Lincoln's Apple of Gold Fragment Explains the Declaration and Constitution

Lincoln wrote some of his best prose where nobody could hear it. The fragment we are about to read was never delivered as a speech, never published in his lifetime, never mailed to a newspaper. It survives as a few lines on a sheet, discovered among his papers, dated by editors to about 1861, the winter when the country was coming apart and the president-elect was working out in private what he believed.

It is one paragraph about fruit. And it is the clearest statement we have of how the man who saved the Union understood the relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.

The setting

The date matters. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln place this fragment around the opening weeks of 1861, a time when the first Southern states were leaving the Union and Lincoln had not yet been inaugurated. He was in Springfield, Illinois, drafting speeches and letters. What he wrote down was not a policy. It was an answer to a question his whole country was asking: what is the Union for?

Many in the North thought the Union was an end in itself, to be preserved at any price. Many in the South thought it was a compact they could leave. Lincoln thought both were looking at the wrong thing. In this fragment he explains what he saw instead.

The text, passage by passage

The fragment begins by saying that the nation's prosperity is not an accident. It has a philosophical cause. Without the Constitution and the Union, Lincoln says, we could not have attained the result; but even these are not the primary cause of the great prosperity. Then comes the turn:

There is something back of these, entwining itself more closely about the human heart. That something is the principle of "liberty to all"—the principle that clears the path for all—gives hope to all—and, by consequence, enterprize, and industry to all.

Look at the structure. First, Lincoln grants that the Constitution and the Union matter enormously. They are necessary conditions. Second, he says they are not the cause of what they produced. Third, he names the cause, and it is a principle, not a document: liberty to all. The grammar is that of a man dismissing the obvious answer in order to reach the true one.

He then notes that the principle was expressed in the Declaration of Independence, and that its assertion at the time of the Revolution was an element of power in the contest. The principle was not just a slogan. It was a weapon, which rallied people to the cause.

Then comes the image. Lincoln borrows from the Book of Proverbs, chapter 25, verse 11, which in the King James translation reads: "A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver." The apple of gold, in Lincoln's use, is the principle of liberty. The picture of silver is the frame.

The Union and the Constitution are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it.

And then the sentence that every student of the Founding should memorize:

The picture was made for the apple — not the apple for the picture.

Finally Lincoln draws the conclusion for action. We should act, he says, so that neither picture nor apple shall ever be blurred, bruised or broken. We must preserve both. But we must not forget which is which.

What the image means

Take the metaphor apart.

Silver is valuable. Frames are not decorations. A good frame protects the picture, holds it in place, shows it to advantage and lets it hang where people can see it. Without the Constitution, the principle of liberty would have no structure, no courts, no enumerated powers, no amending process, no separation of branches. It would be an idea floating in the air. Lincoln respected the Constitution as a lawyer and a statesman. He swore an oath to it.

But the frame exists for the sake of what it holds. If the frame is allowed to crush the picture, if the legal machinery is turned against the principle it was built to preserve, the frame has failed. A reading of the Constitution that makes liberty impossible has misunderstood its purpose, which is what Lincoln thought of the proslavery readings of the document.

This is a claim about how to interpret the Constitution. It says that when we read a doubtful clause, we should prefer the reading that fits the principle in the Declaration. The Declaration is not a legal instrument and has no force of law. But it states the purpose for which the Constitution was ordained. The preamble of the Constitution itself speaks of securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. Lincoln's insistence was that the preamble and the Declaration speak with one voice.

The Dred Scott connection

To see why Lincoln believed this so firmly, go back four years before the fragment, to the Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford in March 1857. Chief Justice Roger Taney's opinion held that people of African descent, whether enslaved or free, could not be citizens of the United States, and that the Declaration's statement that all men are created equal had not been meant to include them. We discuss why that decision is the standing warning about judicial supremacy in Dred Scott Is the Warning Every Fan of Judicial Supremacy Should Read.

Lincoln answered in a speech at Springfield on June 26, 1857. He argued that the authors of the Declaration had meant exactly what they said. They did not mean, he said, to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not claim that all men were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development or social capacity. They defined, with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal: equal in certain unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And he continued that they meant to set up a standard maxim for a free society, a maxim to be familiar to all and revered by all, constantly looked to, constantly laboured for, and, even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated.

That is the apple of gold in the language of a speech. The Declaration states a standard. A free country does not claim to have reached it; a free country claims to be working toward it, and to measure its laws against it.

