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 ever
afterwards actually place all white people on an equality with one
another. And this is the staple argument of both the Chief-Justice
and the Senator, for doing this obvious violence to the plain,
unmistakable language of the Declaration.

I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include
all men; but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all
respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size,
intellect, moral development, or social capacity. They defined
with tolerable distinctness in what respects they did consider all
men created equal--equal with "certain inalienable rights, among
which, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This they
said, and this they m