Lincoln on "Negro Equality": His 1858 Campaign Notebook

In his 1858 campaign notebook, Abraham Lincoln opens a revealing window onto his antebellum political thinking about emancipation, abolition, and black social and political equality. During the heat of his celebrated contest with Senator Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln compiled a pocket memorandum book addressing not just slavery but "the substance of all I have ever said about 'negro equality'"--the issue of how blacks might fit into American society once freed. The resulting notebook consists of newspaper clippings that Lincoln selected from his speeches in response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) and the Dred Scott decision (1857), and from the legendary debates themselves. "Lincoln on 'Negro Equality'" provides a paragraph-by-paragraph commentary on the clippings, considering the content of the notebook within the political climate of the times, and it contrasts Lincoln's views on racial equality as a senatorial candidate for the new Republican Party in 1858 with his actions as Civil War president (1861-1865). Appendices provide the transcribed text of the clippings and Lincoln's handwritten summary of them, a guide to the contemporary sources for Lincoln's selected extracts that are available online, and a brief history of the physical notebook, housed in The Huntington Library.