Abstract
In this essay, I explore the historical challenge that Abraham Lincoln posed to Stephen Douglas at the fifth debate in Galesburg. During an argument regarding the morality of slavery and the meaning and significance of the American regime, Douglas contended that the nation was legally founded on white supremacy. Lincoln, however, affirmed that based on all available historical evidence, the Founders intended to include all humans when they said in the Declaration of Independence, based on their understanding of natural law, that “all men are created equal.” To demonstrate his confidence in this belief, Lincoln challenged Douglas to provide primary source evidence that anyone, prior to the 1850s, ever said that the black race was not included in the Declaration. Studying Lincoln’s natural law challenge and the responses it received offers a new perspective on the importance of the original meaning of the Declaration’s equality principle, grounded in the law of nature, as well as how Lincoln thought about that principle—particularly in contrast to rivals like Douglas and Roger Taney.
1. Introduction
Much has been written about Abraham Lincoln’s famous “Freeport Question” at the 1858 joint debates with Stephen A. Douglas. Less recognized is what might be called Lincoln’s “Galesburg Challenge,” which Lincoln presented to Douglas at the fifth debate in Galesburg and then repeated at the seventh and final debate in Alton. In the midst of an argument regarding the morality of slavery and the meaning and significance of the American regime, Douglas contended that the nation was founded on the principle of white supremacy, and that when the Founders said “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence, they meant only “white men.” Lincoln, on the other hand, affirmed that based on all available historical evidence, Americans should rest assured that the Founders intended to include all human beings—and all races—in the Declaration’s equality principle, based in large part on their commitment to natural law legal reasoning. To demonstrate his confidence in this belief, Lincoln challenged Douglas to provide primary source evidence that anyone, prior to the 1850s, ever said that the black race was not included in the Declaration. Here is the crux of the challenge, as stated by Lincoln at the Galesburg debate in October 1858:
I believe the entire records of the world, from the date of the Declaration of Independence up to within three years ago, may be searched in vain for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the negro was not included in the Declaration of Independence; I think I may defy Judge Douglas to show that he ever said so, that Washington ever said so, that any President ever said so, that any member of Congress ever said so, or that any living man upon the whole earth ever said so, until the necessities of the present policy of the Democratic party, in regard to slavery, had to invent that affirmation.(Johannsen 1965, pp. 219–20)
Specifically, the Galesburg challenge was about correcting a very thin, yet tremendously important, injustice: the lie that Douglas and others were spreading that insisted the Founders never intended to include the black race in the Declaration of Independence. Douglas was the one asserting that the Declaration only applied to white men, and so the burden of proof fell on him. Lincoln, in issuing the Galesburg challenge, called for that proof, believing all along that such evidence did not exist.1
In this essay, I argue that the Galesburg challenge mattered in 1858, and it still matters today. Lincoln’s challenge and Douglas’s subsequent inability, or refusal, to answer it reveals an important lesson about the uses and abuses of historical texts. During a time when leaders such as Douglas attempted to rewrite history to score political points, Lincoln insisted on accurately reading and interpreting primary documents. Studying this aspect of the Lincoln–Douglas debates highlights the importance of the original meaning of the Declaration of Independence, especially its natural law principle that “all men are created equal,” as well as how Lincoln thought about that principle—particularly in contrast to political rivals like Douglas and Roger Taney, who both ignored the distinction between natural and positive law.
This essay is predicated on the belief that there is permanent value to be found in the Galesburg challenge specifically, and the Lincoln–Douglas debates more broadly, when it comes among other things to how they illuminate an important and specific conception of law; however, such a belief has been challenged, even rejected, by others. For example, Albert J. Beveridge, Lincoln biographer and former United States Senator from Indiana, downplayed any historical significance attached to the debates: “Solely on their merits, the debates themselves deserve little notice,” he argued in the 1920s. “For the most part, each speaker merely repeated what he had said before” (Guelzo 2007, p. 393). It should come as no surprise to anyone who has read the debates that they are criticized frequently for their repetitive style. In response to these criticisms, Richard Allen Heckman has observed, quite rightly, that “there was much repetition necessitated by the seven locations” (Heckman 1967, p. 129). Paul M. Angle admits, “In the debates there was, of course, much repetition,” but he explains that “Each audience [at the seven locations] was new, and not until the campaign had been in progress for several weeks could either speaker be sure that the principal issues were generally understood” (Angle 1958, p. xxvi). Over the course of the debates, both men were able to clarify and crystalize their main arguments.2 This rule applied particularly to the Galesburg challenge, which Lincoln repeated at the seventh and last debate at Alton. However, Lincoln did not simply restate the original challenge by doubling-down on what he had said at Galesburg; he enhanced the challenge by further developing and refining the argument to include awareness of the full spectrum of arguments used by the founding generation to support freedom, including natural law arguments, while directly responding to objections.
Finally, Lincoln’s Galesburg challenge not only accused Douglas of deliberately distorting the historical record, but of essentially destroying the regime established by the Founders. “It is not clear that Lincoln ultimately regarded Douglas as incorrigibly evil, amoral, or a sinner who might yet repent—or any of these things,” according to George B. Forgie. “He could accuse Douglas of great crimes (what could be worse than destroying the republic of the fathers?) and then engage in banter with ‘my friend the judge’” (Forgie 1996, p. 288). Lord Charnwood was likely closest to the truth of the matter when he argued in his biography of Lincoln that, on a personal level, to “say that the two men cordially hated each other is probably to misread both,” but that, at bottom, Lincoln did believe that Douglas had committed a form of “treason” against the nation’s founding principles (Charnwood 1996, p. 107).
The purpose of the Galesburg challenge, therefore, was to correct the historical record and bring Douglas to account for his “treason” to the true natural law principles of the Declaration.
2. The Debates, the Declaration, and the Law of Nature
Among the several crucial topics discussed during the 1858 Senate campaign—including the Kansas–Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision, and the “House Divided” speech—arguably the most important issue was the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln and Douglas spent more time during the debates arguing over the correct interpretation of the Declaration than any other subject (Krannawitter 2008, p. 71; Heckman 1967, p. 129). “Many of the most compelling exchanges during the debates,” according to Michael P. Zuckert, “concerned the Declaration” (Zuckert 2023, pp. 190–91). And during the Galesburg debate in particular, Lincoln delivered what Ronald C. White, Jr. has identified as Lincoln’s “strongest statement in the debates about the Declaration’s intent” (White 2010, p. 280). That statement took the form of the Galesburg challenge.
“[W]hen the debates shifted back to northern Illinois, to Galesburg, on 7 October,” Allen C. Guelzo writes, “Lincoln’s attack on the immorality of slavery moved to the center of his arguments” (Guelzo 1999, p. 223). Lincoln, as late as the fourth debate at Charleston, had been “fumbling for the right offensive weapon to use on Douglas,” according to Guelzo. “Once he found it, and found that the appeal against the immorality of slavery worked, it became the mountaintop of every speech he made.” Douglas, meanwhile, was “aghast at Lincoln’s proposal to turn a debate on public policy into a forum on morality” (Guelzo 1999, pp. 224–25). Lincoln, for the most part, abstained from relying on social, political, or economic arguments against slavery, and instead focused on building the moral case against it based on the natural law principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence. In doing so, Lincoln seems to suggest that without the Declaration’s principles, no moral attack could be waged against one person’s making a slave of another. To confront the immorality of slavery required moving the Declaration to the center of the debate, focusing especially on the meaning of the equality principle. Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech, which essentially kicked off the 1858 Senate campaign, never explicitly mentioned the Declaration of Independence; by the final month of the canvas, on 7 October at Galesburg, the Declaration had become the obvious centerpiece.
Lincoln was not merely leveraging the Declaration for political gain. Rather, Lincoln consciously adhered to the moral teachings of Jefferson’s document from the perspective of a specific legal standard. Perhaps the most important lesson that one can take away from the study of Abraham Lincoln is his unwavering belief in the existence of permanent ethical standards by which real injustice can be seen and judged for what it truly is. These enduring standards, accessible to human reason and promulgated by the Declaration, are “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” (Anastaplo 1999, pp. 70, 171, 196, 253, 257).
The ultimate grounding of Lincoln’s understanding of natural human equality—that “all men” really meant all men—was the law of nature. For Lincoln, the law of nature was timeless, unchanging, and transcended human history to provide some universal standard of right and wrong discernible by human reason (Jividen 2011, p. 20; Jaffa 2000, pp. 420–21). In this way, the natural law furnished what might be called the “first principles” of just behavior and moral judgment (Anastaplo 1999, pp. 154, 257; Jividen 2011, p. 20; Jaffa 2000, p. 89). Lincoln interpreted the Declaration of Independence as a declaration of the precepts of natural law, and, throughout his public life, maintained a natural law understanding of moral right that judged the justice of human laws based on their conformity to a transcendent rule and measure (Fornieri 2003, pp. 5, 49).
Scholars have long noted Lincoln’s embrace of the law of nature through his universal reading of the Declaration’s self-evident truths, especially the principle that “all men are created equal.” For Lincoln, according to Harry V. Jaffa, the law of nature was “condensed into the proposition that all men are created equal” (Jaffa 2000, p. 421). Commenting on the Declaration’s appeal to the natural law in the first paragraph, Jason R. Jividen writes, “Lincoln understood the natural and inalienable rights of men as timeless, self-evident truths rooted in the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” (Jividen 2011, pp. 38, 164). Allen C. Guelzo, likewise, argues that Lincoln believed “the Declaration’s announcement of the natural equality of all men gave it force of natural law, and more” (Guelzo 1999, p. 196). As a result of his unwavering belief that the Declaration’s equality principle applied to all human beings, regardless of race, Lincoln was always, according to Guelzo, “uncompromising” about slavery as a violation of natural law (Guelzo 2024, p. 152).3
For example, in an 1854 speech at Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln remarked, “Is not slavery universally granted to be, in the abstract, a gross outrage on the law of nature?” (Lincoln 1953–1955, 2: p. 245). Slavery trampled upon the equal natural rights of the individual spelled out by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence and violated mankind’s natural sense of justice. A natural loathing for slavery, therefore, almost amounted to human instinct (Guelzo 2024, p. 125; Anastaplo 1999, p. 74). “Almost every man,” Lincoln observed, “has a sense of certain things being wrong” (Lincoln 1953–1955, 4: p. 3).4 The plain, unmistakable injustice of slavery, Lincoln believed, was so obvious that anyone possessing even the “ordinary perceptions of right and wrong” could easily comprehend it, because “if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong” (Lincoln 1953–1955, 7: pp. 368, 281).5 “The ant who has toiled and dragged a crumb to his nest, will furiously defend the fruit of his labor, against whatever robber assails him. So plain, that the most dumb and stupid slave that ever toiled for a master, does constantly know that he is wronged” (Lincoln 1953–1955, 2: p. 222).6 The Declaration’s overtly universalistic language that “all men are created equal” demonstrated to any reasonable person the obvious injustice of slavery. During the debates, Lincoln emphasized this point to the audience more often and more forcefully than any other.
