Lincoln as Abolitionist (11)

In his speech on the Dred Scott decision on June 25, 1857, Lincoln uses a phrase similar to that I quoted from 1858. But the point of his statement is clear. While blacks, free or enslaved, may not be fully equal to whites, they have rights as human beings that should be respected, which the institution of slavery itself denies:

Now I protest against that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either, I can just leave her alone. 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.

Anyone in the Southern states in 1857 who said such a thing publicly as Lincoln said in that last sentence would have been regarded as an abolitionist subversive, subject to prosecution and/or extralegal violence.

In a letter to slaveholder Joshua Speed of Aug. 24, 1855, Lincoln referred to the nativist American Party, better known to history by its pejorative nickname the Know-Nothing Party, and made on of his most famous observations on the corrosive effects of slavery on the rights of free Americans:

I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it, "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty - to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.