Stephen A. Douglas, speaking at Ottawa, Ill., August 21st, 1858, said:
"For one I am opposed to negro citizenship in any and every form. I
believe this Government was made by white men, for the benefit of
white men and their posterity forever; and I am in favor of
confining citizenship to white men,—men of European birth and
descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians and other
inferior races."[239]
General William T. Sherman, writing in July, 1860, said:
"All the Congresses on earth can't make the negro anything else than
what he is; he must be subject to the white man, or he must
amalgamate or be destroyed. Two such races cannot live in harmony,
save as master and slave. Mexico shows the result of general
equality and amalgamation, and the Indians give a fair illustration
of the fate of negroes if they are released from the control of the
whites."[240]
William H. Seward, speaking at Detroit, Michigan, September 4th, 1860,
said:
"The great fact is now fully realized that the African race here is
a foreign and feeble element, like the Indians, incapable of
assimilation, ... and that it is a pitiful exotic, unwisely and
unnecessarily transplanted into our fields, and which it is
unprofitable to cultivate at the cost of the desolation of the
native vineyard."[241]