In July 1858, a year removed from the Dred Scott decision1 in which the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that African-Americans, whether enslaved or free, were not citizens of the United States and therefore, could not sue in federal courts, Abraham Lincoln delivered a speech on the founding fathers of this country and its later inhabitants.2 In it, he wondered how it is that those who are not blood descendants of this country’s founding generation, who subsequently came from Europe themselves and settled here, find “themselves equal in all things.” In his infinite wisdom Lincoln answered:
When [such people] look through that old Declaration3 of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.
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