One cannot read the Lincoln–Douglas debates with care and escape the obvious conclusion that current arguments over the meaning of the Declaration of Independence, particularly the phrase “all men are created equal,” are nothing new. The debate that divides Americans today in the twenty-first century over the original meaning of our nation’s founding charter and whether natural law applies is identical to the argument that Lincoln and Douglas were having in the 1850s. When the Founders said “all men” in the Declaration, did they mean all human beings? Or did they mean only white men? Although it might sound surprising, many twenty-first century readers in fact agree with Douglas’s, not Lincoln’s, interpretation of the Declaration (Zuckert 2023, p. 194; Krannawitter 2008, pp. 77–114; Burt 2013, pp. 497–98).7
Listen to Douglas describe how the nation was founded on white supremacy: “I believe,” Douglas said at the first debate in Ottawa, “this Government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity for ever” (Johannsen 1965, p. 45). Then, in the final debate at Alton, Douglas asserted that when the Founders said “all men are created equal” in the Declaration, they must have meant only white men:
I hold that the signers of the Declaration of Independence had no reference to negroes at all when they declared all men to be created equal. They did not mean negro, nor the savage Indians, nor the Fejee Islanders, nor any other barbarous race. They were speaking of white men. They alluded to men of European birth and European descent—to white men, and to none others, when they declared that doctrine. I hold that this Government was established on the white basis. It was established by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and should be administered by white men, and none others.(Johannsen 1965, p. 299)
Douglas’s interpretation of the Declaration as applying only to white men corresponds with how many modern readers interpret the American founding, through either a positive law or economic lens that does not speak to the Founders’ own intent. I suspect these readers are largely unaware that this interpretation of the Declaration has its origins in the political thought not only of Stephen Douglas, but of the author of the infamous 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, which rejects any natural law reasoning.
Even before the Lincoln–Douglas debates commenced, Chief Justice Taney had argued that it was “too clear for dispute that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included” in the Declaration, because “if the language, as understood in that day, would embrace them, the conduct of the distinguished men who framed the Declaration of Independence would have been utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted[.]” In other words, if the Founders had intended to include the African race in the principle that “all men are created equal,” then they would have been guilty of hypocrisy for failing to free their slaves. “Yet the men who framed this declaration were great men,” Taney continued, “high in literary acquirements, high in their sense of honor, and incapable of asserting principles inconsistent with those on which they were acting.” According to Taney, the Founders were great men, and great men cannot fail to live up to their own principles; great men cannot be hypocrites. Therefore, the Founders must have meant, Taney concluded, that only white men were created equal in the Declaration of Independence (Stevens 2019, p. 96).
Interestingly, this ignores much of what both virtue and the natural law tradition recognize, namely, that human beings often fall far short of the standards that support flourishing. Empirical divergence from those standards does not invalidate the law of nature. Rather, it points us back to our need for them. “Hypocrisy is the complement that vice pays to virtue” may not seem as if it is a particularly insightful observation, but it captures a deep truth also recognized by Thomas Aquinas and by John Finnis in the 20th century (Aquinas 2009; Finnis 2011).
Both Douglas and Taney, in an effort to rescue the Founders from the charge of hypocrisy, make the mistake of reading the black race out of the Declaration. How do we know it was a mistake? That is exactly what Lincoln set out to prove with his Galesburg challenge.
“Much time is spent in the debates,” according to Michael P. Zuckert, “on the question whether the Founders meant all men when they spoke of ‘all men’ in the Declaration or actually intended that phrase in the more restrictive meaning that Taney and Douglas affirm” (Zuckert 2023, p. 193).8 While Douglas and Taney argued that the Founders had a more restrictive interpretation of equality that only included white men, Lincoln advocated a reading of “all men” that actually meant all men—i.e., all mankind, which, to emphasize, is the natural law interpretation. In his 1857 reply to the Dred Scott decision, Lincoln expressed the same sentiment about the Declaration’s equality principle that would reach its zenith in the Galesburg challenge a year later during the debates with Douglas:
I think the authors of that notable instrument [the Declaration of Independence] 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 developments, 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 meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. In fact, they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.(Lincoln 1953–1955, 2: pp. 405–6)9
The Galesburg challenge was Lincoln’s attempt to prove that his reading of the Declaration was right and that Douglas’s and Taney’s interpretation was wrong. Today, many readers still side with the Douglas/Taney approach against Lincoln; at the very least, these readers should know whose side of the argument they are on when it comes to understanding the natural law principles of the Declaration of Independence.
3. Lincoln’s Challenge to Douglas and Today
Indeed, the Galesburg challenge is alive and well today. Lincoln’s challenge to Douglas mattered in 1858, and it remains highly relevant today; it teaches an important historical and legal lesson that should still resonate with American audiences nearly 170 years after it was first issued. Undertaking the right historical investigation supports the broader argument about the natural law intent of the Founders—which in turn has implications for our understanding of the American project and regime today. That lesson has to do with the original meaning of the Declaration of Independence, especially the principle that “all men are created equal,” as well as how Lincoln thought about that principle—particularly in contrast to political rivals like Roger Taney and Stephen Douglas. As we will see in a later part of this essay, Lincoln was right (for the most part), and Taney and Douglas were wrong, about the Founders’ understanding of the equality principle in the Declaration. Both the original meaning of the Declaration and Lincoln’s understanding of it were important in the late 1850s and helped propel Lincoln into the White House in 1861; they remain essential to the study of American history and politics in the twenty-first century, perhaps now more than ever.
In this context, it is important to emphasize that Lincoln was a great teacher of American history. It was in the political struggle of the 1850s, above all in the debates with Douglas, that Lincoln’s understanding of history was called forth. “Much has been written about the extraordinary capacity for growth revealed in Lincoln the president,” wrote Don E. Fehrenbacher, “but anyone who follows him through the preceding decade will find ample evidence of this same quality and may even conclude that the moral stamina, the humane judgment, and the profound sense of history had long been there within him, waiting only to be called forth” (Fehrenbacher 1962, p. 18).10 No one who has studied the Lincoln–Douglas debates—and, additionally, Lincoln’s 1854 speech at Peoria on the repeal of the Missouri compromise and his 1860 Cooper Union address—can possibly doubt that Lincoln took the study of America, and the founding era in particular, extremely seriously. No high school textbook has presented the facts of the history of slavery in America so assiduously as Abraham Lincoln.
Indeed, Lincoln demonstrated that teaching with primary documents remains the best instruction in American history available to teachers, students, and citizens. The Galesburg challenge reflects the importance that Lincoln placed on the study of such texts, especially insofar as they then connect to the specific paradigm of law indicated by our Constitution. “The Lincoln-Douglas debates illustrate both the artistic and the inartistic variations of the historical argument,” according to David Zarefsky, “and they also reveal the relative effectiveness of documents and stories as forms of support” (Zarefsky 1990, p. 163). The use of original sources provides essential evidence necessary to corroborate or repudiate historical claims. The same is true, of course, regarding legal claims in a courtroom; Lincoln and Douglas did not cease to be lawyers when they stepped out onto the debate stage. In addition, an education that includes primary historical documents offers a solution to the problem Lincoln first raised in his 1838 Lyceum Address about fading memories of the American Revolution. Although the “living history” of the founding generation was quickly disappearing from the face of the earth, primary documents allow one to connect the living and the dead. In a way, these documents facilitate a conversation with dead people from forgotten times. The art of writing, Lincoln later said in his lecture on discoveries and inventions, opens the door to communicate with “the dead, the absent, and the unborn,” bridging the gap between the past, the present, and the future (Lincoln 1953–1955, 1: p. 115, 3: p. 360).
Lincoln had a habit of issuing public challenges when the truth of the historical record was in dispute. Most of the time, these disputes involved Stephen A. Douglas. On 26 June 1857—sixteen months before the debate at Galesburg—Lincoln challenged both the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dred Scott case and the historical “facts” upon which it rested (Lincoln 1953–1955, 2: pp. 398–410; Zuckert 2023, p. 190). On 27 February 1860—sixteen months after the debate at Galesburg—Lincoln appeared in New York City and, in strikingly similar language to the Galesburg challenge, issued another challenge in his Cooper Union speech about whether the Constitution forbade the federal government from controlling slavery in the territories (Lincoln 1953–1955, 3: p. 534).11 The Galesburg challenge, therefore, was perhaps the inspiration Lincoln needed to conduct the exhaustive historical research necessary for this later address.12 Then there was the challenge in 1854 at Peoria, Illinois against the claim that the American public had demanded the repeal of the Missouri Compromise: “I deny that the public ever demanded any such thing—ever repudiated the Missouri Compromise—ever commanded its repeal,” Lincoln asserted. “I deny it, and call for the proof” (Lincoln 1953–1955, 2: p. 257). And, finally, at Alton, Illinois, Lincoln’s last words in the formal debates contained another challenge that pushed back on Douglas’s “unfriendly legislation” answer to the famous Freeport Question and, ironically, threw Douglas into the abolitionist camp, at least in principle:
I defy anybody to go before a body of men whose minds are educated to estimating evidence and reasoning, and show that there is an iota of difference between the constitutional right to reclaim a fugitive, and the constitutional right to hold a slave, in a Territory, provided this Dred Scott decision is correct. I defy any man to make an argument that will justify unfriendly legislation to deprive a slaveholder of his right to hold his slave in a Territory, that will not equally, in all its length, breadth and thickness, furnish an argument for nullifying the Fugitive Slave law. Why, there is not such an Abolitionist in the nation as Douglas, after all.(Johannsen 1965, p. 322)
These various challenges were more than rhetorical flourishes unleashed by a skilled lawyer and politician. They represented a calculated response to what Lincoln viewed as an unconscionable crime committed against history and the truth, which if properly excavated point to the natural law foundations of the American polity. Lincoln would throw down the proverbial gauntlet in those cases when the present threatened to destroy the past.
To rescue the past from being destroyed by the present, Lincoln turned to the primary documents. Lincoln’s focus on primary source evidence for understanding and teaching American history was evident in the Galesburg challenge. Lincoln reminded the American people of the importance of studying history through the lens of original sources, as opposed to relying exclusively on secondary interpretive accounts and analyses provided by potentially unreliable outside sources, such as Taney, Douglas, or even Lincoln himself. The Galesburg challenge was an invitation to self-education, with the great minds of the past as teachers, in the service of protecting self-government in the stormy present and indeterminable future. Lincoln turned to the documents, and more importantly the principles contained in those documents, to heal a divided nation. Today, if we are still willing to take his challenge seriously, maybe he can do so again.
In 1858, Lincoln, armed with history, was ready to confront Douglas on the battlefield of ideas.
4. Lincoln at Galesburg: The Challenge
In the next few sections, I take a deeper dive into this history, again with the purpose of confirming the relevance of the principles and specific legal understanding of the American regime that history reveals. Thus, in northern Illinois on Thursday, 7 October 1858, the largest crowd of the seven debates converged on the grounds of Knox College. Some 15,000 to 20,000 spectators, mostly antislavery and enthusiastic for the Republican candidate, stood in the cold while icy winds ripped down political banners. But not even the elements could drive the people away as the two candidates spoke from an elevated platform attached to the east side of Old Main, the largest building on campus. This was the small town of Galesburg, whose population quadrupled that day. Galesburg was a stop on the Underground Railroad, and, in 1878, the birthplace of Carl Sandburg, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet and Lincoln biographer. In 1858, it was the site of Lincoln’s Galesburg challenge (Burlingame 2008, 1: p. 530; Donald 1995, pp. 221–22; Miller 2002, p. 351; White 2010, pp. 279–80).
