era of the introduction of the Nebraska bill again.”  He repeated often that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists;” that he had “no lawful right to do so,” and “no inclination to do so.”  He said that his declarations as to the right of the negro to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” were designed only to refer to legislation “about any new country which is not already cursed with the actual presence of the evil,—­slavery.”  He denied having ever “manifested any impatience with the necessities that spring from the ... actual existence of slavery among us, where it does already exist.”

He dwelt much upon the equality clause of the Declaration.  If we begin “making exceptions to it, where will it stop?  If one man says it does not mean a negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man?” Only within three years past had any one doubted that negroes were included by this language.  But he said that, while the authors “intended to include all men, they did not mean to declare all men equal in all respects,... in color, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity,” but only “equal in certain inalienable rights.”  “Anything that argues me into his [Douglas’s] idea of perfect social and political equality with the negro is but a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse....  I have no purpose to produce political and social equality between the white and the black races.  There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality; and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position....  But 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 with Judge Douglas that he is not my equal in many respects,—­certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment.  But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”  Later at Charleston he reiterated much of this in almost identical language, and then in his turn took his fling at Douglas:  “I am not in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people....  I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife.  My understanding is that I can just let her alone....  I have never had the least apprehension that I or my friends would marry negroes, if there was no law to keep them from it; but as Judge Douglas and his friends seem to be in great apprehension that they might, if there were no law to keep them from it, I give him the most solemn pledge that I will to the very last stand by the law of this State, which forbids the marrying of white people with negroes.”