Civil War Era Invocations of the American Revolution (1852-1860)

Frederick Douglass's famous "What to the slave is the Fourth of July" speech argued that the perpetuation of slavery in the United States conflicted with the founding spirit of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Abraham Lincoln's famous presidential campaign speech in which he argued that the majority of the signers of the Constitution supported the new Republican Party's core position on slavery: the federal government had the power to restrict its expansion into new territories.

The South Carolina Convention repeatedly invokes the Constitution and the revolutionary spirit of 1776 to justify seceding from the Union.