dignified or very logical argument but so it was, I had to get along with
it as well as I could.
It has occurred to-me here to-night that if I ever do shoot over the
line at the people on the other side of the line into a slave State, and
purpose to do so, keeping my skin safe, that I have now about the
best chance I shall ever have. I should not wonder if there are some
Kentuckians about this audience--we are close to Kentucky; and whether
that be so or not, we are on elevated ground, and, by speaking distinctly,
I should not wonder if some of the Kentuckians would hear me on the other
side of the river. For that reason I propose to address a portion of what
I have to say to the Kentuckians.
I say, then, in the first place, to the Kentuckians, that I am what they
call, as I understand it, a "Black Republican." I think slavery is wrong,
morally and politically. I desire that it should be no further spread
in--these United States, and I should not object if it should gradually
terminate in the whole Union. While I say this for myself, I say to you
Kentuckians that I understand you differ radically with me upon this
proposition; that you believe slavery is a good thing; that slavery is
right; that it ought to be extended and perpetuated in this Union.
Now, there being this broad difference between us, I do not pretend, in
addressing myself to you Kentuckians, to attempt proselyting you; that
would be a vain effort. I do not enter upon it. I only propose to try
to show you that you ought to nominate for the next Presidency, at
Charleston, my distinguished friend Judge Douglas. In all that there is a
difference between you and him, I understand he is sincerely for you, and
more wisely for you than you are for yourselves. I will try to demonstrate
that proposition. Understand, now, I say that I believe he is as sincerely
for you, and more wisely for you, than you are for yourselves.
What do you want more than anything else to make successful your views of
slavery,--to advance the outspread of it, and to secure and perpetuate
the nationality of it? What do you want more than anything else? What--is
needed absolutely? What is indispensable to you? Why, if I may, be allowed
to answer the question, it is to retain a hold upon the North, it is to
retain support and strength from the free States. If you can get this
support and strength from the free States, you can succeed. If you do not
get this support and this strength from the free States, you are in the
minority, and you are beaten at once.
If that proposition be admitted,--and it is undeniable,--then the next
thing I say to you is, that Douglas, of all the men in this nation, is the
only man that affords you any hold upon the free States; that no other man
can give you any strength in the free States. This being so, if you doubt
the other branch of the proposition, whether he is for you--whether he is
really for you, as I have expressed it,--I propose asking your attention
for a while to a few facts.
The issue between you and me, understand, is, that I think slavery is
wrong, and ought not to be outspread; and you think it is right, and
ought to be extended and perpetuated. [A voice, "Oh, Lord!"] That is my
Kentuckian I am talking to now.
I now proceed to try to show you that Douglas is as sincerely for you and
more wisely for you than you are for yourselves.
In the first place, we know that in a government like this, in a
government of the people, where the voice of all the men of the country,
substantially, enters into the execution--or administration, rather--of
the government, in such a government, what lies at the bottom of all of it
is public opinion. I lay down the proposition, that Judge Douglas is
not only the man that promises you in advance a hold upon the North, and
support in the North, but he constantly moulds public opinion to your
ends; that in every possible way he can he constantly moulds the public
opinion of the North to your ends; and if there are a few things in which
he seems to be against you,--a few things which he says that appear to
be against you, and a few that he forbears to say which you would like
to have him say you ought to remember that the saying of the one, or the
forbearing to say the other, would lose his hold upon the North, and, by
consequence, would lose his capacity to serve you.
Upon this subject of moulding public opinion I call your attention to the
fact--for a well established fact it is--that the Judge never says your
institution of slavery is wrong. There is not a public man in the United
States, I believe, with the exception of Senator Douglas, who has not, at
some time in his life, declared his opinion whether the thing is right or
wrong; but Senator Douglas never declares it is wrong. He leaves himself
at perfect liberty to do all in your favor which he would be hindered from
doing if he were to declare the thing to be wrong. On the contrary, he
takes all the chances that he has for inveigling the sentiment of the
North, opposed to slavery, into your support, by never saying it is right.
This you ought to set down to his credit: You ought to give him full
credit for this much; little though it be, in comparison to the whole
which he does for you.
Some other, things I will ask your attention to. He said upon the floor of
the United States Senate, and he has repeated it, as I understand, a great
many times, that he does not care whether slavery is "voted up or voted
down." This again shows you, or ought to show you, if you would reason
upon it, that he does not believe it to be wrong; for a man may say when
he sees nothing wrong in a thing; that he, dues not care whether it be
voted up or voted down but no man can logically say that he cares not
whether a thing goes up or goes down which to him appears to be wrong. You
therefore have a demonstration in this that to Judge Douglas's mind your
favorite institution, which you would have spread out and made perpetual,
is no wrong.
