A250: The Declaration’s Promise

-This is a guest post by Ryan Reft, a historian in the Manuscript Division. It also appears in the May/June issue of the Library of Congress Magazine. Following the trauma of the American Civil War, Walt Whitman published “ Democratic Vistas ,” a tough but ultimately optimistic appraisal of America’s democratic promise. In it, Whitman reminisced about the nation’s founding and the echoes of the…