The Public Record
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. A member of the Republican Party, he is best known for leading the nation through the Civil War and for his efforts to abolish slavery, notably through the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Lincoln's leadership during this tumultuous period helped to preserve the Union and set the stage for the eventual passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which formally abolished slavery in the United States.
Then you really believe that the principle which "our fathers who framed the government under which we live" thought so clearly right as to adopt it, and indorse it again and again, upon their official oaths, is in fact so clearly wrong as…
The fact that we get no votes in your section is a fact of your making, and not of ours.
You will grant a hearing to pirates or murderers, but nothing like it to "Black Republicans." In all your contentions with one another, each of you deems an unconditional condemnation of "Black Republicanism" as the first thing to be…
As those fathers marked it, so let it again be marked, as an evil not to be extended, but to be tolerated and protected only because of and so far as its actual presence among us makes that toleration and protection a necessity.
Let all who believe that "our fathers who framed the government under which we live understood this question just as well, and even better than we do now," speak as they spoke, and act as they acted upon it.
But he has no right to mislead others who have less access to history, and less leisure to study it, into the false belief that "our fathers who framed the government under which we live" were of the same opinion--thus substituting…
To do so, would be to discard all the lights of current experience--to reject all progress, all improvement.
I do not mean to say we are bound to follow implicitly in whatever our fathers did.
I was losing interest in politics when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again.
My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.
The good old maxims of the Bible are applicable, and truly applicable, to human affairs; and in this, as in other things, we may say that he who is not for us is against us; he who gathereth not with us, scattereth.
They say there are but two ways,--one is to hire men and to allure them to labour by their consent; the other is to buy the men, and drive them to it, and that is slavery.
Labour is the great source from which nearly all, if not all, human comforts and necessities are drawn.
We mean to recognize and bear in mind always, that you have as good hearts in your bosoms as other people, or as we claim to have, and to treat you accordingly.
We mean to remember that you are as good as we; that there is no difference between us other than the difference of circumstances.
We mean to be as deliberate and calm about it as it is possible to be, but as firm and resolved as it is possible for men to be.
We, the Republicans and others forming the opposition of the country, intend "to stand by our guns," to be patient and firm, and in the long run to beat you, whether you take him or not.
If there was a necessary conflict between the white man and the negro, I should be for the white man as much as Judge Douglas; but I say there is no such necessary conflict.
I desire that it should be no further spread in these United States, and I should not object if it should gradually terminate in the whole Union.
I say, then, in the first place to the Kentuckians that I am what they call, as I understand it, a "Black Republican." I think slavery is wrong, morally and politically.
If public sentiment has not been debauched already to this point, a new turn of the screw in that direction is all that is wanting; and this is constantly being done by the teachers of this insidious popular sovereignty.
If you think that now, and did not think it then, the next thing that strikes me is to remark that there has been a change wrought in you, and a very significant change it is, being no less than changing the negro, in your estimation, from…
Did you ever, five years ago, hear of anybody in the world saying that the negro had no share in the Declaration of National Independence; that it did not mean negroes at all; and when "all men" were spoken of, negroes were not included?
Judge Douglas ignores altogether the very well-known fact that we have never had a serious menace to our political existence except it sprang from this thing, which he chooses to regard as only upon a par with onions and potatoes.
Politicians like Abraham Lincoln
