History of the United States I / Unit 14 USH1 2004 review, 2 to 3 minutes
Lincoln at Ottawa
The idea
At Ottawa, Illinois, on August twenty-first, eighteen fifty-eight, Lincoln said two things in the same passage, and this course quotes both or neither. He disclaimed any purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races. In the same breath he maintained that Black people held all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, and that in the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, the Black man was, in Lincoln's words, my equal. The setting matters. Douglas had spent the campaign calling Republicans abolitionists who promoted miscegenation, and calling them Black Republicans, a threat to the Constitution and to the founders' work. Lincoln was answering that charge in front of Illinois voters whose support he needed. Note the exact scope of each half. The disclaimer is about political and social equality, which in that campaign meant voting and intermarriage. The affirmation is about natural rights and about the product of a person's own labour.
In practice
A candidate asserting natural rights and denying social and political equality in one passage, before an audience he was asking to send him to the Senate.
Where people slip
Do not sand this down in either direction. An entry that quotes only the disclaimer produces a Lincoln who was indifferent to slavery, and an entry that quotes only the affirmation produces a Lincoln from a later century. What the passage shows is a politician working inside the limits of what Illinois voters in eighteen fifty-eight would tolerate, and locating the claim he could defend, which was the right of a person to what his own hand earns. That claim is narrower than equality and it is not nothing, since a right to the product of your labour is precisely what slavery takes. Hold both halves at once and the man is legible. Drop either and he is not.
Your place on the trail
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Builds on
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