We should remind ourselves of Lincoln’s Galesburg challenge, and this time we will quote a little bit more of the surrounding text:
The Judge has alluded to the Declaration of Independence, and insisted that negroes are not included in that Declaration; and that it is a slander upon the framers of that instrument, to suppose that negroes were meant therein; and he asks you: Is it possible to believe that Mr. Jefferson, who penned the immortal paper, could have supposed himself applying the language of that instrument to the negro race, and yet held a portion of that race in slavery? Would he not at once have freed them? I only have to remark upon this part of the Judge’s speech (and that, too, very briefly, for I shall not detain myself, or you, upon that point for any great length of time), that I believe the entire records of the world, from the date of the Declaration of Independence up to within three years ago, may be searched in vain for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the negro was not included in the Declaration of Independence; I think I may defy Judge Douglas to show that he ever said so, that Washington ever said so, that any President ever said so, that any member of Congress ever said so, or that any living man upon the whole earth ever said so, until the necessities of the present policy of the Democratic party, in regard to slavery, had to invent that affirmation. And I will remind Judge Douglas and this audience, that while Mr. Jefferson was the owner of slaves, as undoubtedly he was, in speaking upon this very subject, he used the strong language that “he trembled for his country when he remembered that God was just;” and I will offer the highest premium in my power to Judge Douglas if he will show that he, in all his life, ever uttered a sentiment at all akin to that of Jefferson.(Johannsen 1965, pp. 219–20)
While Lincoln did not frame his challenge in the form of a question, it is helpful to recognize that there are a pair of implied questions at the heart of Lincoln’s rhetoric. Lincoln, of course, was a lawyer who knew never to ask a question if one does not already know the answer. At the core of the Galesburg challenge, Lincoln was asking:
- Did anyone prior to three years ago ever affirm that the Declaration of Independence did not include the black race?
- Did Stephen Douglas, in all his life, ever utter a sentiment at all akin to that of Thomas Jefferson on the moral injustice of slavery?
The first question had to do with the life of the whole nation, and the second had to do with the life of a single man (though both, in the end, point to natural law). I will address the pair of challenges in the order Lincoln presented them.
4.1. First Challenge
Entering this stream of history, it is possible to see that both Lincoln and Douglas had previously posited questions to each other in the debates, most notably at Ottawa and Freeport (e.g., the famous Freeport Question). These were not rhetorical questions, since both men expected the other to provide an answer. In addition, the use of rhetorical questions was not unusual during the debates, although sometimes even these were not merely rhetorical, since they often prompted responses from the audience. One scholar notes that Lincoln’s use of rhetorical questions “speaks to his desire to engage his listeners in rational analysis. …In this way, the politicians encouraged active discernment on the part of their audience rather than passive spectatorship” (Silverman 2009, p. 773). Another scholar of rhetoric observes that since the debates created a kind of dialogue, the personal pronouns you, I, and we appeared often, as was the case with the Galesburg challenge. This rhetorical strategy “achieved a directness by immediate reference to the members of the audience and by personal pronouns in dialogue.” The same scholar also reports that “Lincoln in support of his interpretation of the statement in the Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are created equal’…has facts, reasons, opinions, and examples to bolster his case” (Crocker 1968, pp. 483, 500). Lincoln’s first rhetorical challenge to Douglas was intended to demonstrate that historical fact and past example supported Lincoln’s, not Douglas’s, view of the Declaration.
There was both a “low” and a “high” purpose involved in what Lincoln was trying to do when he issued the Galesburg challenge to Douglas. The low purpose was strictly political—Lincoln obviously cared about the outcome of the senatorial contest and, to be sure, about his own reputation and future political prospects. In this sense, the Galesburg challenge was part of what Richard Carwardine has called Lincoln’s “shrewd political pragmatism” (Carwardine 2006, p. 85).13 Lincoln thought he was the best man for the job, and he meant to win the election if he could. But Lincoln also meant to correct some politically harmful accusations that had been hurled against him, notably by Douglas and his supporters, to the effect that he proposed war upon the South to free the slaves, and that he preached amalgamation of the white and black races. Both allegations were politically damaging and gross distortions of Lincoln’s record and position; if either of the charges stuck, it would surely cost him the election. “To keep his views clearly before the public,” Fred J. Kauffeld writes, “Lincoln had to challenge these perversions” (Kauffeld 1994, p. 21). The Galesburg challenge aimed to do exactly that. By aligning his political position with that of the fathers, Lincoln was showing that he was proposing nothing on the slavery question that was out of step with the founding generation; in fact, part of the purpose of the Galesburg challenge was to prove that Douglas, not Lincoln, was the one who had departed from the path set out by the Founders as they articulated natural law principles to support the American regime.
But there was also a higher purpose involved than “just politics” in issuing the Galesburg challenge, because Lincoln also cared deeply about the truth, especially the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln avoided his trademark anecdotes and jokes, urging the people to decide between good and evil, right and wrong (Carwardine 2006, p. 84). Later, at Alton during the seventh and final debate, in what was the rhetorical climax of the campaign, Lincoln would say that “the eternal struggle” between right and wrong was the only significant dispute—the only “real issue”—between him and Douglas (Johannsen 1965, p. 319).14 The higher purpose of the Galesburg challenge was to arrest the spread and nationalization of slavery—which Lincoln saw as the outcome of Douglas’s popular sovereignty doctrine—and to counter the twisting of the true meaning of the Declaration’s equality principle, as supported by the law of nature. Douglas robbed the Declaration of its noblest truth when he claimed that it only applied to white people (Morel 2020, p. 48). Lincoln, in issuing the Galesburg challenge, invited the nation to confront its past and probe the historical record, particularly the primary documents left behind, to return to an older understanding of the Declaration established by the Founders. Armed with this understanding, “the public mind shall rest in the belief that [slavery] is in course of ultimate extinction” (Lincoln 1953–1955, 2: p. 461). The Galesburg challenge, therefore, was perhaps more of an invitation than it was a proper challenge; it was an invitation to the people to become self-educated about their own history in order to begin a necessary self-correction for returning to the path set out by the Founders.
Historically, the picture of Lincoln that emerged, according to Fred J. Kauffeld, was “that of an advocate strenuously engaged in an effort to make certain truths apparent in the face of distortion and distraction. …Lincoln explicitly worked to maintain the conditions under which the truthfulness of his statements might be persuasive” (Kauffeld 1994, pp. 23–24). The Galesburg challenge certainly was persuasive—if Lincoln could demonstrate its historical accuracy.
In the first part of the Galesburg challenge, Lincoln said he would address “very briefly” the portion of Douglas’s speech that argued the Founders did not intend to include blacks in the Declaration since some of them, including Thomas Jefferson, continued to own slaves (Johannsen 1965, p. 219). Lincoln reflected on two questions that Douglas had asked the audience about Jefferson and the founding:
- “Is it possible to believe that Mr. Jefferson, who penned the immortal paper [the Declaration of Independence], could have supposed himself applying the language of that instrument to the negro race, and yet held a portion of that race in slavery?”
- “Would He Not at Once Have Freed Them?” (Johannsen 1965, p. 219).15
These are the exact same questions that students and citizens ask about the American founding today. As a professor at a small liberal arts university, these are probably the questions that I hear the most from students, both inside and outside the classroom. They may be the most important questions we Americans ask ourselves when we contemplate our own history as a people. But they are not new questions. Lincoln’s answer to these questions took the form of the Galesburg challenge.
Let us go over the first part of the challenge, in continuing to expand our historical understanding of this moment as it relates to founding principles. The first part of that challenge was expressed as a personal belief of Lincoln’s:
I believe the entire records of the world, from the date of the Declaration of Independence up to within three years ago, may be searched in vain for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the negro was not included in the Declaration of Independence; I think I may defy Judge Douglas to show that he ever said so, that Washington ever said so, that any President ever said so, that any member of Congress ever said so, or that any living man upon the whole earth ever said so, until the necessities of the present policy of the Democratic party, in regard to slavery, had to invent that affirmation.(Johannsen 1965, pp. 219–20)16
Lincoln did not state the first challenge as naked fact, but only as his firm belief that “the entire records of the world” may be searched in vain from 1776 to within “three years ago” for “one single affirmation, from one single man,” that the black race was not intended to be included in the Declaration. The first part of the Galesburg challenge made a difficult, if not impossible, historical claim. Absolutely no one, prior to three years ago, said the black race was not included in the Declaration? How could Lincoln, or anyone else, possibly know that for sure? Furthermore, how could such a claim be verified? Lincoln, therefore, softened his challenge with the use of qualifying phrases like “I believe” and “I think.”
Lincoln expressed his own personal belief, but he did not quote from the Declaration in issuing the original challenge. He might have observed, for example, that the Declaration did not say what Douglas was now proposing that it said. It did not, in fact, say “all [white] men are created equal.” The first part of the Galesburg challenge was a response to Douglas’s mangling of the original meaning of the equality principle in the Declaration. One way to determine that meaning would be to go back to the primary documents and see what they had to say—and that was precisely what Lincoln now challenged Douglas to do. Did anyone on the face of the earth, including Douglas, ever say prior to three years ago that the Declaration did not include the black man in the assertion that “all men are created equal”? Apparently not, since Lincoln defied Douglas “to show that he [Douglas] ever said so, that Washington ever said so, that any President ever said so, that any member of Congress ever said so, or that any living man upon the whole earth ever said so” (Johannsen 1965, pp. 219–20).17 Lincoln emphasized the “world” and the “earth,” perhaps demonstrating that the challenge was directed not just to Douglas and the nation, but to anyone who had a mind capable of reasoning. In addition, the reference to “any President” might conjure images of James Buchanan, whose endorsement of the Dred Scott decision meant he was, according to Lincoln, the first president who ever claimed that the black race was not included in the Declaration. Lincoln’s future Vice President, Andrew Johnson, also agreed with Douglas’s version of the Declaration, not Lincoln’s, and Johnson would become the second president who ever said so. In a complete reversal of the Galesburg challenge, Johnson stated in a speech before the U.S. Senate on 12 December 1859:
When we take the Declaration of Independence and connect it with the circumstances under which it was written, is there a man throughout the length and breadth of this broad Republic who believes for one instant that Mr. Jefferson, when he penned it, had the negro population in his mind? Notwithstanding, he says that “all men are created equal, and that they are by their Creator endowed with certain inalienable rights, that amongst these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” is there an intelligent man throughout the whole country, is there a Senator, when he has stripped himself of all party prejudice, who will come forward and say that he believes that Mr. Jefferson, when he penned that paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, intended it to embrace the African population? Is there a gentleman in the Senate who believes any such thing? Is there any one who will stake his reputation on the assertion that that is the correct interpretation of the Declaration of Independence? There is not a man of respectable intelligence who will hazard his reputation upon such an assertion. …It is evident to my mind, and it must be so to everybody else, that Mr. Jefferson meant the white race, and not the African race.18
The Lincoln administration, therefore, would be bookended by presidents who read the Declaration as Taney and Douglas did, excluding the black man from the principle that “all men are created equal.”
