Civics Instruction

The Declaration of Independence states the principles on which our government, and our identity as Americans, are based. Unlike the other founding documents, the Declaration of Independence is not legally binding, but it is powerful. Abraham Lincoln called it “a rebuke and a stumbling-block to tyranny and oppression.” It continues to inspire people around the world to fight for freedom and equality.

The Constitution acted like a colossal merger, uniting a group of states with different interests, laws, and cultures. Under America’s first national government, the Articles of Confederation, the states acted together only for specific purposes. The Constitution united its citizens as members of a whole, vesting the power of the union in the people. Without it, the American Experiment might have ended as quickly as it had begun.

The Constitution might never have been ratified if the framers hadn't promised to add a Bill of Rights. The first ten amendments to the Constitution gave citizens more confidence in the new government and contain many of today's Americans' most valued freedoms.

The Articles of Confederation were adopted by the Continental Congress on November 15, 1777. This document served as the United States' first constitution. It was in force from March 1, 1781, until 1789 when the present-day Constitution went into effect.

The Federalist, commonly referred to as the Federalist Papers, is a series of 85 essays written by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison between October 1787 and May 1788. The essays were published anonymously, under the pen name "Publius," in various New York state newspapers of the time.

The Federalist Papers were written and published to urge New Yorkers to ratify the proposed United States Constitution, which was drafted in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. In lobbying for adoption of the Constitution over the existing Articles of Confederation, the essays explain particular provisions of the Constitution in detail. For this reason, and because Hamilton and Madison were each members of the Constitutional Convention, the Federalist Papers are often used today to help interpret the intentions of those drafting the Constitution.

On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered one of the most famous speeches in American history: the Gettysburg Address. The Union victory at Gettysburg was a key moment in the Civil War—thwarting General Robert E. Lee’s invasion of the North. President Lincoln offered this brief speech in a dedication ceremony for a new national cemetery near the Gettysburg battlefield. Lincoln was not even the featured speaker that day. Noted orator Edward Everett spoke for nearly two hours, while Lincoln spoke for a mere two minutes. In his powerful address, Lincoln embraced the Declaration of Independence, recalling how the nation was “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” By resurrecting these promises, Lincoln committed post-Civil War America to “a new birth of freedom.” Following the Civil War, the Reconstruction Amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments—abolished slavery, wrote the Declaration of Independence’s commitment to freedom and equality into the Constitution, and promised to ban racial discrimination in voting. In so doing, the amendments sought to make Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom” a constitutional reality.

President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the nation approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free." Despite this expansive wording, the Emancipation Proclamation was limited in many ways. It applied only to states that had seceded from the United States, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. It also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy (the Southern secessionist states) that had already come under Northern control. Most important, the freedom it promised depended upon Union (United States) military victory.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote the Letter from Birmingham Jail while he was imprisoned for leading nonviolent civil rights demonstrations in Alabama in 1963. The Letter from Birmingham Jail explains why MLK believed people had a responsibility to follow just laws and a duty to break unjust ones.