Lincoln on Democracy

"NOT BLOODY BULLETS,BUT PEACEFUL BALLOTS"

92 LINCOLN ON DEMOCRACY version. It will then run thus: "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all British subjects who were on this continent eighty-one years ago, were created equal to all British subjects born and then residing in Great Britain." And now I appeal to all-to Democrats as well as others,-are you really willing that the Declaration shall be thus frittered away?-thus left no more at most, than an interesting memorial of the dead past? thus shorn of its vitality, and practical value; and left without the germ or even the suggestion of the individual rights of man in it? "NOT BLOODY BULLETS, BUT PEACEFUL BALLOTS" From a Draft of a Speech [DECEMBER 1857?] The date of this fragment has long been a matter of dispute, with some believing it was prepared for what an eyewitness called Lincoln's ''fine Republican speech" in Edwardsville, Illinois, on May 18, 1858, and others arguing it was written as early as Decemberoftheprevious year. Whenever it was composed, it represented Lincoln's clearest expression yet of the biblical "house divided" warning he would crystallize by the summer of 1858. Well, I, too, believe in self-government as I understand it; but I do not understand that the privilege one man takes of making a slave of another, or holding him as such, is any part of "self-government." To call it so is, to my mind, simply absurd and ridiculous. I am for the people ofthe whole nation doing just as they please in all matters which concern the whole nation; for those of each part doing just as they choose in all matters which concern no other part; and for each individual doing just as he chooses in all matters which concern nobody else. Lincoln and Slavery, 1854-1857 93 This is the principle. Of course I am content with any exception which the Constitution, or the actually existing state of things, makes a necessity . But neither the principle nor the exception will admit the indefinite spread and perpetuity of human slavery. A house divided against itself cannot stand. [from the Books of Matthew and Mark-eds.] I believe the government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I expressed this belief a year ago; and subsequent developments have but confirmed me. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and put it in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward so it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new. Do you doubt it? Study the Dred Scott decision, and then see how little even now remains to be done. That decision may be reduced to three points. The first is that a negro cannot be citizen. That point is made in order to deprive the negro, in every possible event, of the benefit of that provision of the United States Constitution which declares that "the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States." The second point is that the United States Constitution protects slavery, as property, in all the United States territories, and that neither Congress, nor the people of the Territories, nor any other power, can prohibit it at any time prior to the formation of State constitutions. This point is made in order that the Territories may safely be filled up with slaves, before the formation of State constitutions, thereby to embarrass the free-State sentiment, and enhance the chances of slave constitutions being adopted. The third point decided is that the voluntary bringing of Dred Scott into Illinois by his master, and holding him here a long time as a slave, did not operate his emancipation-did not make him free. This point is made, not to be pressed immediately; but if acquiesced in for a while, then to sustain the logical conclusion that what Dred Scott's master might lawfully do with Dred in the free State of Illinois, 94 LINCOLN ON DEMOCRACY every other master may lawfully do with any other one or one hundred slaves in Illinois, or in any other free State. Auxiliary...