Notice what a standard like this does. It condemns slavery without condemning the Founders for failing to end it overnight. It lets Lincoln say, honestly, that the Constitution tolerated what the Declaration condemned, and that the right course was to restrict slavery's growth and place it, in his phrase from another speech, in the course of ultimate extinction. The Founders had put the picture in a frame. Their descendants had to make the frame fit the picture.

The Gettysburg connection

Two years after the fragment, Lincoln returned to the same thought in the shortest great speech in American history. On November 19, 1863, he stood at Gettysburg and said that fourscore 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.

Count the date. Eighty-seven years before 1863 is 1776. Lincoln does not begin with 1787, the year of the Constitution. He begins with the Declaration. The nation was conceived in liberty and dedicated to a proposition. The Constitution comes later, as the frame. Our line-by-line reading of that speech is in The Gettysburg Address Read Closely Sentence by Sentence, and it is worth reading beside the fragment.

The steelman: is Lincoln reading the Declaration into the Constitution?

A critic has an answer ready, and it deserves a fair statement.

The critic says that the Constitution is a different document with a different purpose, and that Lincoln smuggles one into the other. The Declaration was a statement of grievances and principles by thirteen colonies leaving an empire. The Constitution was a compromise, hammered out in 1787 by men who had to bring slaveholding and free states into one government. It protected slavery in several clauses, including the three-fifths clause and the fugitive slave clause, without using the word. A lawyer should read the text of the Constitution as written, not through a set of aspirations from another document. If the Declaration is the key to the Constitution, then judges and politicians can read anything into the document that fits their idea of liberty. That, the critic notes, is what the Progressives later did.

That objection has force. It is the reason a conservative should be careful with the argument.

The answer

Three responses.

One: Lincoln's claim is about purpose, not about substituting a new text. He never asked that the clauses of the Constitution be ignored. As president he enforced the fugitive slave clause until the war forced a different policy, and he argued throughout that Congress had no power to touch slavery in the states where it existed. His claim was that the Constitution should be read in the light of the principle behind it, not against it. That is how every lawyer reads any instrument.

Two: the Founders themselves understood it this way. The authors of the Constitution did not think they were setting up a system of slavery. Madison, at the Convention, objected to admitting in the text the idea that there could be property in men, and the word slave never appears in the document. That restraint was deliberate, and Lincoln noticed it. We take up that evidence in Seven Myths About the Declaration of Independence, Checked Against the Record.

Three: the interpretive discipline Lincoln recommends is not open-ended. He does not say that any idea of liberty can override the text. He says that the Declaration's specific principle, equal unalienable rights, is the end the text was written to secure. That is a narrow and public standard, not a blank cheque. The Progressives, as we will see in Coolidge's 1926 Declaration Speech Is the Best Answer to Progress Talk, did the opposite: they treated rights as evolving and the text as obsolete. Lincoln wanted to fix the principle and let practice improve. They wanted to evolve the principle and let the text decay.

So the answer is that Lincoln is a constitutionalist. He keeps the silver and honours the gold.

What it means now

Three practical lessons come out of the fragment.

First, read the Constitution as an instrument of purposes. When a clause is doubtful, the preamble and the Declaration are part of the evidence. A reading that turns a power into a tyranny has misread the document.

Second, never let the frame become the picture. A person who defends the form of government while forgetting what it is for will end up defending procedures that protect nothing. Many a bureaucracy has the whole apparatus of due process and none of its spirit.

Third, honour both. Lincoln warns against blurring the picture. The principle without the Constitution is a mob. The Constitution without the principle is a machine. A citizen of a free country has to carry both, and the work of citizenship is to keep them aligned.

For the reading of the principle itself, begin with The Declaration's Second Paragraph Is a Complete Theory of Government, and for how unalienable rights were meant to work, see Unalienable Means You Cannot Even Give Your Rights Away, and Here Is Why.

The case in brief

1. Around 1861 Lincoln wrote privately that the principle of "Liberty to all" is the cause of American prosperity and that the Constitution and the Union are the picture of silver framed around it.
2. His image comes from Proverbs 25:11, and its point is that "the picture was made for the apple, not the apple for the picture."
3. The fragment compresses his 1857 answer to Dred Scott, that the Declaration set a standard maxim for free society, and anticipates the Gettysburg Address, which dates the nation from 1776.
4. The strongest objection says Lincoln reads the Declaration into the Constitution; the answer is that he reads the text by its purposes, enforces its clauses and fixes the principle instead of evolving it.
5. The lesson is to keep both the frame and the picture, and never to let the legal machinery defeat the liberty it exists to secure.

What you can do: read the Constitution's preamble, then the Declaration's second paragraph, and write down one law in your own state that you think fails the test of the second.