At Galesburg, Lincoln next said that the Democrats, under the necessities of their present policy regarding slavery, had “to invent” the affirmation that the black race was not included in the Declaration of Independence. Calling the argument a Democratic invention is revealing since we know Lincoln delivered a series of lectures on discoveries and inventions over a two-year period that encompassed the debates, from early 1858 to early 1860, in which Lincoln heavily criticized the practices and policies of “Young America,” a political movement often associated with Stephen Douglas (Lincoln 1953–1955, 3: pp. 356–63). In another speech from roughly this same time, 11 September 1858 in Edwardsville, Illinois, Lincoln explicitly asked the question: What did Douglas “invent” when he pushed the 1854 Kansas–Nebraska bill through Congress? The answer, Lincoln said, is that Douglas did not invent popular sovereignty, since that principle, properly understood, had been alive and well since 1776. What Douglas invented, or discovered, was that the right of the people to govern themselves included the right to govern slaves (Lincoln 1953–1955, 3: pp. 94–95). The actualization of this “sacred right of self-government” to rule over other so-called inferior races required re-interpreting, or re-inventing, the equality principle in the Declaration to exclude members of the black race.19
The invention, Lincoln said, was very new, only three years old. When issuing the challenge, why did Lincoln seem to pinpoint 1855 (“three years ago”) as the year when public opinion on the meaning of “all men” began to shift? He only mentioned “three years ago” once at Galesburg, but he later repeated it an astounding seven more times at the Alton debate where he expressed his belief that Taney was the first man to claim that the black race was not intended to be included in the Declaration: “I believe the first man who ever said it was Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott case, and the next to him was our friend, Stephen A. Douglas” (Johannsen 1965, p. 305). But if Lincoln was right about Taney, then the date should be 1857 (the year of the Dred Scott decision) and not 1855. Perhaps Lincoln was leaving room for error and providing some extra cover for himself by extending the timeframe of the challenge a couple of years; at any rate, this has produced some minor discrepancies in the scholarship regarding the finer details of Lincoln’s challenge.20 In the final analysis, the exact year did not seem to matter to Lincoln. After the joint debates with Douglas ended and the Senate election was over, a defeated but determined Lincoln went to Ohio in September 1859. In both Columbus and Cincinnati, Lincoln repeated the essence of the Galesburg challenge, but this time emphasized “five years ago,” which would now put the date when public opinion began to change as 1854 (Lincoln 1953–1955, 3: pp. 423–24, 444–45).21 Although the exact year did not seem to matter to Lincoln, this is an issue for further research. For the remainder of this essay, I will simply refer to the period before the 1850s when dealing with the parameters of Lincoln’s challenge to Douglas.
But it is necessary to confront the following question: was Lincoln perhaps exaggerating when he issued the Galesburg challenge, claiming that no one prior to the 1850s ever said the Declaration did not include the black race? Others have observed, in Lincoln’s defense, that at times he was “exercising the politician’s privilege of overstating his case” (Fehrenbacher 1962, p. 80; Kauffeld 1994, p. 10). And while the historical record certainly contains conflicting and convoluted sources, there is nonetheless overwhelming support for Lincoln’s position (Dyer 2009, p. 71; Zarefsky 1990, p. 277). Harry V. Jaffa has written:
While we would not attest, as a matter of historical record, that no man had ever said what Douglas and Taney were saying, prior to 1857, Lincoln’s statement cannot be much of an exaggeration, if it is an exaggeration at all. That Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, Patrick Henry, and all others of their general philosophic persuasion understood the Declaration in its universalistic sense, and as including the Negro, is beyond doubt or cavil.(Jaffa 1959, p. 314)
When Taney, Douglas, and other Democrats in the 1850s were asserting that the black man had no rights which the white man was bound to respect (since the Declaration only applied to white men), they were unknowingly asserting an opinion that would become common among the future leaders of the southern Confederacy, but was practically nonexistent among the political leaders of the American Revolution (Jaffa 1958, p. 750). Allen C. Guelzo adds, “If it was true that the Declaration of Independence was never intended to include blacks, then the burden of proof was on Douglas, and it was proof which he would never be able to find, since no such proof existed” (Guelzo 2008, p. 225).
Not all scholars, of course, agree with the assessment of Jaffa and Guelzo. Douglas was “probably” right, says John Burt, that the Declaration was in fact intended only to apply to whites, since this was what “most whites of his [Douglas’s] time and earlier believed” (Burt 2013, pp. 551–52; Burt 2009, pp. 747–48).22 In other words, according to Burt, Lincoln was wrong and Douglas was right about the meaning of the Declaration; “most whites” prior to the 1850s agreed with Douglas’s interpretation of the Declaration, which made the Galesburg challenge a sham. But if “most whites” prior to the 1850s agreed with Douglas, then where was the historical evidence? Certainly, if such an opinion was as common as Burt asserts, then producing the primary sources necessary to support Douglas’s claim would be relative child’s play. Douglas, however, never attempted to respond directly to the Galesburg challenge and failed to produce any historical documentation that would have contradicted Lincoln’s claims.23 Why not? Did he know such evidence did not exist, as Jaffa and Guelzo suggest? According to one scholar, Douglas became convinced that the fathers of the Republic did not include the black race in the equality clause of the Declaration, because, from boyhood until his death in 1861, Douglas was an inveterate reader of the speeches and writings of the founding period (Whan 1968, p. 126). If true, then where was the primary source evidence? Lord Charnwood was likely correct when he wrote that many white men, both during and after the American founding, “were more ready to think themselves the equals of Washington or Hamilton in the respects in which they were not so, than to think a negro their equal in the respects in which he was” (Charnwood 1996, p. 31). But the point of the Galesburg challenge was not about disproving the existence of racial prejudice, or ignoring the many ways blacks have been unjustly treated at the hands of whites. There is no doubt that racial prejudice has been a sad and sorry part of the American story since the beginning. The point of the Galesburg challenge was about disproving a very narrow, yet massively consequential, kind of historical injustice: the lie that the Founders never intended to include the black race in the promises of the Declaration of Independence.
On 10 July 1858, Lincoln spoke in Chicago: A vast portion of the American people look upon slavery, he said, as “a vast moral evil; they can prove it is such by the writings of those who gave us the blessings of liberty which we enjoy” (Lincoln 1953–1955, 2: p. 494). What does the primary source evidence tell us about the Founders’ understanding of the immorality of slavery and the equality clause in the Declaration? Although it is a difficult, if not impossible, task to speak of “the Founders” as though they all agreed, some general conclusions can be formulated based on the available primary source evidence, especially to the extent that it points to the “law of nature.”
First, Lincoln was right when he said there was overwhelming evidence that the Founders looked upon slavery as “a vast moral evil.” All the leading Founders, even those who owned slaves, acknowledged the evils of slavery and believed that blacks were human beings. “We have seen the mere distinction of color made in the most enlightened period of time,” James Madison said at the Constitutional Convention, “a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.” George Washington, who famously freed his slaves in his last will and testament, proclaimed, “There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it.” In general, the Founders were antislavery in principle and condemned the institution in the strongest possible terms. “Slavery is,” Benjamin Franklin said in a 1789 public address, “an atrocious debasement of human nature.” John Adams, who never owned slaves, argued: “Every measure of prudence, therefore, ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States. …I have, through my whole life, held the practice of slavery in…abhorrence” (West 1997, p. 5).24 Mountains of primary source evidence could easily be produced proving the same point: the leading Founders believed slavery was unjust because it denied blacks their equal natural right to liberty, a right belonging to all human beings and enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. To be clear, this is an affirmation of the importance of natural law.
Even before the Declaration was adopted by the Second Continental Congress in 1776, its primary author produced an eloquent denunciation of slavery in general and the African slave trade in particular: “The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in his 1774 A Summary View of the Rights of British America; the perpetuation of the African slave trade, Jefferson argued, promoted the immediate interests of the British crown at the expense of “the rights of human nature deeply wounded by this infamous practice” (McDonald 2019, p. 49). If slavery violated “the rights of human nature,” then the slave must be a human being and slavery must be wrong. Although it is outside the purposes of this essay to explain why the founding generation failed to abolish slavery, or everything they did to put slavery, as Lincoln put it, “in course of ultimate extinction,” it is beyond dispute that, based on the primary source evidence, all the leading Founders agreed that “all men” literally meant all men.
Second, even those individuals during the founding who did not necessarily see slavery as a vast moral evil did not defend the institution as a moral good. For example, John Rutledge, a proslavery delegate to the Constitutional Convention from South Carolina, said in an 21 August 1787, debate on the African slave trade that “Religion and morality had nothing to do with this question. Interest alone is the governing principle with nations” (Lloyd 2014, p. 411). Rutledge and others preferred not to talk about principles of religion and morality in any discussion involving slavery, leaving their defense of the peculiar institution to rest upon claims of self-interest, not justice. Patrick Henry echoed this sentiment in a 1773 letter to the Virginia antislavery activist, Robert Pleasants: “Would anyone believe I am the master of slaves of my own purchase! I am drawn along by the general inconvenience of living here without them. I will not, I cannot justify it,” Henry wrote, refusing to justify himself by an appeal to principles of religion or morality; like Rutledge, his only defense rested upon thinner claims of self-interest and “general inconvenience”(Henry 1773).25 Such claims were common during the founding and are clearly distinct from the later “positive good” arguments of John C. Calhoun and others that arose in the early nineteenth century as an attempt to morally justify slavery, which will be discussed in further detail below. For now, it is sufficient to recognize that even slavery’s defenders during the founding did not go so far as to claim a permanent moral right to slaves, and no one during or after the founding, as far as we know, argued that the black race was not included in the principles of the Declaration of Independence prior to the 1850s—exactly as Lincoln claimed in the Galesburg challenge.26
Third, Lincoln, following the Founders, made the important distinction between natural equality on the one hand, and political, social, or civil equality on the other hand. During the debates, Lincoln was always sure to limit his equality claims to equality in natural rights, not social or political rights:
While this may seem limited, it is certainly consistent with principles of natural law.[A]nything that argues me into his [Douglas’s] idea of perfect social and political equality with the negro, is but a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse-chestnut to be a chestnut horse. …I hold…there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects—certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.(Johannsen 1965, pp. 52–53)27
The principles of the Declaration were certainly antislavery. Lincoln argued three days after the last debate at Alton, “But it does not follow that social and political equality between whites and blacks, must be incorporated, because slavery must not. The declaration does not so require” (Lincoln 1953–1955, 3: p. 328).28 Of course, Lincoln’s own suggestion here is that social and political equality might be incorporated without violating the Declaration. Responding to Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, whether out of ignorance or convenience, ignored any distinction between natural, or unalienable, rights (which belong to everyone, regardless of what the law says) with legal, or political/social/civil, rights (which only belong to those favored by the law). Slavery might be legal, but that does not make it just; blacks may not enjoy equal legal rights (voting, for example), but that does not make it unjust, at least according to Lincoln’s understanding of the Declaration’s principles.29 Douglas, completely ignoring the distinction between natural and legal rights, frequently tried to paint Lincoln as an abolitionist who wanted to extend full citizenship rights to the black man: “If you desire negro citizenship, if you desire to allow them to come into the State and settle with the white man, if you desire them to vote on an equality with yourselves, and to make them eligible to office, to serve on juries, and to adjudge your rights, then support Mr. Lincoln and the Black Republican party” (Johannsen 1965, p. 45).30 Students today, like Douglas, very often miss the distinction between natural and legal rights, which can easily lead to a fundamental misunderstanding of the Founders’ principles.31 How could the Founders have meant “all men are created equal” when the law did not allow most black people to vote? What about the law’s unequal treatment of women? What about property qualifications for voting? These are all questions students frequently ask today in order to try to prove Douglas’s point—that the Founders did not really believe “all men” meant all men in the Declaration. They actually prove no such thing, and students ask these questions because they do not understand, or fail to acknowledge, the distinction between natural equality on the one hand, and political, social, or civil equality on the other hand.
