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By Root 1768 0

writings of the southern ideologue George Fitzhugh, who described the idea of equality as a disastrous mistake. Lincoln was also familiar with Slavery Ordained by God, a militant defense of slavery by the Alabama minister Frederick A. Ross. In an undated manuscript, Lincoln imagined Dr. Ross, seated “in the shade, with gloves on his hands,” ruminating on whether slavery harmonized with the will of God, while his slave Sambo worked in “the burning sun.” Lincoln doubted that under the circumstances Dr. Ross would be “actuated by that perfect impartiality, which has ever been considered most favorable to correct decisions.” Douglas’s view that the Declaration applied only to whites seemed to Lincoln essentially the same as the arguments of proslavery ideologues; he considered both a repudiation of “our national axioms.”9

As Isaac N. Arnold, a Radical Republican from Chicago who would serve two terms in Congress during the Civil War, later wrote, “It required some nerve in Lincoln, in a state where the prejudice against the negro was so strong…to stand up and proclaim the right of the negro to all the rights in the Declaration.” But what did those rights amount to? The right to life in Jefferson’s triad needed no explanation; liberty stood as a rebuke to the institution of slavery. The equal right to the pursuit of happiness, Lincoln explained, meant enjoyment of the fruits of one’s labor. To drive home his point, he chose to refer to a black woman, implying that this right was bounded by neither gender nor race: “In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others.”

Lincoln also directly confronted Douglas on the charge that by speaking of blacks enjoying any rights at all, Republicans promoted “amalgamation”—that is, interracial sexual relations. In fact, Lincoln responded, it was slavery that produced such mixing. He noted sardonically that by returning the Scotts’ two teenage daughters to slavery, Taney’s decision exposed them to the danger of “the forced concubinage of their masters,” one of the few times in his career that he referred even obliquely to the sexual abuse of slave women. The best way to prevent “amalgamation” was to “keep them apart.” At the end of his speech, as he had done at Peoria, Lincoln called for “the separation of the races” through colonization. Blacks might be entitled to the natural rights of mankind, but ultimately they should enjoy them outside the United States.10

The Springfield speech was Lincoln’s sole major address of 1857. He devoted the rest of the year to his law practice. He reentered the political arena in the Senate campaign of 1858. Then, he would elaborate what “equality” did and did not imply. He would make explicit that blacks were not entitled to the civil and political rights white Americans took for granted. But he would not retreat from his insistence that the principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence applied to every human being.

II

AS LINCOLN PREPARED for his second run for the Senate, a political earthquake dramatically altered the landscape of party politics. In the wake of the Dred Scott decision, President Buchanan announced that slavery now existed in all the territories, “by virtue of the Constitution.” In the spring of 1858, when Buchanan attempted to bring Kansas into the Union as a slave state under the Lecompton Constitution, which patently flouted the wishes of the majority of the territory’s residents, Stephen A. Douglas denounced the move as a violation of popular sovereignty. Douglas and his supporters joined with Republicans in Congress to block approval of the constitution.

Douglas’s stance outraged the president and southern Democrats and made it almost inevitable that his party would fracture along sectional lines in 1860. But by reinventing himself with an antisouthern (if not antislavery) political persona, Douglas created a dilemma for the Republican party in Illinois and for Lincoln