On a farm field that, just months before, had been witness to some of the bloodiest battles in the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln took to the podium to deliver his famed Gettysburg Address, a speech that would arguably become one of the greatest ever uttered in the English language. Lincoln opened his short remarks commemorating the opening of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery by speaking of the United States as a nation “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In this language, Lincoln harkened back to the words of the Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration of Independence’s famous second paragraph begins with the “self-evident” truth “that all men are created equal.” Self-evident simply means that something is true without any prior demonstration. The Declaration thus teaches that the truth of equality is embedded within the very definition of the term “mankind.” The abundance of tyrannical regimes such as North Korea, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union shows clearly that self-evident does not mean obvious.