Finally, as mentioned above, after his loss to Douglas for the Senate, Lincoln reiterated the essence of the Galesburg challenge during the 1859 Ohio campaign. In both Columbus and Cincinnati, Lincoln, playing the role of the itinerant school master, added one new key ingredient to the challenge that helped to clarify his argument. Like the good teacher who encourages students to learn how to support their claims with facts and evidence, Lincoln insisted on being shown the physical proof that someone prior to the 1850s had “put upon paper” the claim that the Declaration did not include the black race. Lincoln highlighted the Galesburg challenge during his concluding remarks at Columbus, Ohio:
The next day, Lincoln spoke again at Cincinnati on Constitution Day, 17 September 1859:Did you ever, five years ago, hear of anybody in the world saying that the negro had no share in the Declaration of National Independence; that it did not mean negroes at all; and when “all men” were spoken of, negroes were not included? I am satisfied that five years ago that proposition was not put upon paper by any living being anywhere.(Lincoln 1953–1955, 3: pp. 423–24)32
I believe it is safe to assert that five years ago no living man had expressed the opinion that the negro had no share in the Declaration of Independence. Let me state that again: five years ago no living man had expressed the opinion that the negro had no share in the Declaration of Independence. If there is in this large audience any man who ever knew of that opinion being put upon paper as much as five years ago, I will be obliged to him now or at a subsequent time to show it.(Lincoln 1953–1955, 3: p. 444)33
In both instances, Lincoln resolved to “call for the proof.” He essentially asked his audience the same question that I frequently pose to my own students during classroom discussions of difficult primary documents: “Where in the text do you see that argument?” There might very well have been someone, prior to the 1850s, who said or wrote that the black man was not included in the Declaration; but where was the proof? Lincoln’s point was that if someone did express such an opinion, then it was not recorded in the larger memory of the nation.
Recent historiography on race and early America has given particular attention to the arguments for a proslavery founding, following in the intellectual footsteps of Douglas and Taney. These historians—among them, David Waldstreicher, Robert G. Parkinson, and George William Van Cleve—have engaged in extensive primary source reading to “prove” the case for a proslavery founding, focusing on both familiar and relatively obscure documentary evidence. In a way, their research represents an implicit response to the Galesburg challenge. Without going too far afield from the main purpose of this essay, we should answer the question: what primary sources do these historians use from the founding era to repudiate the Declaration’s equality clause and attempt to answer Lincoln’s Galesburg challenge?34
One of the main pieces of documentary evidence cited by these historians that purports to prove that someone “put upon paper” that the Declaration’s equality claim did not apply to the black race is, surprisingly, the Declaration itself. In this case, however, it is not exactly what was put upon paper that is at issue, but what was struck out. Both Waldstreicher and Parkinson argue that Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration was in part “antislavery” because of its explicit attacks on the African slave trade; however, when Congress eliminated that grievance, the Declaration went from being, according to Waldstreicher, “antislavery in draft to anti-antislavery (if not proslavery) in publication” (Waldstreicher 2009, p. 47). Parkinson also contends that Congress “struck the antislavery part” of the Declaration—meaning, the grievance against the slave trade—and, in the final draft, charged that the king had “excited domestic [slave] insurrections amongst us” and “endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages[.]” As a result of these changes, Parkinson concludes that Congress’s meddling with Jefferson’s original draft left “no room for the thousands of blacks or Indians who supported the patriot cause, [because] the Declaration portrayed them all as mindless, bloodthirsty barbarians too naïve to realize they were being duped by a tyrant” (Parkinson 2016, pp. 252–58). A proslavery founding, according to these sources, was inaugurated with a proslavery Declaration of Independence.
Lincoln, however, never needed to refer to Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration of Independence to make the case for an anti-slavery founding, believing that the final version contained sufficient principles to do so.35 The document, especially the equality principle that was never struck out, stood as a permanent testament to the true anti-slavery beliefs of the Founders—so long as the people refused to be deceived by Douglas and Taney’s lies about the meaning of “all men.” “All honor to Jefferson,” Lincoln wrote, “to the man who…had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times” (Lincoln 1953–1955, 3: p. 376). To salvage the principles at the heart of free society, the people must remain firm and vigilant in the belief that “all men” meant all humankind, rejecting the white supremacist teachings about the Declaration from Douglas, Taney, and others. Hence, the Galesburg challenge.
Some contemporary historians have long tried to make the case for a pro-slavery founding by focusing on more obscure sources, documentary evidence that perhaps would have escaped the attention of Lincoln and Douglas. George William Van Cleve, for example, writes that in the first federal Congress, during a contentious 1790 debate on slavery, “Congressman William L. Smith of South Carolina argued…that the Declaration of Independence had never been intended to apply to slaves” (Van Cleve 2010, p. 198). If Van Cleve’s claim about Congressman Smith is true, then we have found an answer to the Galesburg challenge.
Van Cleve, however, greatly exaggerates Congressman Smith’s argument. Here is the complete quotation from Smith at issue:
Where in this passage did Smith argue that “the Declaration of Independence had never been intended to apply to slaves”? Smith did say that it was “extraordinary” that the principle of human equality should have a place in the Declaration alongside the reality of slavery. It was “extraordinary” to assert that all men are created equal while some 100,000 “persons” remained in a state of slavery that was neither free nor equal to their owners. Smith clearly rejected the truth of the equality principle in this passage, because he thought that principle had been intended to encompass all mankind, including the slaves (not to mention criminals and beggars). Smith never argued that the Declaration had not been intended to apply to slaves, as Van Cleve asserts; in fact, the opposite was true. The Galesburg challenge passed another test.The declaration of Independence has been mentioned as asserting that all men are born free and equal: I think this assertion was an extraordinary one in a country where there were some hundred thousand persons in a state of slavery, and where they were daily born in a condition neither free nor equal to their owners: I am persuaded no gentleman will insist that the child of an imprisoned debtor or convict is born equally free with that of a person who enjoys uncontroled [sic] liberty, nor that the offspring of a beggar is born in a state of equality with that of a monarch.(Bickford et al. 2019)
By issuing the Galesburg challenge, Lincoln was essentially asking his fellow citizens to engage with history and do the basic homework required of civic society, without relying on the misplaced teachings of a demagogue like Douglas. Indeed, that is the homework assigned by Lincoln to each generation of Americans.
4.2. Second Challenge
Returning to the debate at Galesburg, it was clear Lincoln was articulating a second challenge, or the second part in a pair of challenges, by his emphatic use of the coordinating conjunction “and” to start the sentence: “And I will remind Judge Douglas and this audience,” Lincoln said, “that while Mr. Jefferson was the owner of slaves, as undoubtedly he was, in speaking upon this very subject, he used the strong language that ‘he trembled for his country when he remembered that God was just;’ and I will offer the highest premium in my power to Judge Douglas if he will show that he, in all his life, ever uttered a sentiment at all akin to that of Jefferson” (Johannsen 1965, p. 220).36 Lincoln’s second challenge to Douglas essentially asked this question: Did Douglas, in all his life, ever utter a sentiment at all akin to that of Jefferson on the moral injustice of slavery? Lincoln, in issuing this part of the Galesburg challenge, went back to the primary documents to gather the historical evidence necessary to confront his opponent. Lincoln offered a reminder to Douglas, and the audience, of Jefferson’s powerful condemnation of slavery in his book, Notes on the State of Virginia.37 Lincoln reminded them further that Douglas had never in his entire life uttered a similar sentiment against slavery to that of Jefferson, who, despite being a slave owner himself, offered perhaps the most eloquent rebuke to the institution by anyone during the founding era, slave owner or not. Jefferson admitted that he “trembled” over the injustice of slavery precisely because his own words in the Declaration about all men being created equal actually meant all men (Guelzo 2008, p. 225).
Thus, Jefferson’s condemnation of slavery was on both political and moral grounds; he dedicated a chapter of his Notes to detailing the ways in which slavery corrupted a republican people, causing them to bring their children up in habits of tyranny. But worse than this political corruption, Jefferson predicted that divine judgment—perhaps in the form of a successful slave uprising—was inevitable for America’s immoral slave society. Lincoln again quoted this part of Jefferson’s Notes during a speech in Columbus, Ohio on 16 September 1859. Jefferson, said Lincoln, “supposed there was a question of God’s eternal justice wrapped up in the enslaving of any race of men, or any man, and that those who did so braved the arm of Jehovah—that when a nation thus dared the Almighty every friend of that nation had cause to dread His wrath. Choose ye between Jefferson and Douglas as to what is the true view of this element among us” (Lincoln 1953–1955, 3: p. 410).38 The choice between Jefferson and Douglas was the same one Lincoln had been talking about since at least 1854: “The spirit of seventy-six and the spirit of Nebraska, are utter antagonisms” that “can not stand together,” Lincoln said at Peoria; “whoever holds to the one, must despise the other” (Lincoln 1953–1955, 2: p. 275). Thomas Jefferson was undoubtedly a slave owner, but at the very least he was willing to condemn slavery in the strongest possible language, without reservation, on both political and moral grounds, accepting the judgment of Almighty God.
But what about Stephen A. Douglas?
Lincoln had to pose the second challenge through the audience, which of course made a direct response from Douglas more difficult and less likely. “The very format that the candidates had agreed to,” writes Fred Kaplan, “did not allow for the give-and-take, especially rebuttal, associated with formal debates” (Kaplan 2014, p. 18). Allen C. Guelzo adds, “What was peculiar about these debates was that they were not, in the strictest sense, debates at all. They were sequences of speeches, with only the most meager nod in the direction of interaction between speakers” (Guelzo 2008, p. 94). The second challenge, however, was not just difficult for Douglas to respond to based on the rules and structure of the debates. Douglas would undoubtedly struggle to answer the challenge posed by Lincoln because Lincoln was ultimately correct: Douglas had never condemned slavery in moral terms, either publicly or privately, in anything like the way Jefferson did (Johannsen 1989, p. 191; Peck 2005).
The second challenge was nearly impossible for Douglas to answer, and he knew it. He never attempted to respond directly to Lincoln, except to the extent that he reiterated his own well-known moral indifference to slavery (Johannsen 1965, pp. 128, 215–16, 299).39 “Although Douglas developed a personal distaste for the institution,” according to Richard Allen Heckman, “it did not concern him whether slavery existed or was excluded from the territories so long as the people of the area were allowed to decide the issue for themselves” (Heckman 1967, p. 130). Before, during, and after the debates with Lincoln, popular sovereignty was always the central issue for Douglas. When he asserted his moral indifference and famous “don’t care” policy in regard to slavery being voted up or down in any given political community, Douglas had no choice but to reject outright the Lincolnian (and Jeffersonian) understanding of the Declaration of Independence’s equality principle (Dyer 2009, pp. 73–74). If “all men” included the black race, then how could the “sacred right of self-government” also include the right to govern slaves? The irony, of course, was that under the illusion of expanding popular choice, Douglas had destroyed the capacity to choose—or, as the Declaration put it, to “hold”—the most important human truths, such as natural equality.
