LINCOLN, Abraham. Speech of the Hon. Abram Lincoln, in reply to Judge Douglas. Delivered in Representatives' Hall, Springfield, Illinois, June 26th, 1857. [Springfield, Ill., 1857].

Lincoln's reply to Douglas on Kansas, Utah and the Dred Scott decision. A scarce printing of a significant speech by Lincoln, delivered in the wake of the growing sectional crisis and foreshadowing his famous "House Divided" speech in 1858 that secured the Republican nod for the U.S. Senate. Most prominent is his critique of the recent Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v Sanford, which Lincoln claimed was "in part, based on assumed historical facts which were not really true. … Chief Justice Taney, in delivering the opinion of the majority of the Court, insists at great length that negroes were no part of the people who made, or for whom was made, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution of the United States. On the Contrary, Judge Curtis, in his dissenting opinion, shows that in five of the then thirteen States," free Blacks voted, enjoying the "same part in making the Constitution the white people had." While still a firm advocate of racial separation at this time, Lincoln offers a remarkable statement. Responding to Democratic charges that those supporting abolition "do so only because they want to vote, and eat, and sleep, and marry with negroes," Lincoln responds: "I protest against the counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave, I must want her for a wife. I need not have her for either. I can just leave her alone. In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others." Monaghan 9.

Octavo (296 x 200mm). Uncut (a few partial separations, light dustsoiling).