Abraham Lincoln by Stephen B. Oates Page B

moral evil” he could not but hate. He hated it because it degraded blacks and whites alike. He hated it because it violated America’s “ central idea ”—the idea of equality and the right to rise. He hated it because it was cruelly unjust to the Negro, prevented him from eating “the bread that his own hands have earned,” reduced him to “stripes, and unrewarded toils.” He hated slavery because it imperiled white Americans, too. For if one man could be enslaved because of the color of his skin, Lincoln realized, then any man could be enslaved because of skin color. Yet, while branding slavery an evil and doing all they could to contain it in Dixie, Lincoln and his Republican colleagues would not, legally could not, molest the institution in those states where it already existed.
    Douglas, fighting for his political life in free-soil Illinois, lashed back at Lincoln with unadulterated race baiting. Throughout the Great Debates of 1858, Douglas smeared Lincoln and his party as Black Republicans, as a gang of radical abolitionists out to liberate southern slaves and bring them stampeding into Illinois and the rest of the North, where they would take away white jobs and copulate with white daughters. Douglas had made such accusations before, but never to the extent that he did in 1858. Again and again, he accused Lincoln of desiring intermarriage and racial mongrelization.
    Lincoln did not want to discuss such matters. He complained bitterly that race was not the issue between him and Douglas. The issue was whether slavery would ultimately triumph or ultimately perish in the United States. But Douglas understood the depth of anti-Negro feeling in Illinois, and he hoped to whip Lincoln by playing on white racial fears. And so he kept warning white crowds: Do you want Negroes to flood into Illinois, cover theprairies with black settlements, and eat, sleep, and marry with white people? If you do, then vote for Lincoln and the “Black Republicans.” But I am against Negro citizenship, Douglas cried. I want citizenship for whites only. I believe that this government “was made by the white man, for the benefit of the white man, to be administered by white men.” “I do not question Mr. Lincoln’s conscientious belief that the negro was made his equal, and hence his brother”—great laughter at that—“but for my own part, I do not regard the negro as my equal, and positively deny that he is my brother or any kin to me whatever.”
    Such allegations forced Lincoln to take a stand. It was either that or risk political ruin in white-supremacist Illinois. What he said carefully endorsed the kind of racial discrimination then enforced by Illinois law. Had he not done so, as one scholar has reminded us, “the Lincoln of history simply would not exist.” At Charleston, Illinois, Lincoln conceded that he was not and never had been in favor “of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.” There was, he said at Ottawa, “a physical difference” between the black and white races that would “probably” always prevent them from living together in perfect equality. And Lincoln wanted the white race to have the superior position so long as there must be a difference. Therefore any attempt to twist his views into a call for perfect political and social equality was “but a specious and fantastic arrangement of words by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse.”
    We shall probably never know whether Lincoln was voicing his own personal convictions in speeches like these, given in the heat of political debate before all-white audiences. To be sure, this is one of the most hotly disputed areas of Lincoln scholarship, with several white historians siding with Bennett and Harding and labeling Lincoln a white supremacist. Certainly in the 1850s