Lincoln was right when he said Douglas saw slavery as “an exceedingly little thing” with “no moral question in it” (Lincoln 1953–1955, 2: pp. 493–94). According to Harry V. Jaffa, “Douglas had no moral inhibitions against [slavery],” and, in comparison to what Thomas Jefferson had said in his Notes, “no such out-and-out anti-slavery sentiments can be found in the public records” of Stephen Douglas (Jaffa 2000, p. 311; 1959, pp. 47–48). “I call your attention to the fact—for a well-established fact it is—that the Judge never says your institution of Slavery is wrong; he never says it is right, to be sure, but he never says it is wrong,” Lincoln told a Cincinnati crowd in 1859. “There is not a public man in the United States, I believe, with the exception of Senator Douglas, who has not, at some time in his life, declared his opinion whether the thing is right or wrong; but, Senator Douglas never declares it is wrong” (Lincoln 1953–1955, 3: p. 442). In all fairness to Douglas, he was careful to point out that “I do not hold that because the negro is our inferior that therefore he ought to be a slave” (Johannsen 1965, p. 46). Lincoln accused Douglas of moral indifference to slavery, but Douglas was skeptical of any universal claims that superseded the doctrine of popular sovereignty and limited the right of the people to choose for themselves what laws and institutions they will have. Certainly, Douglas never went so far as to defend slavery as morally right, like John C. Calhoun and his “positive good” followers did; but Douglas also defended popular sovereignty on the grounds that the Declaration of Independence did not declare slavery to be wrong. Douglas had a “don’t care” policy toward slavery, because he genuinely believed that the Declaration, and the Founders, did not care about the black man. For that same reason, Douglas also did not care to answer the second challenge, which he probably considered, like slavery, “an exceedingly little thing.”
5. Lincoln at Alton: The Challenge Redux
By the time the two candidates arrived for the final debate in Alton on the banks of the Mississippi River, where the abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy had been murdered by a proslavery mob in 1837 and where Lincoln and James Shields had once met for a duel in 1842, Lincoln and Douglas were on the eve of their third joint debate in a little over a week—an exhausting ordeal. While Lincoln’s strength and stamina had seemed to grow over the course of the final stretch of the canvas, Douglas was fading fast. In Galesburg, on 7 October, Douglas had trouble being heard beyond the first rows of spectators due to a sore throat and cold; it was the same result in Quincy on October 13 and, only two days later, in Alton, where Douglas seemed exhausted, with a worn and haggard appearance that shocked some spectators (Burlingame 2008, 1: pp. 530–38; Carwardine 2006, p. 81; Donald 1995, p. 222). On October 14, the day before the final debate, the Democratic Chicago Times defended Douglas against charges that he was “failing in health and voice.” The senator “never enjoyed better health than he does today,” the newspaper proclaimed; “he has gained several pounds in flesh since he has been traveling about, and his voice is as clear and as full as it was the evening of his reception and speech at Chicago” (The Weekly Chicago Times 1858b). It was not true, but those friendly to the senator continued to cover up his poor health brought on by the rigors of the campaign.
The final debate at Alton, according to one modern reckoning, “added little to what had already been said in previous debates” (Heckman 1967, p. 126). While this assumption might have applied to some matters, it certainly was not true regarding the Galesburg challenge, which Lincoln repeated now. However, Lincoln did not simply restate or revive the challenge by doubling-down on what he had said at Galesburg; he enhanced the challenge by further developing and refining the argument, while directly responding to objections.
“At Galesburgh [sic] the other day,” Lincoln began, “I said in answer to Judge Douglas, that three years ago there never was a man, so far as I knew or believed, in the whole world, who had said that the Declaration of Independence did not include negroes in the term ‘all men.’ I reassert it today” (Johannsen 1965, p. 304). In his restatement of the Galesburg challenge, Lincoln now quoted from the text of the Declaration (“all men”), which, surprisingly, was something he did not do when initially posing the challenge on 7 October. He also reiterated that the Galesburg challenge was directed to “the whole world” and not just the city, state, or country. Lincoln had acknowledged at the sixth joint debate at Quincy that the two debaters had stepped out on to the world stage and that the highest standard of propriety ought to prevail in the campaign at hand (Kauffeld 1994, p. 20; Johannsen 1965, p. 252).40 “I assert,” Lincoln continued at Alton, “that Judge Douglas and all his friends may search the whole records of the country, and it will be a matter of great astonishment to me if they shall be able to find that one human being three years ago had ever uttered the astounding sentiment that the term ‘all men’ in the Declaration did not include the negro” (Johannsen 1965, p. 304).41 Lincoln asserted that it would be a matter of “great astonishment” if primary source evidence could be produced proving that anyone, anywhere, at any time prior to the 1850s, had argued that the statement “all men” in the Declaration did not include blacks. Lincoln rarely used the word astonishment, or any of its various forms, in his speaking and writing, but this was one time when it definitely applied to the situation.42 Lincoln did not say that it would be “impossible” to produce such primary source evidence, only that he would be greatly shocked or surprised—“astonished”—if such proof actually existed. This was basically Lincoln’s polite way of saying, “If I’m wrong, I’ll eat my hat!”
At this point in the debate, Lincoln provided a much-needed clarification of the Galesburg challenge. “Do not let me be misunderstood,” he said.
I know that more than three years ago there were men who, finding this assertion constantly in the way of their schemes to bring about the ascendency and perpetuation of slavery, denied the truth of it. I know that Mr. Calhoun and all the politicians of his school denied the truth of the Declaration. I know that it ran along in the mouth of some Southern men for a period of years, ending at last in that shameful though rather forcible declaration of Pettit of Indiana, upon the floor of the United States Senate, that the Declaration of Independence was in that respect “a self-evident lie,” rather than a self-evident truth.(Johannsen 1965, pp. 304–5)43
Lincoln said he knows three things: 1—That more than three years ago there were people who denied the truth of the Declaration. 2—That John C. Calhoun and his supporters denied the truth of the Declaration. 3—That some southerners had been denying the truth of the Declaration for years, which culminated in Indiana Senator John Pettit’s assertion in 1854 that it was “a self-evident lie.” Lincoln differentiated between, on the one hand, the “positive good” adherents of Calhoun, including Senator Pettit of Indiana, all of whom rejected the equality principle of the Declaration as “a self-evident lie,” rather than a self-evident truth, and, on the other hand, the followers of the Douglas and Taney version of the Declaration that insisted the Founders did not mean to include blacks in the phrase “all men are created equal.” These were two fundamentally different positions on the meaning of the “all men” portion of the Declaration. The former school of thought had been around for a relatively long time by 1858—since approximately the 1820s or 1830s—and did not acknowledge any truth in the assertion that “all men are created equal”; as a result, the Calhounians renounced the Declaration as wrong in principle—socially, morally, and politically.44 There was plenty of primary source evidence out there that expressed Calhoun’s perspective on the meaning of the Declaration: that the Founders really believed all men were created equal in certain natural rights, but that such a belief was absolutely wrong because slavery was absolutely right (Burkett 2013, pp. 195–200). This was not the point of the Galesburg challenge. Evidence supporting Calhoun’s thesis would not be hard to find; in fact, Lincoln expressed his growing frustration that such testimony was becoming more and more ubiquitous. However, the latter school of thought, and the subject of the Galesburg challenge, was relatively new to the world, coming into existence only in the early 1850s; this view, shared by Douglas, Taney, and an increasing number of Democrats, did not jettison the Declaration, or declare it wrong in any way, but, according to Lincoln, had reinterpreted the “all men” part of the Declaration by excluding the black race. They read in to the Declaration a new meaning by reading the black race out of it.45
With the distinction between Calhoun and Douglas in mind, Lincoln reasserted that no one prior to the 1850s had attacked the Declaration “in the sneaking way of pretending to believe it and then asserting it did not include the negro” (Johannsen 1965, p. 305).46 Why did Lincoln call Douglas’s version of the Declaration “sneaking”? What was so deceptive about it? Douglas was, of course, perfectly free to say whatever he wanted about the historical record and “to enforce his position by all truthful evidence and fair argument which he can,” Lincoln said just over a year later at the Cooper Institute in New York City. “But he has no right to mislead others, who have less access to history, and less leisure to study it … thus substituting falsehood and deception for truthful evidence and fair argument” (Lincoln 1953–1955, 3: p. 535). Douglas was not just slandering the Founding Fathers; he was not just misrepresenting Lincoln’s views on race; he was taking deliberate political advantage of the historical ignorance of the public, who simply did not know any better. Through no fault of their own, lacking the luxury of Douglas’s educational advantages and opportunities, many in the American public allowed themselves to be duped by a clever lie masquerading as history. The public trusted Douglas as a teacher of the American story, and he led them astray with a corrupt version that was not true. Douglas, in other words, was not just a bad history teacher by accident; he was, in the words of Lincoln biographer David Herbert Donald, “willing to distort history and to rewrite the story of the American Revolution” (Donald 1995, p. 222).
Was Douglas really being as duplicitous about the founding and the meaning of the Declaration as Lincoln alleged? Was Lincoln suggesting that Douglas was only “pretending to believe” his white supremacy version of the Declaration of Independence, and that the Little Giant really knew better than he was letting on by the fact that he failed to produce even a sliver of primary source evidence to back up his historical claims? I think what Lincoln was arguing here was not that Douglas was pretending to believe his version of the founding, but that Douglas really believed what he said when he presented his pretended version for public consumption. Douglas had duped the American public, but first he had tricked himself. Or, as Lincoln said in the very next sentence: “I believe the first man who ever said it [that the Declaration did not include blacks] was Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott case, and the next to him was our friend, Stephen A. Douglas” (Johannsen 1965, p. 305).
At Alton, Lincoln said it was his belief that Taney was the first man, and Douglas the second, who denied that blacks were included in the Declaration. Lincoln did not say as much at Galesburg when he first issued the challenge, but he came very close to expressing a similar sentiment in his 1857 reply to the Dred Scott decision: “Chief Justice Taney, in his opinion in the Dred Scott case, … and Judge Douglas argue that the authors of that instrument [the Declaration of Independence] did not intend to include negroes, by the fact that they did not at once, actually place them on an equality with the whites” (Lincoln 1953–1955, 2: p. 405). Lincoln’s argument was that this new attack on the principles of the Declaration originated with Roger Taney, who had to invent the notion that “all men” did not include black men specifically to defend the outcome in the Dred Scott case. More generally, according to Lincoln, the attack on the original meaning of the Declaration, advanced first by Taney and then Douglas, was intended to overcome the presumption against slavery held by the Founders and to prepare the public mind to accept the permanent existence of slavery, if not its total nationalization (Burt 2013, p. 506).
For Lincoln, the essence of the Galesburg challenge was to prove that the “fixed and universal” opinion from 1776 until the 1850s was, according to Harry V. Jaffa, “almost the exact opposite of what the Democratic party, echoing Douglas and Taney, now professed and now said that the Fathers had professed” (Jaffa 1959, p. 313). Lincoln proclaimed at Alton that, within the space of a few years, the notion that the Declaration did not include the black race had progressed from an opinion belonging to very few individuals to the cornerstone of the entire Democratic party:
And now it has become the catch-word of the entire party. I would like to call upon his [Douglas’s] friends every where to consider how they have come in so short a time to view this matter in a way so entirely different from their former belief? to ask whether they are not being borne along by an irresistible current—whither, they know not?(Johannsen 1965, p. 305).
