Fragment of a Speech on Slavery, [1 July 1854]1
. . .dent truth– Made so plain by our good Father in Heaven, that all feel and understand it, even down to brutes and creeping insects– 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– So plain that no one, high or low, ever does mistake it, except
in a plainly selfish way; for although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing,
we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself2–
Most governments have been based, practically, on the denial of the equal rights of men, as I have,
in part, stated them; [...?] ^ours^ began, by affirming those rights– They said, some men are too ignorant, and vicious, to share in government– Possibly so, said we; and, by your system, you would always
keep them ignorant, and vicious– We proposed to give all a chance; and we expected the weak to grow stronger, the ignorant, wiser; and all
better, and happier together–
We made the experiment; and the fruit is before us– Look at it— think of it– Look
at it, in it’s aggregate grandeur, of extent of country, and numbers of population— of ship, and
steamboat, and rail-. . .
1Abraham Lincoln wrote this document. In editing Lincoln’s papers, his secretaries John G. Nicolay and John M. Hay gave this undated fragment and other short undated pieces on government and slavery
the tentative date of composition of July 1, 1854. Roy P. Basler maintained this dating
in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, despite finding no evidence to support it and arguing that the fragment was likely
a portion of a speech composed in 1858 or 1859, or perhaps an omitted portion of Lincoln’s
September 17, 1859 speech at Cincinnati. This fragment almost certainly postdates the May 30, 1854 passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and repeal of the Missouri Compromise which reawakened Lincoln’s interest in politics and spurred him to campaign for Whig congressional candidate Richard Yates in the autumn of 1854.
John G. Nicolay and John Hay, eds., Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, new and enlarged ed. (New York: Francis D. Tandy, 1905), 2:182-84, 186-87; Roy P.
Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 2:222, 3:438-62; Autobiography of Abraham Lincoln written for John L. Scripps.
Handwritten Document, 1 page(s), GLC03251, Gilder Lehrman Collection (New York, New York).