universal and eternal, it is assailed, and sneered
at, and construed and hawked at, and torn, till if
its framers could rise from their graves they
could not at all recognize it. All the powers
of earth seem rapidly combining against him.
Mammon is after him, ambition follows, 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 he produced
to make the impossibility of his escape more complete
than it is....
There is a natural disgust in the minds
of nearly all white people at the idea of an indiscriminate
amalgamation of the white and black races; and
Judge Douglas evidently is basing his chief hope upon
the chances of his being able to appropriate the benefit
of this disgust to himself. If he can by
much drumming and repeating fasten the odium of
that idea upon his adversaries, he thinks he can
struggle through the storm. He therefore clings
to this hope as a drowning man to the last plank.
He makes an occasion for lugging it in, from the
opposition to the Dred Scott decision. He finds
the Republicans insisting that the Declaration of
Independence includes all men, black as
well as white, and forthwith he boldly denies
that it includes negroes at all, and proceeds
to argue gravely that all who contend it does, do so
only because they want to vote, and eat, and sleep,
and marry with negroes. He will have it that
they cannot be consistent else. Now I protest
against the 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.
Chief-Justice Taney, in his opinion
in the Dred Scott case, admits that the language
of the Declaration is broad enough to include the
whole human family; but he and Judge Douglas argue
that the authors of that instrument did not intend
to include negroes, by the fact that they did
not at once actually place them on an equality
with the whites. Now this grave argument comes
to just nothing at all by the other fact that
they did not at once or ever afterwards actually
place all white people on an equality with one another.
And this is the staple argument of both the Chief-Justice
and the Senator, for doing this obvious violence
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