Document A (ORIGINAL) In 1858, Abraham Lincoln ran against Stephen A. Douglas for a seat in the U.S. Senate. The two engaged in a series of seven public debates, which attracted national attention....

Document A (ORIGINAL)


In 1858, A
aham Lincoln ran against Stephen A. Douglas for a seat in the U.S.
Senate. The two engaged in a series of seven public debates, which attracted
national attention. Although Lincoln lost the election, he became widely known for
his views on slavery.

If you desire negro citizenship, if you desire to allow them to come into the State
and settle with the white man, if you desire them to vote on an equality with
yourselves, and to make them eligible to office, to serve on juries, and to adjudge
your rights, then support Mr. Lincoln and the Black Republican party, who are in
favor of the citizenship of the negro. For one, I am opposed to negro citizenship
in any and every form. I believe this government was made on the white basis. I
elieve it was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity
forever, and I am in favor of confining citizenship to white men, men of European
irth and descent, instead of confe
ing it upon negroes, Indians, and other
inferior races.
Mr. Lincoln, following the example and lead of all the little Abolition orators who
go around and lecture in the basements of schools and churches, reads from the
Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal, and then asks how
can you deprive a negro of that equality which God and the Declaration of
Independence award to him? He and they maintain that negro equality is
guaranteed by the laws of God, and that it is asserted in the Declaration of
Independence. If they think so, of course they have a right to say so, and so vote.
I do not question Mr. Lincoln's conscientious belief that the negro was made his
equal, and hence is his
other; but for my own part, I do not regard the negro as
my equal, and positively deny that he is my
other or any kin to me whatever.

Source:​ An excerpt from Stephen A. Douglas’s argument in the first
Lincoln-Douglas debate at Ottawa, Illinois, August 21, 1858.


A
aham Lincoln 

Document B (ORIGINAL)

I have no purpose, either directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of
slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I
have no inclination to do so. I have no purpose to introduce political and social
equality between the white and the black races. There is a physical difference
etween the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever fo
id 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. I have never said
anything to the contrary, but I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no
eason 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 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
ead, 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.

Source:​ From A
aham Lincoln’s reply to Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois,
August 21, 1858.


A
aham Lincoln 

Document C (ORIGINAL)

BLOOMINGTON, ILL., September 27, 1841.
MISS MARY SPEED, Louisville, Ky.
My Friend:​ Having resolved to write to some other's family, and not having the
express permission of any one of them to do so, I had some little difficulty in
determining which to inflict the task of reading what I feel must be a most dull and
silly letter; when I remembered that you and I were something of cronies while I
was at Farmington and that while there I was under the necessity of shutting you
up in a room to prevent your committing an assault and battery upon me, I
decided that you should be the devoted one….By the way, a fine example was
presented on board the boat for contemplating the effect of condition upon
human happiness. A gentleman had purchased twelve negroes in different parts
of Kentucky, and was taking them to a farm in the South. They were chained six
and six together. A small iron clevis was around the left wrist of each, and this
was fastened to the main chain by a shorter one, at a convenient distance from
the others, so that the negroes were strung together precisely like so many fish
upon a trotline. In this condition they were being separated forever from the
scenes of their childhood, their friends their fathers and mothers and
others
and sisters, and many of them from their wives and children, and going into
perpetual slavery, where the lash of the master is prove
ially more ruthless and
unrelenting than any other where; and yet amid all these distressing
circumstances, as we would think them they were the most cheerful and
apparently happy creatures on board. One whose offense for which he had been
sold was an over-fondness for his wife, played the fiddle almost continually, and
the others danced, sang, cracked jokes, and played various games with cards
from day to day. How true it is that "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb," or
in other words, that he renders the worst of human conditions tolerable while he
permits the best to be nothing better than tolerable….
Your sincere friend,
A. LINCOLN.


Source:​ ​A
aham Lincoln, writing in a letter to Mary Speed, a personal friend,
September 27, 1841.


A
aham Lincoln 

Document D (ORIGINAL)

God himself has made them for usefulness as slaves, and requires us to employ
them as such, and if we betray our trust, and throw them off on their own
esources, we reconvert them into ba
arians, and we shall be compelled to
atone for our sin towards them through all time.

Our Heavenly Father has made us to rule, and the negroes to serve, and if we,
through a pretended sympathy, or a false philanthropy, right in the face of all
common sense and reason, set aside his holy a
angements for the good of
mankind and his own glory, and tamper with his laws, we shall be overthrown
and eternally degraded, and perhaps made subjects of some other civilized
nation. This will be our doom as sure as God lives. Then, will you persevere in
such foolery, right in the face of truth and righteousness, with your heaven-
daring schemes of wickedness, that will as assuredly overthrow this great and
glorious Union as the scheme shall be adopted, or
ing about the extermination
of the whole negro race in this country ? The laws of nature and nature's God
prohibit the mixing of the two colors into one blood, which ends that plan.
Colonization in their native land of all the negroes would be so nearly
impracticable, that it will never be done, and no other spot on this green earth will
do for them. It would be the height of cruelty and ba
arism to send them
anywhere else. If they could all be colonized on the coast of Africa, they would
fall back into heathenism and ba
arism in less than fifty years….



Source: ​From ​Pictures of Slavery and Anti-Slavery: Advantages of Negro
Slavery and the Benefits of Negro Freedom Morally, Socially, and Politically
Considered ​by John Bell Robinson, a White pro-slavery spokesperson,
Pennsylvania, 1863, p. 42.


A
aham Lincoln 


Reconstruction Timeline
1865 ​The Civil War ends.
Republican President A
aham Lincoln is assassinated.
Democrat Andrew Johnson becomes president.
13​th ​Amendment to the Constitution passes.
Congress creates the Freedmen’s Bureau to help freed men
and women transition from slavery.
1866 ​Civil Rights Act of 1866 allows African Americans to own
property and to be treated equally in court.
The Ku Klux Klan is founded.
1867 ​Radical Republicans take over the United States
government.
1868 ​14​th ​Amendment to the Constitution passes.
First African American elected to United States Congress.
1869 ​Ulysses S. Grant is elected president.
1870 ​15​th ​Amendment to the Constitution passes.
1871 ​Congress passes the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 in
esponse to reports of widespread violence in the South.
1872 ​The Freedmen’s Bureau ends.
1874 ​Democrats take control of the United States Congress.
Radical Republicans are no longer in power.
1877 ​Rutherford B. Hayes is elected President and officially
ends Reconstruction. Hayes pulls all remaining Northern troops
out of the Southern states.
Document A: The Reconstruction Amendments ​(Modified)
The 13​th​, 14​th ​and 15​th ​amendments to the United States Constitution are
sometimes called the “Reconstruction Amendments.” They were passed in
order to abolish slavery and to establish the rights of former slaves.
13​th ​Amendment: 1865
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a
punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,
shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their
jurisdiction​.
14​th ​Amendment: 1868
Section 1. All persons born or ​naturalized ​in the United States . . . are
citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State
shall make or enforce any law which shall ​a
idge ​the privileges or