For Tocqueville, this democratic patriotism depends on a belief in equality, inalienable rights, and the consent of the governed—in effect, on the beliefs and actions found in the Declaration of Independence. But that universal creed can’t exist solely in abstract nouns. To mean anything—to survive at all—it requires the participation of the governed as citizens. The purpose of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was to remind Americans that self-government would not endure without the efforts of patriots on its behalf. When ancestry defines national identity, patriotism requires nothing other than allegiance. But the blood of the Union dead and the soil of the cemetery that Lincoln had come to dedicate bore a larger meaning: the liberty and equality of all human beings. Patriotism was the devotion of Americans to these principles, and to preserving them through self-government.