Douglas had even shown that Lincoln did not utter the same sentiments in all parts of Illinois.  In Chicago where there was a large alien vote Lincoln had said:  “I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it, where will it stop?  If one man says it does not mean a negro, why may not another man say it does not mean another man?  If the Declaration is not the truth let us get the statute books in which we find it and tear it out.  Who is so bold as to do it?...  Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man, this race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position, discarding our standard that we have left us.  Let us discard all these things and unite as one people throughout this land until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.”

Douglas had driven Lincoln hard upon this application of the Declaration of Independence with the result that in the southern part of Illinois, at Charleston, Lincoln had uttered these words of a very different tenor: 

“I will say then that I am not nor never have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races; that I am not nor never have been in favor of making free voters of the negroes or jurors or qualifying them to hold office or having them marry with white people.  I will say in addition that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I suppose will forever forbid the two races living together upon terms of social and political equality; and inasmuch as they cannot so live that while they do remain together there must be the position of the superior and the inferior; that I, as much as any other man, am in favor of the superior position assigned to the white man.”

Lincoln and Douglas were therefore at one on this.  But how about slavery?  Lincoln looked forward to a time when slavery would be abolished.  How could that be?  By not admitting any more slave states?  No!  For Lincoln confessed that he would as a Senator vote to admit a slave state, if it as a territory had had a free chance to have slavery or freedom as it chose, and if in becoming a state it freely adopted a slave constitution.  As to these opinions Lincoln and Douglas were agreed; for Douglas had fought the Kansas constitution because it forced slavery on Kansas; and now the whole Buchanan administration in Illinois was arrayed against Douglas for his attitude on Kansas, and Lincoln was profiting by that.