If we had lost the Revolution, the DOI would not have been worth the paper it was printed on.
Just as when the Confederacy lost the war, the Confederate Constitution was no longer worth the paper it was printed on.
When the Confederacy lost its Constitution, the United States lost its as well.
Even earlier as Garry Wills writes that Lincoln at Gettysburg, “performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting. Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked. The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological luggage, that new constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they brought there with them. They walked off, from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America. Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.”
Today we have something even better than the old U.S. Constitution: we have the one million page - or is it two million pages now - Federal Register to regulate our lives and conduct.
When Lincoln became President, we discovered that the Declaration of Independence was in fact not "worth the paper it was printed on."
No man is more responsible for breaking the fundamental law upon which our own nation was founded; A right to Independence.