Then, in the order of impeachment, followed a remarkable utterance from a much-valued friend of my own and of the Senator, the late Rufus Choate, who, without descending into the same particularity, seems to have reached a similar conclusion, when, in addressing political associates, he characterized the Declaration of Independence as “that passionate and eloquent manifesto of a revolutionary war,” and then again spoke of its self-evident truths as “the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right.”[234] This was in his letter to the Maine Whig State Central Committee, August 9, 1856. In my friendship for this remarkable orator, I can never think of these too famous words without a pang of regret. This great question became a hinge in the memorable debate between Mr. Douglas and Mr. Lincoln in the contest for the Senatorship of Illinois, when the former said, in various forms of speech, that “the Declaration of Independence only included the white people of the United States”;[235] and Abraham Lincoln replied, that “the entire records of the world, from the date of the Declaration of Independence up to within three years ago, may be searched in vain for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the negro was not included in the Declaration.”[236] This was in Mr. Lincoln’s speech at Galesburg, October 7, 1858. Elsewhere he repeated the same sentiment. Andrew Johnson renewed the assault. After quoting the great words of the Declaration, he said in this Chamber, December 12, 1859:-- “Is there an intelligent man throughout the whole country, is there a Senator, when he has stripped himself of all party prejudice, who will come forward and say that he believes that Mr. Jefferson, when he penned that paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, intended it to embrace the African population? Is there a gentleman in the Senate who believes any such thing?… There is not a man of respectable intelligence who will hazard his reputation upon such an assertion.”[237] All this is characteristic of the author, as afterward revealed to us. Then, Sir, in the list we skip to April 5, 1870, when the Senator from Wisconsin ranges himself in the line, characterizing the great truths of the Declaration as “the generalities of that revolutionary pronunciamento.” In reply to myself, he rebuked me, and said that it was my disposition, if I could not find a thing in the Constitution, to seek it in the Declaration of Independence,--and if it were not embodied in “the generalities of that revolutionary pronunciamento,” then to go still further.[238]