FIFTH JOINT DEBATE, AT GALESBURGH,

OCTOBER 7, 1858

Mr. LINCOLN’S reply.

My fellow-citizens:  A very large portion of the speech which Judge Douglas has addressed to you has previously been delivered and put in print.  I do not mean that for a hit upon the Judge at all.—–­If I had not been interrupted, I was going to say that such an answer as I was able to make to a very large portion of it had already been more than once made and published.  There has been an opportunity afforded to the public to see our respective views upon the topics discussed in a large portion of the speech which he has just delivered.  I make these remarks for the purpose of excusing myself for not passing over the entire ground that the Judge has traversed.  I however desire to take up some of the points that he has attended to, and ask your attention to them, and I shall follow him backwards upon some notes which I have taken, reversing the order, by beginning where he concluded.

The Judge has alluded to the Declaration of Independence, and insisted that negroes are not included in that Declaration; and that it is a slander upon the framers of that instrument to suppose that negroes were meant therein; and he asks you:  Is it possible to believe that Mr. Jefferson, who penned the immortal paper, could have supposed himself applying the language of that instrument to the negro race, and yet held a portion of that race in slavery?  Would he not at once have freed them?  I only have to remark upon this part of the Judge’s speech (and that, too, very briefly, for I shall not detain myself, or you, upon that point for any great length of time), that I believe the entire records of the world, from the date of the Declaration of Independence up to within three years ago, may be searched in vain for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the negro was not included in the Declaration of Independence; I think I may defy Judge Douglas to show that he ever said so, that Washington ever said so, that any President ever said so, that any member of Congress ever said so, or that any living man upon the whole earth ever said so, until the necessities of the present policy of the Democratic party, in regard to slavery, had to invent that affirmation.  And I will remind Judge Douglas and this audience that while Mr. Jefferson was the owner of slaves, as undoubtedly he was, in speaking upon this very subject he used the strong language that “he trembled for his country when he remembered that God was just”; and I will offer the highest premium in my power to Judge Douglas if he will show that he, in all his life, ever uttered a sentiment at all akin to that of Jefferson.