Life of Abraham Lincoln, Sixteenth President of the United StatesCrosby, Frank
History
Life of Abraham Lincoln, Sixteenth President of the United States
Crosby, Frank
Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865
they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they
stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and
matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape
more complete than it is.
“It is grossly incorrect to say or assume, that the public estimate
of the negro is more favorable now than it was at the origin of the
Government.
“Three years and a half ago, Judge Douglas brought forward his
famous Nebraska bill. The country was at once in a blaze. He
scorned all opposition, and carried it through Congress. Since then
he has seen himself superseded in a Presidential nomination, by
one indorsing the general doctrine of his measure, but at the same
time standing clear of the odium of its untimely agitation, and its
gross breach of national faith; and he has seen that successful
rival Constitutionally elected, not by the strength of friends, but
by the division of his adversaries, being in a popular minority
of nearly four hundred thousand votes. He has seen his chief aids
in his own State, Shields and Richardson, politely speaking,
successively tried, convicted, and executed, for an offence not
their own, but his. And now he sees his own case, standing next on
the docket for trial.
“There is a natural disgust, in the minds of nearly all white
people, to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the
white and black races; and Judge Douglas evidently is basing his
chief hope upon the chances of his being able to appropriate the
benefit of this disgust to himself. If he can, by much drumming
and repeating, fasten the odium of that idea upon his adversaries,
he thinks he can struggle through the storm. He, therefore, clings
to this hope, as a drowning man to the last plank. He makes an
occasion for lugging it in from the opposition to the Dred Scott
decision. He finds the Republicans insisting that the Declaration
of Independence includes ALL men, black as well as white, and
forthwith he boldly denies that it includes negroes at all, and
proceeds to argue gravely that all who contend it does do so only
because they want to vote, eat and sleep, and marry with negroes.
He will have it that they can not be consistent else. Now, I
protest against the counterfeit logic which concludes that because
I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want
her for a wife. I need not have her for either. I can just leave
her alone. In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in
her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands,
without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the
equal of all others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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