Another thing he tells you, in a speech made at Memphis in Tennessee,
shortly after the canvass in Illinois, last year. He there distinctly
told the people that there was a "line drawn by the Almighty across this
continent, on the one side of which the soil must always be cultivated by
slaves"; that he did not pretend to know exactly where that line was,
but that there was such a line. I want to ask your attention to that
proposition again; that there is one portion of this continent where the
Almighty has signed the soil shall always be cultivated by slaves; that
its being cultivated by slaves at that place is right; that it has the
direct sympathy and authority of the Almighty. Whenever you can get these
Northern audiences to adopt the opinion that slavery is right on the other
side of the Ohio, whenever you can get them, in pursuance of Douglas's
views, to adopt that sentiment, they will very readily make the other
argument, which is perfectly logical, that that which is right on that
side of the Ohio cannot be wrong on this, and that if you have that
property on that side of the Ohio, under the seal and stamp of the
Almighty, when by any means it escapes over here it is wrong to have
constitutions and laws "to devil" you about it. So Douglas is moulding the
public opinion of the North, first to say that the thing is right in your
State over the Ohio River, and hence to say that that which is right there
is not wrong here, and that all laws and constitutions here recognizing
it as being wrong are themselves wrong, and ought to be repealed and
abrogated. He will tell you, men of Ohio, that if you choose here to have
laws against slavery, it is in conformity to the idea that your climate
is not suited to it, that your climate is not suited to slave labor, and
therefore you have constitutions and laws against it.
Let us attend to that argument for a little while and see if it be sound.
You do not raise sugar-cane (except the new-fashioned sugar-cane, and you
won't raise that long), but they do raise it in Louisiana. You don't raise
it in Ohio, because you can't raise it profitably, because the climate
don't suit it. They do raise it in Louisiana, because there it is
profitable. Now, Douglas will tell you that is precisely the slavery
question: that they do have slaves there because they are profitable, and
you don't have them here because they are not profitable. If that is so,
then it leads to dealing with the one precisely as with the other. Is
there, then, anything in the constitution or laws of Ohio against raising
sugar-cane? Have you found it necessary to put any such provision in your
law? Surely not! No man desires to raise sugar-cane in Ohio, but if
any man did desire to do so, you would say it was a tyrannical law that
forbids his doing so; and whenever you shall agree with Douglas, whenever
your minds are brought to adopt his argument, as surely you will have
reached the conclusion that although it is not profitable in Ohio, if any
man wants it, is wrong to him not to let him have it.
In this matter Judge Douglas is preparing the public mind for you of
Kentucky to make perpetual that good thing in your estimation, about which
you and I differ.
In this connection, let me ask your attention to another thing. I believe
it is safe to assert that five years ago no living man had expressed the
opinion that the negro had no share in the Declaration of Independence.
Let me state that again: five years ago no living man had expressed the
opinion that the negro had no share in the Declaration of Independence.
If there is in this large audience any man who ever knew of that opinion
being put upon paper as much as five years ago, I will be obliged to him
now or at a subsequent time to show it.
If that be true I wish you then to note the next fact: that within the
space of five years Senator Douglas, in the argument of this question, has
got his entire party, so far as I know, without exception, in saying that
the negro has no share in the Declaration of Independence. If there be now
in all these United States one Douglas man that does not say this, I have
been unable upon any occasion to scare him up. Now, if none of you said
this five years ago, and all of you say it now, that is a matter that you
Kentuckians ought to note. That is a vast change in the Northern public
sentiment upon that question.
Of what tendency is that change? The tendency of that change is to bring
the public mind to the conclusion that when men are spoken of, the
negro is not meant; that when negroes are spoken of, brutes alone are
contemplated. That change in public sentiment has already degraded
the black man in the estimation of Douglas and his followers from the
condition of a man of some sort, and assigned him to the condition of a
brute. Now, you Kentuckians ought to give Douglas credit for this. That is
the largest possible stride that can be made in regard to the perpetuation
of your thing of slavery.
A voice: Speak to Ohio men, and not to Kentuckians!
Mr. LINCOLN: I beg permission to speak as I please.
