accuracy, and certainly he again differentiated it widely
from Abolitionism. The Republican party, he said, think slavery "a
moral, a social, and a political wrong." Any man who does not hold this
opinion "is misplaced and ought to leave us. While, on the other hand,
if there be any man in the Republican party who is impatient over the
necessity springing from its actual presence, and is impatient of the
constitutional guarantees thrown around it, and would act in disregard
of these, he, too, is misplaced, standing with us. He will find his
place somewhere else; for we have a due regard ... for all these
things." ... "I have always hated slavery as much as any
Abolitionist,... but I have always been quiet about it until this new
era of the introduction of the Nebraska bill again." He repeated often
that he had "no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the
institution of slavery in the States where it exists;" that he had "no
lawful right to do so," and "no inclination to do so." He said that his
declarations as to the right of the negro to "life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness" were designed only to refer to legislation "about
any new country which is not already cursed with the actual presence of
the evil,--slavery." He denied having ever "manifested any impatience
with the necessities that spring from the ... actual existence of
slavery among us, where it does already exist."

He dwelt much upon the equality clause of the Declaration. If we begin
"making exceptions to it, where will it stop? If one man says it does
not mean a negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man?"
Only within three years past had any one doubted that negroes were
included by this language. But he said that, while the authors "intended
to include _all_ men, they did not mean to declare all men equal _in all
respects_,... in color, size, intellect, moral development, or social
capacity," but only "equal in certain inalienable rights." "Anything
that argues me into his [Douglas's] idea of perfect social and political
equality with the negro is but a specious and fantastic arrangement of
words, by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut
horse.... I have no purpose to produce political and social equality
between the white and the black races. There is a physical difference
between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid
their living together upon the footing of perfect equality;