Lincoln, Abraham

Speech of the Hon. Abram Lincoln, in Reply to Judge Douglas. Delivered in Representatives' Hall, Springfield, Illinois, June 26th, 1857. [Springfield, Illinois, 1857]

7 pages, 4to (11 1/2 x 8 1/2 in.; 292 x 216 mm, uncut). Caption title, text in 2 columns; some marginal chipping and tears, final leaf with long closed tear. Unsewn (2 quired bifolia).

Acquisition: William Reese

Monaghan 9

A scarce printing of a significant and fascinating speech by Lincoln, dealing largely with the Dred Scott decision and other issues relating to slavery and foreshadowing the celebrated "House Divided" speech that would, a year later, secure him the Illinois Republican nomination for the United States Senate. Lincoln attacks the Dred Scott decision as "in part, based on assumed historical facts which were not really true. … Chief Justice Taney, in delivering the opinion of the majority of the Court, insists at great length that negroes were no part of the people who made, or for whom was made, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution of the United States. On the Contrary, Judge Curtis, in his dissenting opinion, shows that in five of the then thirteen States … free negroes were voters, and, in proportion to their numbers, had the same part in making the Constitution the white people had."

This speech makes clear that at this stage in his career, Lincoln advocated a separation of the races by colonization. But in one remarkable passage—responding to the Democrat Douglas's specious claim that Republicans who believe that the Declaration of Independence applies equally to all men "do so only because they want to vote, and eat, and sleep, and marry with negroes"—the humility and humanity that would eventually make Lincoln an icon of racial equality is fully on display: "I protest against the counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave, I must 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."