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When President Abraham Lincoln recited the Gettysburg Address on Nov. 19, 1863, in a Pennsylvania cemetery where many of the 7,000 fallen soldiers still awaited burial four months after the infamous battle, he breathed new life into the Declaration of Independence.
So says Chehalis attorney J. Vander Stoep, who gave a presentation to the St. Helens Club on Wednesday at the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Chehalis as part of the club’s lecture series focusing on the nation’s 250th anniversary this year.
Susan Remund introduced Vander Stoep, a graduate of W.F. West High School, Western Washington University and the University of Washington School of Law who, in 1980 at 23, became the youngest person elected to the Washington state House of Representatives. The Remund family hosts a huge Fourth of July fireworks show at their Curtis farm, and noted that, for the past three decades, he has given a four-minute recitation of the Declaration of Independence from memory.
“The crowd just loves it,” she said. “Every year, I get a thank-you note from somebody who says, besides the fireworks, it was so special to have J. present the Declaration of Independence.”
Vander Stoep noted the crowd at the Remunds has grown through the decades from about 40 to more than a thousand.
“The Fourth of July, even with 1,000 people there, when I start to recite that thing, the place goes dead quiet, and it’s really a remarkable moment.”
He said it doesn’t have anything to do with him.
“I think it has to do with us as Americans, knowing how central this document is to us,” he said.
He spoke of how important the St. Helens Club was to his family, especially his mother, the late beloved Suzi Vander Stoep, who prepared diligently for her hour-long lectures.
Vander Stoep likened the Declaration of Independence to the Ten Commandments, which people, whether religious or not, look toward to determine right from wrong.
“I believe that is the most consequential human document written in the last 250 years,” he said, adding that aside from religious writings, it has influenced societies worldwide more than any other document.
“The Declaration serves for us, I believe, as a society, as a North Star, right and wrong, how we should be as a society,” he said. “It sets a marker that our human society will never perfectly obtain but are always, hopefully as Americans, aiming toward it.”
Nations worldwide, including the former Union of Soviet Social Republics, have incorporated words from the Declaration into guiding documents, whether they abided by them or not.
It’s that idea of all people being created equal under the law and given inalienable rights by the Creator to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that faced extinction during the Civil War.
“This country was the first to claw its way out of darkness and put that on paper, and God love you for it, because these aren’t just American ideas anymore,” Vander Stoep said. Rather, these truths are self-evident. The Declaration gives the rights to all people rather than only monarchs or dictators.
Those rights create conflict today with the crackdown on illegal immigration in the United States. Are people being deported by our federal government entitled to any of the rights given to citizens? They are human beings with inalienable rights as human beings.
“That creates a tension in our mind,” Vander Stoep said. “What is right and wrong? And without the Declaration, in a lot of countries, this would not be a tension. This would not be a hot debate over what’s right and wrong. We believe that the ideals of the Declaration apply to all people.”
He didn’t want to open a debate but simply noted the power of the Declaration and the rights listed therein.
“I’m just pointing that out as a very real, very present example of how the Declaration of Independence challenges us and makes us think differently as Americans,” Vander Stoep said. “I point this out at this moment, not for resolution, but as for being a very present issue where 250 years later, the Declaration’s promise of equal rights is very much influencing our thinking.”
He described the United States as “the most diverse nation on earth, in fact, in the history of humanity” offering more freedom and opportunity for citizens than anywhere else on earth — thanks to the Declaration of Independence.
On June 7, 1776, Virginia statesman Richard Henry Lee, acting under instruction from the Virginia convention held in May, introduced to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia what’s known as the Lee Resolution. It called for independence from British rule, formation of foreign alliances, and a plan for a confederation of the colonies. The contents of that resolution — rather than the Declaration written later by Thomas Jefferson — spread throughout the colonies. All except Georgia voted for independence.
After introduction of Lee’s Resolution in June 1776, debate ensued in the Continental Congress. On June 11, a committee of five formed to draft the official Declaration of Independence. Members were Jefferson of Virginia, John Adams of Massachusetts, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, Roger Sherman of Connecticut and Robert Livingston of New York. The new Declaration of Independence incorporated parts of the Lee Resolution.
A painting of Jefferson presenting the Declaration for signing by delegates on July 4, 1776, is historically inaccurate, Vander Stoep said. “That’s not how it happened.” They adopted the resolution on July 2, but it took until late August before all the delegates had returned to Philadelphia to sign the document.
For many years, the Declaration that started the Revolutionary War faded into the background as statesmen created the Articles of Confederation in 1777, soldiers fought for independence until 1783 and colonies ratified the Constitution in 1788. As the law of the United States, the Constitution was the supreme document, the foundation for freedom and prosperity, Vander Stoep said.
But it had warts, in part by failing to address the morality and legality of slavery outright.
Seventy-two years later, Civil War broke out over slavery and state rights.
“The focus is on the Constitution and what that means, until Mr. Lincoln takes the podium at Gettysburg,” Vander Stoep said.
The dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg drew 10,000 people, many eager to hear a speech by a famous American orator, former Massachusetts Gov. Edward Everett who had served in the U.S. House and Senate. Vander Stoep said he also was the great-uncle of Katherine “Kay” Everett Kaufman, a longtime Centralia school counselor who died in 1977. A stained glass window at Westminster Presbyterian Church is dedicated to her.
In November 1863, the illustrious orator spoke for two hours before yielding the podium to Lincoln to make a few brief remarks.
“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,” Lincoln said.
He could have simply said it happened 87 years ago, but Vander Stoep noted the King James Bible spoke of the days of our years in terms of scores. A good life was three scores and 10. A long life was four score. His word usage conveyed the longevity of the new nation while offering no guarantee of its continued survival.
In 272 words, Lincoln spoke of the nation’s founding principles of liberty and equality, calling for a “new birth of freedom” to ensure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
“Mr. Lincoln uttering those words at Gettysburg created the meaning of the Declaration of Independence that we as a nation share, and he changed it at Gettysburg in a very powerful way,” Vander Stoep said.
The Civil War tested the strength of a nation founded on liberty and equality, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, considered among the greatest speeches in American history, outlined why the nation needed to survive.
Afterward, Everett wrote a letter to Lincoln, saying, “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”
Indeed, the 16th president breathed new life into the Declaration of Independence by succinctly describing its purpose and the inalienable rights it promises and lifted it above the Constitution.
“Lincoln, in his first sentence, has flipped American history and American understanding of the relative importance of those documents, and he has made the Declaration the North Star for the nation,” Vander Stoep said.
After a Minneapolis police officer knelt on the neck of George Floyd for more than eight minutes in May 2020, killing him, Vander Stoep wrote notes about the Declaration and its meaning. He said the nation’s founders, if they returned today, would be amazed at how far the United States has come toward achieving universal rights and how far the ideals embedded into the Declaration of Independence have carried into so many other countries across the globe.
“It is the ideals first expressed in the Declaration of Independence that made every real American know immediately that what happened to George Floyd was wrong,” he said.
“There’s more work to be done in America,” Vander Stoep said in the notes he wrote after Floyd’s death. “But on the Fourth of July, we can remember that the American path has always been moving slowly upward toward more freedom and opportunity. I’m an optimist, and I believe we will continue upward, take it all together, and I’m very proud to be an American.”
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
