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.
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