Presidential nomination by one indorsing the
general doctrine of his measure, but at the same time standing clear
of the odium of its untimely agitation and its gross breach of national
faith; and he has seen that successful rival constitutionally elected, not
by the strength of friends, but by the division of adversaries, being in
a popular minority of nearly four hundred thousand votes. He has seen his
chief aids in his own State, Shields and Richardson, politically speaking,
successively tried, convicted, and executed for an offence not their own
but his. And now he sees his own case standing next on the docket for
trial.

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 eve