Slavery and Sacred Texts

Abstract

Lincoln crafted a historical narrative of the American founding that countered the one that Chief Justice Roger B. Taney had used in Dred Scott v. Sandford. In his Supreme Court decision, given three months prior to Lincoln's address, the chief justice had admitted that if "the general words" of the preamble to the Declaration of Independence "were used in a similar instrument at this day," they would be understood to "embrace the whole human family." 1 Taney had dismissed that observation as irrelevant and, as Lincoln explained, had insisted that the declaration's authors "did not intend to include negroes." 2 Challenging Taney's assumption "that the public estimate of the black man is more favorable now than it was in the days of the Revolution," Lincoln argued that "in those days, our Declaration . . . was . . . thought to include all," while in 1857, the declaration was set aside "to aid in making the bondage of the negro universal and eternal." 3 The Kentucky-born lawyer conceded that the founders "did not mean to assert . . . that all were then actually enjoying that equality" but that they "meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit." 4 Otherwise, Lincoln explained, if the founders had created the declaration as a temporary measure rather than a rights-bearing writ meant "for future use," then the "doings of that day had no reference to