Lincoln answers to the bogey of Lincoln negro equality a ghost that never could be laid and stalks abroad in its most forbidding shape after half a century of freedom: —” I protest against the counterfeit logic which concludes that because I do not want a black woman for a slave, I must necessarily want her for a wife.””All I ask for the negro is that if you do not like him, let him alone.
If God gave him but little, that little let him enjoy.””I hold that 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 that he is not my equal in many respects, certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment; but in the ricrht to eat the bread without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of every living man.”
