Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [136]
Lincoln’s goal was to rekindle those very beacons, constantly affirming the revolutionary promises made in the Declaration. When the authors of the Declaration spoke of equality, Lincoln insisted, “they did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality…. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”
He hoped to “penetrate the human soul” until, as he said, “all this quibbling about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race being inferior” could be discarded, until all Americans could “unite as one people throughout this land,” providing true meaning to the phrase “all men are created equal.” His comments on race here and throughout the debates reveal a brooding quality, as if he was thinking aloud, balancing a realistic appraisal of the present with a cautious eye toward progress in the future.
History demonstrates that Lincoln and his contemporaries were not overestimating the depth of racial bigotry in America. A century would pass before legal apartheid was outlawed in the South, before separate schools were deemed unconstitutional, before blacks were finally guaranteed the right to vote. Moreover, each of these steps toward what Frederick Douglass called the “practical recognition of our Equality” met with fierce white resistance and were made possible only by the struggles of blacks themselves, forcing the issue upon largely hostile or indifferent whites.
There is no way to penetrate Lincoln’s personal feelings about race. There is, however, the fact that armies of scholars, meticulously investigating every aspect of his life, have failed to find a single act of racial bigotry on his part. Even more telling is the observation of Frederick Douglass, who would become a frequent public critic of Lincoln’s during his presidency, that of all the men he had met, Lincoln was “the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely, who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color.” This remark takes on additional meaning when one realizes that Douglass had met dozens of celebrated abolitionists, including Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, and Salmon Chase. Apparently, Douglass never felt with any of them, as he did with Lincoln, an “entire freedom from popular prejudice against the colored race.”
THE SEVENTH AND LAST debate took place at Alton, a town on the Mississippi River in southwest Illinois, before an audience Lincoln described as “having strong sympathies southward by relationship, place of birth, and so on.” By the middle of the day, the “whole town” was “alive and stirring with large masses of human beings.” Gustave Koerner, a leader of the German-Americans, was among the throng that came to witness the show. “More than a thousand Douglas men,” Koerner wrote, “had chartered a boat to attend the Alton meeting,” while Lincoln “had come quietly down from Springfield with his wife that morning, unobserved…. He was soon surrounded by a crowd of Republicans; but there was no parade or fuss, while Douglas, about noon, made his pompous entry, and soon afterwards the boat from St. Louis landed at the wharf, heralded by the firing of guns and the strains of martial