Contents
-SUBJECT INDEX -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD
Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865). Political Debates Between Lincoln and Douglas. 1897.
Page 287
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| | it does not mean a negro, why may not another say it does not mean some other man? If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the statute book in which we find it and tear it out. |
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| Lincoln maintains there that the Declaration of Independence asserts that the negro is equal to the white man, and that under divine law; and if he believes so it was rational for him to advocate negro citizenship, which, when allowed, puts the negro on an equality under the law. I say to you in all frankness, gentlemen, that in my opinion a negro is not a citizen, cannot be, and ought not to be, under the Constitution of the United States. I will not even qualify my opinion to meet the declaration of one of the Judges of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case, “that a negro descended from African parents, who was imported into this country as a slave, is not a citizen, and cannot be.” I say that this Government was established on the white basis. It was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and never should be administered by any except white men. I declare that a negro ought not to be a citizen, whether his parents were imported into this country as slaves or not, or whether or not he was born here. It does not depend upon the place a negro’s parents were born, or whether they were slaves or not, but upon the fact that he is a negro, belonging to a race incapable of self-government, and for that reason ought not to be on an equality with white men. | 30 |
| My friends, I am sorry that I have not time to pursue this argument further, as I might have done, but for the fact that Mr. Lincoln compelled me to occupy a portion of my time in repelling those gross slanders and falsehoods that Trumbull has invented against me and put in circulation. In conclusion, let me ask you why should this Government be divided by a geographical line,—arraying all men North in one great hostile party against all men South? Mr. Lincoln tells you, in his speech at Springfield, “that a house divided against itself cannot stand; that this Government, divided into Free and Slave States, cannot endure permanently; that they must either be all Free or all Slave; all one thing or all the other.” Why cannot this Government endure divided into Free and Slave States, as our fathers made it? When this Government was established by Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Jay, Hamilton, Franklin, and the other sages |
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