Stephen A. Douglas, Opening Speech, Jonesboro, September 15, 1858
Mr. Lincoln objects to that
decision [at
the Dred Scott case], first and mainly because it deprives the negro of the
rights of citizenship. I am as much opposed to his reason for that objection as
I am to the objection itself. I hold that a negro is not and never ought to be
a citizen of the United States. (“Good, good,” and tremendous cheers.) I told
that this government was made on the white basis, by white men, for the benefit
of white man and their posterity forever, and should be administered by white men
and none others. I do not believe that the Almighty made the negro capable of
self-government. I am aware that all the abolition lecturers that you find
traveling about through the country are in the habit of reading the Declaration
of Independence to prove that all man were created equal and endowed by their
Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness. Mr. Lincoln is very much in the habit of following in the
track of Lovejoy in this particular, by reading that part of the Declaration of
Independence to prove that the negro was endowed by the Almighty with the
inalienable right of equality with white men. Now, I say to you, my
fellow-citizens, that in my opinion the signers of the Declaration had no
reference to the negro whatever when they declared all men to be created equal.
They desired to express by that phrase, white men, men of European birth, and
European descent, and had no reference either to the negro, the save Indians,
the Fejee, the Malay, or any other inferior and degraded race, when they spoke
of the equality of men. One great evidence that such was their understanding,
is to be found in the fact that at that time every one of the thirteen colonies
was a slaveholding colony, every signer of the Declaration represented a
slave-holding consistuency and we know that no one of the emancipated his
slaves, much less offered citizenship to them when they signed the Declaration,
and yet, if they had intended to declare that the negro was the equal of the
white man, and entitled by divine right to an equality with him, they were
bound, as honest men, that day and hour to have put their negroes on an
equality with themselves. (Cheers.) Instead of doing so, with uplifted eyes to
Heaven they implored the Divine blessing upon them during the seven years’
bloody war they had to fight to maintain that Declaration, never dreaming that
they were violating divine law by still holding the negroes in bondage and
depriving them of equality. (The Complete Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858,
ed. Paul M. Angle [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958, 1991], 200-1,
comment in square brackets added for clarification)
