"My friend Douglass!": A few notes on the great Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln believed our Founding Fathers' declaration that, "all men are created equal," and he always hated slavery. He discussed privately the right to vote for Americans of African descent who fought in the Civil War; he talked about it openly in his last public address: “It is unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.” (One member of the crowd that night was John Wilkes Booth, who knew exactly what Lincoln meant: “That means [...] citizenship! Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make.”) We know also that though Lincoln may have doubted initially the innate ability of the enslaved (as did Thomas Jefferson), it was due to the debased conditions under which they had suffered for centuries (as Jefferson had surmised). The great abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass is
