Papers Of Abraham Lincoln

Fragment on the Struggle Against Slavery, [July - October 1858]1

I have never professed an indifference to the honors of official station; and were I to do so now, I should only make myself ridiculous– Yet I have never failed—do not now fail—to remember that in the republican cause there is a higher aim than that of mere office– I have not allowed myself to forget that the abolition of the Slave-trade by Great Brittain, was agitated a hundred years before it was a final success;2 that the measure had it’s open fire-eating opponents; it’s stealthy “dont care” opponents; it’s dollar and cent opponents; it’s inferior race opponents; its negro equality opponents; and its religion and good order opponents; that all these opponents got offices, and their adversaries got none– But I have also remembered that ^though^ they blazed, like tallow-candles for a century, at last they flickered in the socket, died out, stank in the dark for a brief season, and were remembered no more, even by the smell– School-boys know that Wilbeforce, and Granville Sharpe, helped that cause forward; but who can now name a single man who labored to retard it? Remembering these things I can not but regard it as possible that the higher object of this contest may not be completely attained within

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the term of my ^natural ^ life– But I can not doubt either that it will come in due time. Even in this view, I am proud, in my passing speck of time, to contribute an humble mite to that glorious consummation, which my own poor eyes may never ^not^ last to see–

1Abraham Lincoln wrote this fragment.
The actual date of this fragment is unknown. When gifting the fragment to the Duchess of St. Albans in September 1892, Robert Todd Lincoln noted that the fragment was “a note made in preparing for one of the speeches in the joint-debate campaign between Mr. Douglas & my father in 1858.” Roy P. Basler, editor of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, speculated that Robert Todd Lincoln separated the fragment from a speech manuscript that Abraham Lincoln prepared during the senatorial campaign of 1858. Although some general ideas regarding public service that are present in the fragment also appear in Lincoln’s remarks in the seventh iteration of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, the text in the fragment does not appear verbatim in any of the press coverage of Lincoln’s remarks in any of the seven debates.

Basler dated this fragment July 1858. However, it is possible that Lincoln wrote the fragment at any point between the time he challenged Stephen A. Douglas to the debates in late-July 1858 and the seventh and final debate on October 15, 1858. Therefore, the editors date this fragment sometime between July and October 1858.

Other fragments and notes written by Lincoln and thought to be potentially related to his preparations for the Lincoln-Douglas Debates include: Definition of Democracy; Fragment of Notes for Debates; Fragment of Notes for Speeches; Notes for the Debate at Jonesboro, Illinois; Fragment of Notes on Pro-slavery Theology; Fragment of a Speech on Slavery.
Emanuel Hertz, Abraham Lincoln: A New Portrait (New York: Horace Liveright, 1931), 2:705-6; Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 2:482; Abraham Lincoln to Stephen A. Douglas; Abraham Lincoln to Stephen A. Douglas; Seventh Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Alton, Illinois; Seventh Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Alton, Illinois; Seventh Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Alton, Illinois.

2On August 28, 1833, the British Parliament passed “An Act for the Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Colonies; for Promoting the Industry of the Manumitted Slaves; and for Compensating the Persons Hitherto Entitled to the Services of Such Slaves,” otherwise known as the Slavery Abolition Act. It emancipated enslaved persons throughout the British colonies, designated twenty million pounds for the compensation of the owners of enslaved persons, and imposed a period of forced labor that bound enslaved persons ages six and older in the British colonies to “apprenticeships” of unpaid labor for terms ranging from four to six years. The law took effect August 1, 1834.
“An Act for the Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Colonies; for Promoting the Industry of the Manumitted Slaves; and for Compensating the Persons Hitherto Entitled to the Services of Such Slaves,” 28 August 1833, The Debates in Parliament (1834), 930, 934; Nick Draper, ‘“Possessing Slaves’: Ownership, Compensation and Metropolitan Society in Britain at the time of Emancipation 1834-40,” History Workshop Journal 64 (Autumn 2007), 78.