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Editor's Note: The late Stanford University professor George M. Fredrickson, one of the nation's foremost scholars on issues of race, offers a comprehensive view of Abraham Lincoln's often misunderstood positions on slavery and black equality.
THE SEVEN GREAT DEBATES between Lincoln and Douglas, which were the highlights of the senatorial race of 1858, mostly repeated positions that the candidates had already taken. Douglas' strategy was to represent Lincoln as an abolitionist and racial egalitarian. In the first speech of the first debate, Douglas claimed that "Mr. Lincoln and the Black Republican party" were "in favor of citizenship for the negro." As for himself, he was "opposed to negro citizenship in any and every form. (Cheers.) 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 on negroes, Indians, and other inferior races." Douglas went on to reject the opinion of Lincoln and "all the little abolition orators" that black equality is affirmed in the Declaration of Independence. In Douglas' opinion, "all men" meant all white men; it did not include blacks or other "inferior races." Lincoln's rejoinder to the allegation that he favored black citizenship was to claim for blacks the natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as set forth in the Declaration, but then to deny that this meant they could be equal to whites and eligible for the rights of citizenship. Lincoln reformulated for the occasion the basic point that he had made in the Peoria speech: "I agree with Judge Douglas that [the Negro] is not my equal in many respects - certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man."
Once again, one is struck by Lincoln's minimalist and somewhat impoverished I conception of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It boiled down to the right not to be a slave and to acquire and possess...