chances of his being able to appropriate the benefit of this disgust to
himself. If he can, by much drumming and repeating, fasten the odium of
that idea upon his adversaries, he thinks he can struggle through the
storm. He therefore clings to this hope as a drowning man to the last
plank. He makes an occasion for lugging it in from the opposition to the
Dred Scott decision. He finds the Republicans insisting that the
Declaration of Independence includes _all_ men, black as well as white;
and forthwith he boldly denies that it includes negroes at all, and
proceeds to argue gravely that all who contend it does, do so only
because they want to vote, and eat, and sleep, and marry with negroes!
He will have it that they cannot be consistent else. Now I protest
against the counterfeit logic which concludes that because I do not want
a black woman for a slave, I must necessarily 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.

Chief Justice Taney, in his opinion in the Dred Scott case, admits that
the language of the Declaration is broad enough to include the whole
human family; but he and Judge Douglas argue that the authors of that
instrument did not intend to include negroes, by the fact that they did
not at once actually place them on an equality with the whites. Now this
grave argument comes to just nothing at all, by the other fact that they
did not at once, nor ever afterward, actually place all white people on
an equality with one another. And this is the staple argument of both
the Chief Justice and the senator, for doing this obvious violence to
the plain, unmistakable language of the Declaration.

I think the authors of that notable instrument intended to include _all_