In Kentucky perhaps, in many of the slave States certainly, you are trying
to establish the rightfulness of slavery by reference to the Bible. You
are trying to show that slavery existed in the Bible times by divine
ordinance. Now, Douglas is wiser than you, for your own benefit, upon that
subject. Douglas knows that whenever you establish that slavery was--right
by the Bible, it will occur that that slavery was the slavery of the white
man, of men without reference to color; and he knows very well that you
may entertain that idea in Kentucky as much as you please, but you will
never win any Northern support upon it. He makes a wiser argument for you:
he makes the argument that the slavery of the black man; the slavery of
the man who has a skin of a different color from your own, is right. He
thereby brings to your support Northern voters who could not for a moment
be brought by your own argument of the Bible right of slavery. Will you
give him credit for that? Will you not say that in this matter he is more
wisely for you than you are for yourselves?
Now, having established with his entire party this doctrine, having been
entirely successful in that branch of his efforts in your behalf, he is
ready for another.
At this same meeting at Memphis he declared that in all contests between
the negro and the white man he was for the white man, but that in all
questions between the negro and the crocodile he was for the negro. He did
not make that declaration accidentally at Memphis. He made it a great many
times in the canvass in Illinois last year (though I don't know that it
was reported in any of his speeches there, but he frequently made it). I
believe he repeated it at Columbus, and I should not wonder if he repeated
it here. It is, then, a deliberate way of expressing himself upon that
subject. It is a matter of mature deliberation with him thus to express
himself upon that point of his case. It therefore requires deliberate
attention.
The first inference seems to be that if you do not enslave the negro,
you are wronging the white man in some way or other, and that whoever is
opposed to the negro being enslaved, is, in some way or other, against
the white man. Is not that a falsehood? If there was a necessary conflict
between the white man and the negro, I should be for the white man as much
as Judge Douglas; but I say there is no such necessary conflict. I say
that there is room enough for us all to be free, and that it not only does
not wrong the white man that the negro should be free, but it positively
wrongs the mass of the white men that the negro should be enslaved; that
the mass of white men are really injured by the effects of slave labor in
the vicinity of the fields of their own labor.
But I do not desire to dwell upon this branch of the question more than to
say that this assumption of his is false, and I do hope that that fallacy
will not long prevail in the minds of intelligent white men. At all
events, you ought to thank Judge Douglas for it; it is for your benefit it
is made.
The other branch of it is, that in the struggle between the negro and
the crocodile; he is for the negro. Well, I don't know that there is any
struggle between the negro and the crocodile, either. I suppose that if a
crocodile (or, as we old Ohio River boatmen used to call them, alligators)
should come across a white man, he would kill him if he could; and so he
would a negro. But what, at last, is this proposition? I believe it is a
sort of proposition in proportion, which may be stated thus: "As the negro
is to the white man, so is the crocodile to the negro; and as the negro
may rightfully treat the crocodile as a beast or reptile, so the white man
may rightfully treat the negro as a beast or a reptile." That is really
the "knip" of all that argument of his.
Now, my brother Kentuckians, who believe in this, you ought to thank
Judge Douglas for having put that in a much more taking way than any of
yourselves have done.
Again, Douglas's great principle, "popular sovereignty," as he calls it,
gives you, by natural consequence, the revival of the slave trade whenever
you want it. If you question this, listen awhile, consider awhile what I
shall advance in support of that proposition.
He says that it is the sacred right of the man who goes into the
Territories to have slavery if he wants it. Grant that for argument's
sake. Is it not the sacred right of the man who don't go there equally to
buy slaves in Africa, if he wants them? Can you point out the difference?
The man who goes into the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska, or any other
new Territory, with the sacred right of taking a slave there which belongs
to him, would certainly have no more right to take one there than I would,
who own no slave, but who would desire to buy one and take him there. You
will not say you, the friends of Judge Douglas but that the man who
does not own a slave has an equal right to buy one and take him to the
Territory as the other does.
A voice: I want to ask a question. Don't foreign nations interfere with
the slave trade?
Mr. LINCOLN: Well! I understand it to be a principle of Democracy to whip
foreign nations whenever, they interfere with us.
Voice: I only asked for information. I am a Republican myself.
Mr. LINCOLN: You and I will be on the best terms in the world, but I do
not wish to be diverted from the point I was trying to press.
I say that Douglas's popular sovereignty, establishing his sacred right
in the people, if you please, if carried to its logical conclusion gives
equally the sacred right to the people of the States or the Territories
themselves to buy slaves wherever they can buy them cheapest; and if any
man can show a distinction, I should like to hear him try it. If any man
can show how the people of Kansas have a better right to slaves, because
they want them, than the people of Georgia have to buy them in Africa,
I want him to do it. I think it cannot be done. If it is "popular
sovereignty" for the people to have slaves because they want them, it is
popular sovereignty for them to buy them in Africa because they desire to
do so.
