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By Root 1746 0

most Republican politicians, who preferred to attack Taney for having taken on the territorial question when he need not have done so and who devoted most of their attention to the constitutional power of Congress to bar the institution in the territories, Lincoln addressed head-on the vexatious question of black citizenship. He denied that Taney had presented a plausible account of the founders’ racial outlook. Free blacks, he pointed out, echoing Justice McLean’s dissent, had voted in several states at the time the Constitution was ratified, indicating that they were then viewed as members of the body politic. Taney, moreover, was “grossly incorrect” to imply that “the public estimate of the negro” had improved since the revolutionary era; in fact, “the change between then and now is decidedly the other way.” Lincoln conspicuously failed to mention the deteriorating situation in Illinois, whose voters and legislature within the past decade had approved measures barring free blacks from entering the state. Instead, he turned to the condition of the slaves. In the revolutionary era, he said, emancipation seemed a real possibility; now the prospect had almost been extinguished. Lincoln offered an elaborate metaphor to show how the slave’s prospects had receded:

All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining against him. Mammon is after him; ambition follows, and philosophy follows, and the Theology of the day is fast joining the cry. They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him, and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.

In probing the founders’ intentions, Lincoln said almost nothing of the Constitution’s relationship to slavery, which he would later analyze in detail in his Cooper Institute address of February 1860. Instead, to refute Taney he turned to the Declaration of Independence. During the era of the Revolution, he insisted, the Declaration had been “held sacred by all.” Now, in the hands of Taney, Stephen A. Douglas, and supporters of slavery, “it is assailed, and sneered at, and…torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it.” In the Peoria speech, Lincoln had asserted that the Declaration’s promise of equality applied to blacks. Now, for the first time, he elaborated what he meant—equality should be understood as an open-ended process, not an idea fixed at a single moment in time:

I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal—equal in “certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”…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.8

Lincoln meant his emphasis on the timeless truth of the Declaration to counter not only Douglas’s racialized reading of the document but also proslavery “philosophy” and “theology.” In 1848, John C. Calhoun had attacked the idea that “all men are born free and equal” as “the most false and dangerous of all political error.” Such statements became increasingly common in the South in the 1850s. Lincoln regularly read the Charleston Mercury and Richmond Enquirer as well as the