This part of Lincoln’s speech built on the earlier comparison of Calhoun and Douglas. Lincoln believed that Douglas’s “don’t care” policy was much more dangerous and more sinister than Calhoun’s “positive good” theory, even as neither recognized the truths of natural law as expressed in the Declaration. Douglas, unlike Calhoun, certainly did not see himself as opposed to the promises of the Declaration. Calhoun betrayed the Declaration with open eyes and a clear conscience, but he was at least honest enough with himself and his own racist beliefs to recognize that his doctrine of white supremacy and the principles of the Declaration were irreconcilable. Douglas, however, was trying to have his cake and eat it too by reading the Declaration as a racist document, written by white supremacist Founders who did not believe “all men” included black men. No one had to guess about the consequences of Calhoun’s pro-slavery stance; by contrast, Douglas’s “don’t care” policy of moral indifference might lead the nation anywhere, threatening unknown tragedy to a people “borne along by an irresistible current—whither, they know not?” (Burt 2013, pp. 506–7).
Finally, Lincoln turned to answer an objection that was raised against what he had said at Galesburg. This time, however, the objection did not come from Stephen Douglas, but from an anonymous individual writing in the pages of the newspaper. Someone had tried to answer the Galesburg challenge! “In answer to my proposition at Galesburgh [sic] last week,” Lincoln said, “I see that some man in Chicago has got up a letter addressed to the Chicago Times, to show, as he professes, that somebody had said so before; and he signs himself ‘An Old Line Whig,’ if I remember correctly” (Johannsen 1965, p. 305; The Weekly Chicago Times 1858a).47 Lincoln did remember correctly, and exactly what this “Old Line Whig” had to say in the weekly edition of the Times published on 14 October 1858 is worth discussing before bringing matters to a conclusion.48
The person referring to himself (herself?) as “An Old Line Whig” thought the answer to the Galesburg challenge could be found in the writings of Lincoln’s “beau ideal of a statesman,” Henry Clay (Johannsen 1965, p. 66). Lincoln quoted Clay many times throughout the debates with Douglas and probably knew the sage of Ashland’s words as well as anyone. When Clay died in 1852, Lincoln helped organize the memorial service in Springfield, Illinois and, of course, delivered the eulogy. Six years later, during the Alton debate, Lincoln was now confronted with someone using Clay’s words against him to try to respond to the Galesburg challenge. But if Clay had ever argued that the black race was not included in the Declaration of Independence, surely Lincoln would have known and never issued the challenge in the first place.
Lincoln was more than familiar with the speech of Clay’s that the Old Line Whig tried to use to answer the Galesburg challenge; in fact, Lincoln said the Old Line Whig brought forward “the part of the speech of Henry Clay which I used to bring forward to prove precisely the contrary” (Johannsen 1965, p. 305).49 Therefore, not only was Lincoln familiar with the Clay speech, but he had previously used it to prove exactly the opposite point to the one the Old Line Whig was trying to make. Clay, in speaking of the meaning of the Declaration’s equality principle, argued that “as an abstract principle, there is no doubt of the truth of that declaration.” All societies, Clay argued, should “keep it in view as a great fundamental principle,” even though he knew that in “no society that ever did exist, or ever shall be formed, was or can the equality asserted among the members of the human race, be practically enforced and carried out” (Johannsen 1965, p. 306).50 Moreover, Lincoln quoted another section of the same Clay speech (that the Old Line Whig had conspicuously left out), which saw Clay calling slavery “a great evil” and “deeply lament[able],” because blacks were part of the “abstract principle” that “all men are created equal” (Johannsen 1965, pp. 307–8). The Old Line Whig had misread and misinterpreted the speech, and Lincoln proved it.
The response Lincoln received to the Galesburg challenge from the Old Line Whig reflects exactly the kind of reaction students typically have today when they encounter primary documents in the classroom, if they encounter them at all. Many students today, like the Old Line Whig, unfortunately turn out to be careless readers and are unintentionally biased towards their sources. Although it is certainly not true for all of them, too many students end up only seeing what they expect to see in the documents, just like the Old Line Whig. Let me give just one example of what I mean, related to what we have been discussing.
As part of my job at a university, I recently led a workshop on civic education for high school teachers of American history and government. At this particular workshop, we spent time reading and discussing several primary documents from the American founding, including one that was mentioned above—Thomas Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration of Independence. The teachers were lively and engaging, and it was clear that many of them knew their subject extremely well. However, when we read the part of Jefferson’s rough draft about the African slave trade, one teacher was noticeably perturbed. Many teachers are surprised to learn that Jefferson wrote a rough draft of the Declaration, but this particular teacher had a hard time wrapping her head around the portion of the text that referred to slaves as “MEN.” Here is the relevant portion of the text that we read together:
He [King George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES of another.(McDonald 2019, p. 122)51
Jefferson’s rough draft is perhaps the best document out there for understanding what the Founders meant when they wrote in the Declaration that “all men are created equal.” Jefferson very clearly referred to the African slaves as “MEN,” which of course is the exact same word he used in the second paragraph when he asserted that “all men are created equal.” However, this particular teacher insisted that when Jefferson referred to slaves as “MEN” he must have meant, in the teacher’s words, “white slaves.” Jefferson must have been referring to white slaves, this teacher said, because “Jefferson didn’t really believe black people were human beings.” Other teachers tried to jump in and correct her, and I attempted to point out that based on the description, especially the part about “captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere,” the passage clearly demonstrated that Jefferson must have been talking about the African slave trade, and not “white slaves.” But this teacher was so thoroughly convinced of her interpretation of the founding—that only white people were included in the Declaration of Independence—that it corrupted her understanding of everything else we were studying, especially the documents. What this teacher did not realize was that she was advancing the Taney and Douglas interpretation of the Declaration. Primary documents are wonderful, but these texts simply do not speak for themselves. They require constant study and thoughtful analysis; you miss a lot when you try to impose your own views on the text, which is exactly what this teacher did.52
The problem, then, is not necessarily the bias of students, but rather that Taney and Douglas’s interpretation of the Declaration is the version that many American students today are taught at school. They learn early on that the Declaration does not include “all men,” and thus students bring to the primary sources a tendency to see the inevitability of slavery and racism within the founding documents. This preconceived interpretation then causes students to read incorrectly, as happened to the Old Line Whig.
6. Conclusions
During a special message to Congress, on 4 July 1861, President Abraham Lincoln said that southerners had been participating in “an insidious debauching of the public mind” with their secession doctrine, and with “rebellion thus sugar-coated, they have been drugging the public mind for more than thirty years” (Lincoln 1953–1955, 4: pp. 432–33). On 21 August 1858, in Ottawa, Illinois, Senator Stephen Douglas said with the first words of the first speech of the first debate, “I appear before you to-day for the purpose of discussing the leading political topics which now agitate the public mind” (Johannsen 1965, p. 37). The Galesburg challenge of 1858 proves that Douglas, Taney, and the Democratic Party of the 1850s have been drugging the public mind on the question of the true meaning of the Declaration of Independence for more than 150 years. Fortunately, they have not been entirely successful in that regard; there is still plenty of opposition to the doctrine that the Founders only intended for the Declaration’s equality principle to apply to white men. Much of that opposition, of course, is thanks to Lincoln’s political thought and statesmanship, especially the principal outcome of the Galesburg challenge. The outcome was that Lincoln was right, and Douglas was wrong about the nature and origin of the American regime; no one had “put upon paper,” prior to the 1850s, the notion that when the Founders said, “all men are created equal,” they did not mean to include the black race. Lincoln proved that that argument began with Taney and Douglas, but it did not end there.
Douglas ignored the massive primary source evidence contradicting his assertion that the Founders excluded the black race from “all men.” Douglas’s intellectual heirs commit roughly the same offense today.53 Just like during Lincoln’s time, too many people today, especially young people, fail to take into account the primary sources and the Declaration’s natural law teaching of universal human equality, allowing themselves to be persuaded easily into the belief that the black race had no part to play in the promises of the nation’s founding charter. And just like during Lincoln’s time, one finds in public discourse today what Lincoln called “the jibes and sneers that are so readily thrown out in place of argument where no argument can be found” (Lincoln 1953–1955, 3: p. 423). The difference between then and now is that we lack the leadership of a teacher like Abraham Lincoln to guide us back to the truth.
Or do we? Through the primary documents, Lincoln still speaks today. Lincoln was a self-made master of words, and, according to one scholar, “The Lincoln-Douglas debates mattered because, as Lincoln knew, words mattered” (Meacham 2022, p. 162). Words will always matter, and so will the beliefs, and the ideas, that words illuminate, especially these words:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
The great debaters have passed into history. But the great debate goes on.54
Funding
This research received no external funding.
Institutional Review Board Statement
Not applicable.
Informed Consent Statement
Not applicable.
Data Availability Statement
No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable to this article.
Acknowledgments
The author is indebted to Cara Rogers Stevens for her generous reading and helpful editing on this essay. Whatever is good in this essay is the result of her encouragement. Any mistakes are solely the fault of the author.
Conflicts of Interest
The author declares no conflict of interest.
