Here’s Lincoln telling Lucian K Truscott IV to get stuffed way back in 1858:
“If [Americans not descended directly from the Founders] look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none...
1/ https://twitter.com/dissidentrabbi/status/1280154771161337859">https://twitter.com/dissident...

...”they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but...
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“when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men
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...”that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.”
https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/speech-at-chicago-illinois/
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Jefferson doesn’t belong to you, Mr Truscott. He belongs to anyone who holds to the moral principle of the self-evident truth of the equality of all men. That you choose to dishonor the happy coincidence of your blood relation to him is your burden. You’ll not make it mine.
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