not include negroes in the term "all men." I reassert it to-day. I assert
that Judge Douglas and all his friends may search the whole records of
the country, and it will be a matter of great astonishment to me if they
shall be able to find that one human being three years ago had ever
uttered the astounding sentiment that the term "all men" in the
Declaration did not include the negro. Do not let me be misunderstood. I
know that more than three years ago there were men who, finding this
assertion constantly in the way of their schemes to bring about the
ascendency and perpetuation of slavery, denied the truth of it. I know
that Mr. Calhoun and all the politicians of his school denied the truth
of the Declaration. I know that it ran along in the mouth of some
Southern men for a period of years, ending at last in that shameful,
though rather forcible, declaration of Pettit of Indiana, upon the floor
of the United States Senate, that the Declaration of Independence was in
that respect "a self-evident lie," rather than a self-evident truth. But
I say, with a perfect knowledge of all this hawking at the Declaration
without directly attacking it, that three years ago there never had lived
a man who had ventured to assail it in the sneaking way of pretending to
believe it, and then asserting it did not include the negro. I believe
the first man who ever said it was Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott
case, and the next to him was our friend Stephen A. Douglas. And now it
has become the catchword of the entire party. I would like to call upon
his friends everywhere to consider how they have come in so short a time
to view this matter in a way so entirely different from their former
belief; to ask whether they are not being borne along by an irresistible
current,--whither, they know not.

In answer to my proposition at Galesburgh last week, I see that some man
in Chicago has got up a letter, addressed to the Chicago Times, to show,
as he professes, that somebody had said so before; and he signs himself