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| 1 | I call it the “Galesburg challenge,” because although Lincoln repeated the challenge in Alton, Columbus, Cincinnati, and elsewhere, I believe Galesburg, Illinois is the first place we have him on record making such a claim. |
| 2 | On this point, see also Crocker (1968, pp. 509–11): “It has often been pointed out that the seven debates are repetitive. The same issues are covered. But for the student of debating it is worthwhile to note that the debaters improve their skill in the support of their positions. In intercollegiate debating the same question is often used throughout the season, but debaters learn how to handle their materials better as they progress through the season.” |
| 3 | For more on Lincoln’s “embrace” of natural law, see Guelzo (2024, pp. 21–22, 87, 124–25, 140–42). |
| 4 | See also Lincoln (1953–1955, 4: p. 16): “To us it appears natural to think that slaves are human beings; men, not property,” and therefore “that some of the things, at least, stated about men in the Declaration of Independence apply to them as well as to us.” Lincoln’s emphasis. |
| 5 | See also Jividen (2011, p. 20); Jaffa (2000, p, 25). |
| 6 | Lincoln’s emphasis. |
| 7 | In support of the point that many modern readers accept Douglas over Lincoln on the original meaning of the Declaration, Zuckert cites social historian Lerone Bennet, Krannawitter cites former Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, and Burt cites “recent revisionist historians.” I would add that more recent sources, such as the controversial 1619 Project, also accept Douglas’s interpretation of the Declaration over Lincoln’s. |
| 8 | Zuckert’s emphasis. |
| 9 | See note 6. |
| 10 | Emphasis added. See also Peterson (1994, p. 340). |
| 11 | Here is the relevant part of the challenge: “I defy any man to show that any one of them [‘our fathers who framed the Government under which we live’] ever, in his whole life, declared that, in his understanding, any proper division of local from federal authority, or any part of the Constitution, forbade the Federal Government to control as to slavery in the federal territories. I go a step further. I defy any one to show that any living man in the whole world ever did, prior to the beginning of the present century, (and I might almost say prior to the beginning of the last half of the present century,) declare that, in his understanding, any proper division of local from federal authority, or any part of the Constitution, forbade the Federal Government to control as to slavery in the federal territories. To those who now so declare, I give, not only ‘our fathers who framed the Government under which we live,’ but with them all other living men within the century in which it was framed, among whom to search, and they shall not be able to find the evidence of a single man agreeing with them.” |
| 12 | For the extraordinary historical research conducted by Lincoln in crafting the Cooper Union address, see the original preface to the September 1860 published edition of the speech under the editorship of Charles C. Nott and Cephas Brainerd, as reprinted in Lincoln (2001, pp. 537–38). See also Holzer (2004, pp. 50–54); Gunderson (1968, p. 83). |
| 13 | It should not be forgotten, of course, that in issuing the Galesburg challenge during the debates, Lincoln was also challenging his political rival, the incumbent, for the open United States Senate seat; moreover, as Douglas told the audience at the fourth joint debate in Charleston, Lincoln “had challenged me [Douglas] to a discussion of the public questions of the day” (Johannsen 1965, p. 181). For the origin story of the debates, see Guelzo (2008, pp. 41–113). |
| 14 | See also Brookhiser (2014, pp. 137–38); Guelzo (1999, pp. 223–27); Dyer (2009, pp. 73–76); Wilson and Davis (1998, pp. 727–28). |
| 15 | These are the questions as Lincoln rephrased them, not as Douglas originally stated them. The two questions quoted by Douglas in his opening speech at Galesburg were: 1. “Did he [Jefferson] intend to say in that Declaration, that his negro slaves, which he held and treated as property, were created his equals by Divine law, and that he was violating the law of God every day of his life by holding them as slaves?” 2. “Now, do you believe—are you willing to have it said—that every man who signed the Declaration of Independence declared the negro his equal, and then was hypocrite enough to continue to hold him as a slave, in violation of what he believed to be the Divine law?” Any difference between Douglas’s original questions and Lincoln’s rephrasing seems to be minimal. See Johannsen (1965, pp. 215–16). |
| 16 | My emphasis in bold. |
| 17 | There are several rhetorical repetitions in the challenge; the most obvious one is repeating the phrase “ever said so” an astounding five times in this sentence. I am thankful to Gregory A. McBrayer for bringing Lincoln’s use of rhetorical devices to my attention. |
| 18 | Andrew Johnson’s speech before the Senate, 12 December 1859, see The Congressional Globe, 36th Congress, 1st Session, p. 100. See also Cox (1996, p. 192). |
| 19 | At the outbreak of the Civil War, Lincoln argued that the doctrine of secession had to be “invented” to sugar-coat rebellion and treason. See Lincoln (1953–1955, 4: pp. 432–33). |
| 20 | Zarefsky (1990, p. 150) argues the year Lincoln emphasized in the Galesburg challenge was 1854; Burlingame (2008, 1: p. 538) says it was 1855; Jaffa (1959, p. 313) cites the year 1857. |
| 21 | For a treatment of the Ohio campaign of 1859, see Jaffa and Johannsen (1959). |
| 22 | Emphasis added. |
| 23 | Douglas did not respond directly to the Galesburg challenge in the sense that he was unable, or unwilling, to produce the primary source evidence that would have proven Lincoln wrong. Douglas never pushed back on the challenge with historical documentation, although he frequently and fervently countered Lincoln’s claim to understand the Founders better than he did. See Morel (2020, p. 73). |
| 24 | West’s chapter on slavery is indispensable for understanding the Founders on this subject. For a response, see Finkelman (1996, 1999). |
| 25 | Students are generally uncharitable to Henry’s claim of “general inconvenience.” I have found that it provokes an interesting conversation when I ask them to take out their smartphones and weigh the convenience of their devices against “the rights of human nature deeply wounded by this infamous practice,” since phone components are the product of modern-day unfree labor. In fairness to Henry, and perhaps unlike Rutledge, the famous Virginian could not help but see the moral evil in slavery: “I believe a time will come when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil,” he continued. “Everything we do is to improve it, if it happens in our day; if not, let us transmit to our descendants, together with our slaves, a pity for their unhappy lot and an abhorrence of slavery” (Henry 1773). |
| 26 | In no way am I trying to diminish, or gloss over, the ugliness of these arguments from proslavery forces during the founding era. My only point is that they do not prove what Douglas and Taney were saying about the history and meaning of the Declaration; the existence of these proslavery arguments does not rise to the level of an answer to the Galesburg challenge. Defenders of slavery, and many others, clearly dehumanized Africans and made racist claims that slavery advanced civilization and benefitted the republic. Following the race-based science of their day, and their own racial prejudices supporting that science, many people in both the North and the South cultivated a racist perception of Africans as inferior to white people, sometimes employing language normally reserved for farm animals. However, as Lincoln put it in the Galesburg challenge, even these proslavery forces did not specifically put in writing that the black man was not included in the Declaration’s assertion that “all men are created equal.” See Rogers Stevens (2024, pp. 52–88). |
| 27 | Lincoln’s emphasis. Remarks such as these, especially his opening speech at the fourth debate in Charleston, have tarnished Lincoln, undeservedly, with the reputation as a “white supremacist” among some scholars. See, for example, Fredrickson (2008, pp. 54–57). For a response to these charges, see Jaffa (1959, pp. 363–86); Krannawitter (2008, pp. 13–45). |
| 28 | See note 6. |
| 29 | For more on this subject, see Zuckert (2023, pp. 183–207, esp. pp. 195–96). |
| 30 | It is quite possible that these attacks on Lincoln, far from demonstrating a total lack of awareness on Douglas’s part about the distinction between natural and legal equality, instead showcase a Douglas who correctly foresaw the inevitability of equal social and political rights for whites and blacks once the natural equality of the races was recognized. It is not too far of a stretch to suggest that Douglas foresaw this possibility before Lincoln did. |
| 31 | One example should suffice. Very recently I was asked by some former undergraduate students, currently attending one of the top law schools in Ohio, to give a public talk on the natural law. The event was well attended and well received, but several students told me afterwards that they never heard of the natural law before, and certainly never encountered it in any of their courses. |
| 32 | See note 22. |
| 33 | See note 22. |
| 34 | I am thankful to Andrew F. Lang for raising this question and bringing these sources to my attention. His comments on an early version of this essay were extremely helpful to the editing process. |
| 35 | There is no evidence that Lincoln ever referenced Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration. There is reason to believe, however, that Lincoln at least would have been aware of the rough draft’s existence, since it was published in Jefferson’s Autobiography in 1821. The law library at the state capitol in Springfield had a copy, as did the Library of Congress. Lincoln would have had easy access to both. |
| 36 | Lincoln slightly misquotes Jefferson. |
| 37 | For Jefferson’s position on slavery as articulated in his Notes, see Rogers Stevens (2024). |
| 38 | It is interesting to note that Lincoln also said in this speech that “we all know” Jefferson expressed these beliefs in his Notes on the State of Virginia. I doubt the same could be argued today. |
| 39 | See also Johannsen (1973, pp. 570–71, 672–73, 725). |
| 40 | “I was aware, when it was first agreed that Judge Douglas and I were to have these seven joint discussions, that they were the successive acts of a drama … to be enacted … in the face of the nation, and to some extent…in the face of the world; and I am anxious that they should be conducted with dignity and in … good temper” (Johannsen 1965, p. 252). |
| 41 | See note 22. |
| 42 | Besides Alton, Lincoln only used the word “astonishment” in these five places: Eulogy on Henry Clay, 6 July 1852 (Lincoln 1953–1955, 2: p. 130); Speech at Peoria, 16 October 1854 (Lincoln 1953–1955, 2: p. 273); Letter to Joshua F. Speed, 24 August 1855 (Lincoln 1953–1955, 2: p. 321); “A House Divided”: Speech at Springfield, Illinois, 16 June 1858 (Lincoln 1953–1955, 2: p. 463); Last Public Address, 11 April 1865 (Lincoln 1953–1955, 8: p. 402). Other forms of the word appear in a handful of other Lincoln writings but very infrequently. |
| 43 | Lincoln’s emphasis is in italics. My emphasis is in bold. |
| 44 | In his 1852 eulogy of Henry Clay, Lincoln juxtaposed Clay and Calhoun on the question of slavery, particularly Calhoun’s rejection of the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln admitted that Clay owned slaves, but argued that he stood between both abolitionists, on the one hand, and defenders of the institution, like Calhoun, on the other hand: The reference to Calhoun as the first American of any note to reject the principle that “all men are created free and equal” is significant, because Lincoln appeared to call the Declaration of Independence “the white man’s charter of freedom.” One might interpret this statement of Lincoln’s as anticipating Douglas’s argument in the debates that the government was founded upon “the white basis.” Was it possible that Lincoln shared Douglas’s “whites only” understanding of the Declaration, at least in 1852 when he delivered Clay’s eulogy? I am extremely doubtful of that interpretation, especially since it flies in the face of everything else we have from Lincoln on this topic. I do not think that Lincoln was contending that the Declaration was a “whites only” document (like Douglas argued), but that Calhoun, in renouncing the Declaration’s principle that all men are created free and equal, was rejecting the foundation of his own freedom and that of all white people—the race that Calhoun claimed to care about. If Calhoun was serious about protecting the rights of white people, then he was foolish to reject “the white man’s charter of freedom,” the principle that all men are created free and equal. In addition, by referring to the Declaration as “the white man’s charter of freedom,” Lincoln was acknowledging what those principles had accomplished for the white race; it was not an admission that the Declaration only applied to white people, but rather that white people were the primary beneficiaries to date. See Guelzo (1999, pp. 130, 193–94); White (2010, p. 185); Briggs (2005, p. 128). |
| 45 | At the university where I teach, I have found that it is often a difficult task for students to distinguish between the Calhoun/Pettit school of thought and that of Douglas/Taney. I think the students have trouble seeing the subtle, yet important, distinction, because they fail to read the primary sources carefully. Lincoln’s clarification of these two ways of interpreting the Declaration is, therefore, much needed today. |
| 46 | See note 22. |
| 47 | See note 6. |
| 48 | For more on the Old Line Whig’s story, see my forthcoming essay, “The Lost Debate: Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, and the ‘Old Line Whig.’” |
| 49 | Lincoln’s emphasis. For an example of when Lincoln previously used this Clay speech, see Johannsen (1965, pp. 281–82). |
| 50 | Lincoln’s emphasis. For the complete Clay speech, see Mallory (1844, 2: pp. 595–600). For a description of the circumstances of the speech delivered in Richmond, Indiana, 1 October 1842, see Remini (1991, pp. 617–19). For several first-hand reports, see Coffin et al. (1908, pp. 117–28). |
| 51 | The Second Continental Congress, of course, had this portion deleted from the final draft. |
| 52 | It should be noted that the rough draft can also be used to demonstrate that Jefferson intended to include women and children in the phrase “all men” as well. The rough draft identifies slaves as “MEN” and attacks slavery for violating their natural rights. Of course, it was not only black male slaves, but all of the slaves (males, females, and children), who were “captivat[ed] & carr[ied] … into slavery in another hemisphere…to incur miserable death in their transportation thither,” and, therefore, had their natural rights violated. When Jefferson used the word “men” in the Declaration, he clearly intended to encompass all human beings. |
| 53 | Douglas’s intellectual heirs ignore compelling contemporary scholarship by Justin Dyer, Edward Erler, and others that definitively shows how the historical record consisting of these primary sources supports a natural law reading of the Declaration of Independence and the American regime. See Dyer (2012) and Erler (2025). |
| 54 | A paraphrase of Jaffa and Johannsen (1959, p. 57). |
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