Civil, Political, And Social Equality After Lincoln: A Paradigm And A Problematic

KATE MASUR
Assistant Professor of History, Northwestern University


When it comes to Abraham Lincoln and race, there are few words
more famous than the future president’s 1858 assertion that he had “no
purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and
the black races.”1
 The statement cannot be discounted as merely an
artifact of his intense struggle against Stephen Douglas for a seat in the
U.S. Senate. To the contrary, in a standalone speech in Peoria four
years earlier, Lincoln had said his “own feelings” did not admit of
making former slaves “politically and socially our equals.”2
At the same
time, of course, Lincoln also consistently argued for certain kinds of
racial equality. As he said in Columbus, Ohio, in 1859, “there is no
reason 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.”3
My purpose here is not to assess whether Lincoln was racist, or how
racist. Nor is it to chart how his own views on equality changed over the
course of the Civil War. Rather, it is to reflect on the meanings of the
separate categories of equality that Lincoln mentioned—natural (or
civil), political, and social—as they took shape after his death. The
historian James Oakes has recently made the interesting argument that
Lincoln separated natural and civil rights from political and social ones
because he believed the federal government had power to enforce civil


1. First Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois, CHI.PRESS & TRIB., Aug. 21, 
1858, reprinted in 3 THE COLLECTED WORKS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN 1, 16 (Roy P. Basler
et al. eds., 1953) [hereinafter COLLECTED WORKS].
2. Abraham Lincoln, Speech at Peoria, Illinois, ILL. J., Oct. 21, 23–28, 1854, reprinted in
2 COLLECTED WORKS, supra note 1, at 247, 256.
3. Abraham Lincoln, Speech at Columbus, Ohio, ILL. STATE J., Sept. 24, 1859, reprinted 
in 3 COLLECTED WORKS, supra note 1, at 400, 402. See also Sixth Debate with Stephen A. 
Douglas, at Quincy, Illinois, CHI. PRESS & TRIB., Oct. 13, 1858, reprinted in 3 COLLECTED 
WORKS, supra note 1, at 245, 248–49 (illustrating Lincoln’s view regarding equality); Fourth 
Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois, CHI. PRESS & TRIB., Sept. 18, 1858, 
reprinted in 3 COLLECTED WORKS, supra note 1, at 145, 145–46 (same).

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