton School materials describe the effort as preserving an important campus landmark while adapting it to serve future generations of students. Renowned architects with experience on projects such as Harvard University’s Widener Library and the George W. Bush Presidential Library are contributing to the transformation.
For UF, the new home represents an important milestone in the Hamilton School’s evolution from a promising academic initiative into a permanent part of the university landscape. For students, it offers something equally valuable: a place intentionally designed for conversation, contemplation and the exchange of ideas.