I know that Douglas has recently made a little effort, not seeming to
notice that he had a different theory, has made an effort to get rid
of that. He has written a letter, addressed to somebody, I believe, who
resides in Iowa, declaring his opposition to the repeal of the laws that
prohibit the Africa slave trade. He bases his opposition to such repeal
upon the ground that these laws are themselves one of the compromises of
the Constitution of the United States. Now, it would be very interesting
to see Judge Douglas or any of his friends turn, to the Constitution of
the United States and point out that compromise, to show where there is
any compromise in the Constitution, or provision in the Constitution;
express or implied, by which the administrators of that Constitution are
under any obligation to repeal the African slave trade. I know, or at
least I think I know, that the framers of that Constitution did expect
the African slave trade would be abolished at the end of twenty years, to
which time their prohibition against its being abolished extended there
is abundant contemporaneous history to show that the framers of the
Constitution expected it to be abolished. But while they so expected,
they gave nothing for that expectation, and they put no provision in
the Constitution requiring it should be so abolished. The migration or
importation of such persons as the States shall see fit to admit shall not
be prohibited, but a certain tax might be levied upon such importation.
But what was to be done after that time? The Constitution is as silent
about that as it is silent, personally, about myself. There is absolutely
nothing in it about that subject; there is only the expectation of the
framers of the Constitution that the slave trade would be abolished at the
end of that time; and they expected it would be abolished, owing to public
sentiment, before that time; and the put that provision in, in order that
it should not be abolished before that time, for reasons which I suppose
they thought to be sound ones, but which I will not now try to enumerate
before you.
But while, they expected the slave trade would be abolished at that time,
they expected that the spread of slavery into the new Territories should
also be restricted. It is as easy to prove that the framers of the
Constitution of the United States expected that slavery should be
prohibited from extending into the new Territories, as it is to prove
that it was expected that the slave trade should be abolished. Both these
things were expected. One was no more expected than the other, and one was
no more a compromise of the Constitution than the other. There was nothing
said in the Constitution in regard to the spread of slavery into the
Territory. I grant that; but there was something very important said about
it by the same generation of men in the adoption of the old Ordinance of
'87, through the influence of which you here in Ohio, our neighbors in
Indiana, we in Illinois, our neighbors in Michigan and Wisconsin, are
happy, prosperous, teeming millions of free men. That generation of men,
though not to the full extent members of the convention that framed the
Constitution, were to some extent members of that convention, holding
seats at the same time in one body and the other, so that if there was any
compromise on either of these subjects, the strong evidence is that
that compromise was in favor of the restriction of slavery from the new
Territories.
But Douglas says that he is unalterably opposed to the repeal of those
laws because, in his view, it is a compromise of the Constitution. You
Kentuckians, no doubt, are somewhat offended with that. You ought not to
be! You ought to be patient! You ought to know that if he said less than
that, he would lose the power of "lugging" the Northern States to your
support. Really, what you would push him to do would take from him
his entire power to serve you. And you ought to remember how long, by
precedent, Judge Douglas holds himself obliged to stick by compromises.
You ought to remember that by the time you yourselves think you are ready
to inaugurate measures for the revival of the African slave trade, that
sufficient time will have arrived, by precedent, for Judge Douglas to
break through, that compromise. He says now nothing more strong than
he said in 1849 when he declared in favor of Missouri Compromise,--and
precisely four years and a quarter after he declared that Compromise to
be a sacred thing, which "no ruthless hand would ever daze to touch," he
himself brought forward the measure ruthlessly to destroy it. By a mere
calculation of time it will only be four years more until he is ready to
take back his profession about the sacredness of the Compromise abolishing
the slave trade. Precisely as soon as you are ready to have his services
in that direction, by fair calculation, you may be sure of having them.
But you remember and set down to Judge Douglas's debt, or discredit, that
he, last year, said the people of Territories can, in spite of the Dred
Scott decision, exclude your slaves from those Territories; that he
declared, by "unfriendly legislation" the extension of your property into
the new Territories may be cut off, in the teeth of the decision of the
Supreme Court of the United States.
He assumed that position at Freeport on the 27th of August, 1858. He said
that the people of the Territories can exclude slavery, in so many words:
You ought, however, to bear in mind that he has never said it since. You
may hunt in every speech that he has since made, and he has never used
that expression once. He has never seemed to notice that he is stating his
views differently from what he did then; but by some sort of accident, he
has always really stated it differently. He has always since then declared
that "the Constitution does not carry slavery into the Territories of the
United States beyond the power of the people legally to control it, as
other property." Now, there is a difference in the language used upon
that former occasion and in this latter day. There may or may not be a
difference in the meaning, but it is worth while considering whether there
is not also a difference in meaning.