By equating the Civil War with America's founding Lincoln suggested not only the importance of the war, but in a larger sense the idea of the nation as a living project. There was not just one "founding" but another to come and, by extension, perhaps future "rebirths."

Lincoln locates American nationhood in the abstract. At its heart, America is an idea--not a geographical place, not a body of laws or collection of institutions. An idea exists, lives, in the minds of the people. All else flows from that idea.

By emphasizing the language of the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln implicitly acknowledged the weakness of the U.S. Constitution, which tolerated slavery. Indeed, at the time of the Gettysburg Address, slavery was still legal in America. It was not until 1865 that the Constitution was amended to outlaw slavery and to extend the protections of the Bill of Rights to all people in America (the U.S. Supreme Court had declared in 1857 that blacks were not, nor ever could be, U.S. citizens and therefore the Constitution did not apply to them.)