Joanna, my wife, once promised our grandchildren that she would give $20 to each of them who learnt Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address by heart. Most did. Almost all of them learnt at least the first two sentences. Those two sentences are important, for they help explain, then and now, why we think of our country as a Nation of Documents and not a Nation of a Single Tribe.
Consider the first sentence: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Those last few words had made their author, Thomas Jefferson, immortal. Jefferson wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
By the time I grew up, just after the second world war, we had elaborated further on these basic “unalienable rights”. We are a democracy, we search for equality, but we do more. We protect basic liberties, such as free speech, free press and others listed in the Constitution. We insist upon a separation of powers, vertically (states, federal government) and horizontally (three branches of the federal government) so that no group of individuals becomes too powerful.