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DOUGLAS UNDERSTOOD from the outset that his primary goal, more important than debating or defining his own position, was to cast Lincoln as a radical, bent on abolishing all distinctions between the races. The question of black equality—in the modern sense—was not controversial in Illinois, or in the nation as a whole. Almost every white man was against it, even most abolitionists. Douglas was certain that no candidate who professed a belief in the social or political equality of blacks and whites could possibly carry Illinois, where a long-standing set of Black Laws prevented blacks from voting, holding political office, giving testimony against whites, and sitting on juries.

At every forum, therefore, Douglas missed no opportunity to portray Lincoln as a Negro-loving agitator bent on debasing white society. “If you desire negro citizenship,” Douglas baited his audience, “if you desire them to vote on an equality with yourselves, and to make them eligible to office, to serve on juries, and to adjudge your rights, then support Mr. Lincoln and the Black Republican party.” The crowd responded as Douglas hoped: “Never, never.” Cheers nearly drowned out his voice as he shouted his opinion that “the signers of the Declaration of Independence had no reference to negroes at all when they declared all men to be created equal. They did not mean negro, nor the savage Indians, nor the Fejee Islanders, nor any other barbarous race. They were speaking of white men…. I hold that this government was established…for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and should be administered by white men, and none others.” Cries of “that’s the truth” erupted from the agitated throng amid raucous applause.

In response, Lincoln avowed that he had “no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races.” He had never been in favor “of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry.” He acknowledged “a physical difference between the two” that would “probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality.” But “notwithstanding all this,” he said, taking direct aim at the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott case, “there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence…. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects—certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral and intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”

It is instructive, political philosopher Harry Jaffa perceptively notes, that the only unequivocal statement of white supremacy Lincoln ever made was as to “color”—the assertion of an obvious difference. Had he advocated political and social equality for blacks, he unquestionably would have lost the election in a state where the legislature not only supported the discriminatory Black Laws but had gone even further by passing a special law making it a criminal offense to bring into the boundaries of Illinois “a person having in him one-fourth negro blood, whether free or slave.” And this same law essentially barred blacks and mulattos from entering the state to take up residence.

Nonetheless, Lincoln’s implied support for the Black Laws stands in contrast to the bolder positions adopted by both Seward and Chase. Chase had long since adopted a liberal stance on race far in advance of the general public, and had been instrumental in removing some but not all of Ohio’s discriminatory Black Laws. Seward, too, had spoken out vehemently against the Black Laws, and in favor of black suffrage, coming from the more progressive state of New York.

However, neither Seward nor Chase advocated full social and political equality for blacks. “Seward did not believe,” his biographer concludes, “that the black man in America was the equal of the white, or that he was capable of assimilation