Citizenship and Limited Suffrage
Lincoln stated that Negroes had the rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" in the first of the Lincoln–Douglas debates. Publicly, Lincoln said he was not advocating Negro suffrage in his speech in Columbus, Ohio on September 16, 1859.
This might have been a strategy speech used to gain voters, as Douglas had accused Lincoln of favoring negroes too much as well.
In his second term as president, on April 11, 1865, Lincoln gave a speech supporting a form of limited suffrage extended to what Lincoln described as the more "intelligent" blacks and those blacks who had rendered special services to the nation. In analyzing Lincoln's position historian Eugene H. Berwanger notes:
During his presidency, Lincoln took a reasoned course which helped the federal government both destroy slavery and advance the cause of black suffrage. For a man who had denied both reforms four years earlier, Lincoln's change in attitude was rapid and decisive. He was both open-minded and perceptive to the needs of his nation in a postwar era. Once committed to a principle, Lincoln moved toward it with steady, determined progress.Read more about this topic: Abraham Lincoln And Slavery
Famous quotes containing the words citizenship, limited and/or suffrage:
“Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in which you do not live. If you try to obtain citizenship in it, at once the court and retinue pack the royal archives and treasure and move away beyond the hills.”
—O. Henry [William Sydney Porter] (1862–1910)
“Professors of literature, who for the most part are genteel but mediocre men, can make but a poor defense of their profession, and the professors of science, who are frequently men of great intelligence but of limited interests and education, feel a politely disguised contempt for it; and thus the study of one of the most pervasive and powerful influences on human life is traduced and neglected.”
—Yvor Winters (1900–1968)
“... woman was made first for her own happiness, with the absolute right to herself ... we deny that dogma of the centuries, incorporated in the codes of all nations—that woman was made for man ...”
—National Woman Suffrage Association. As quoted in The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 3, ch. 27, by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage (1886)