o it.

At Galesburgh, the other day, I said, in answer to Judge Douglas, that
three years ago there never had been a man, so far as I knew or believed,
in the whole world, who had said that the Declaration of Independence did
not include negroes in the term "all men." I reassert it to-day. I assert
that Judge Douglas and all his friends may search the whole records of the
country, and it will be a matter of great astonishment to me if they shall
be able to find that one human being three years ago had ever uttered the
astounding sentiment that the term "all men" in the Declaration did not
include the negro. Do not let me be misunderstood. I know that more than
three years ago there were men who, finding this assertion constantly in
the way of their schemes to bring about the ascendency and perpetuation
of slavery, denied the truth of it. I know that Mr. Calhoun and all the
politicians of his school denied the truth of the Declaration. I know
that it ran along in the mouth of some Southern men for a period of years,
ending at last in that shameful, though rather forcible, declaration of
Pettit of Indiana, upon the floor of the United States Senate, that the
Declaration of Independence was in that respect "a self-evident lie,"
rather than a self-evident truth. But I say, with a perfect knowledge of
all this hawking at the Declaration without directly attacking it, that
three years ago there never had lived a man who had ventured to assail it
in the sneaking way of pretending to believe it, and then asserting it did
not include the negro. I believe the first man who ever said it was Chief
Justice Taney in the Dred Scott case, and the next to him was our friend
Stephen A. Douglas. And now it has become the catchword of the entire
party. I would like to call upon his friends everywhere to consider how
they have come in so short a time to view this matter in a way so entirely
different from their former belief; to ask whether they are not being
borne along by an irresistible current,--whither, they know not.

In answer to my proposition at Galesburgh last week, I see that some man
in Chicago has got up a letter, addressed to the Chicago Times, to show,
as he professes, that somebody had said so before; and he signs himself
"An Old-Line Whig," if I remember correctly. In the first place, I would
say he was not an old-line Whig. I am somewhat acquainted with old-line
Whigs from the origin to the end of that party; I became prett