The Lincoln Conspiracy

Today in the Lincoln Conspiracy:  June 26

Two days after Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered, President Lincoln spoke to a crowd of well-wishers at the White House.  During his remarks, Lincoln strongly made the case in favor of equal voting rights for newly freed slaves in the Southern states.  Among those listening was John Wilkes Booth.  He was so enraged by Lincoln's words that he declared it was the last speech the president would ever make.  But it wasn't the first time Lincoln had addressed the issue.  That had happened almost eight years earlier.

On June 26, 1857, Lincoln gave a speech in Springfield, Illinois harshly critical of the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision.  Specifically, he was responding to a speech made at the same venue two weeks earlier by Stephen A. Douglas, the Democratic U.S. Senator from Illinois.  Douglas had endorsed the court's ruling that -- in essence -- African Americans had no rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution.  Lincoln presented a spirited counter-argument, by turns legal, philosophical and moral.  He concluded:

Abraham Lincoln, 1860

"The Republicans inculcate, with whatever of ability they can, that the negro is a man; that his bondage is cruelly wrong, and that the field of his oppression ought not to be enlarged. The Democrats deny his manhood; deny, or dwarf to insignificance, the wrong of his bondage; so far as possible, crush all sympathy for him, and cultivate and excite hatred and disgust against him; compliment themselves as Union-savers for doing so; and call the indefinite outspreading of his bondage 'a sacred right of self-government.'"

The next year, Illinois Republicans nominated Lincoln to challenge Douglas for re-election.  He lost.  Two years after that, Douglas and Lincoln faced off for the presidency.  Lincoln won.