Search for Equality

Abraham Lincoln’s search for equality centered on slavery, equal rights, and protection under the Constitution. In July 1858 he asked, “Who shall say, I am the superior, and you are the inferior?” and during the October 13 Quincy debate in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates he affirmed that in the right to eat bread earned by one’s own hands, a Black man was his equal and the equal of every other man. As president, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and advocated voting rights for African Americans who fought for the Union; by the standards of his era, his evolving views on racial equality were progressive and helped change American attitudes and culture. He also endorsed women’s voting rights in 1836, years before the women’s suffrage movement began, and in the 1850s told a young woman who wanted to vote that he believed she would vote before she was much older. His thirty-year friendship with Quincy’s Eliza Caldwell Browning reflected his view of women as equals through shared intellectual vigor and mutual respect. In Quincy, the home of abolitionist Dr. Richard Eells symbolized the issue at the heart of the Lincoln-Douglas debate. Built in 1835, it was the oldest brick house in Quincy, a documented Underground Railroad station, four blocks from the Mississippi River, and within sight of the debate. In April 1843, after helping an enslaved person escape, Eells was convicted by Judge Stephen Douglas, a distant cousin of Lincoln, and fined for harboring a runaway slave. Hundreds of enslaved people escaped across the Mississippi River from Missouri to Quincy by way of the Underground Railroad. In 1839, sixty-five members chartered the Adams County Anti-Slavery Society, the first in Illinois. Credited with assisting more than 200 enslaved people, Eells was caught helping a fugitive, Charlie, escape; after being bound over for trial in 1842, he was convicted in Quincy by Circuit Court Judge Stephen A. Douglas and fined $400. Eells became president of the Illinois Anti-Slavery Party in 1843 and a Liberty Party candidate in the 1844 presidential election. Although he died before his case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, his attorneys, including William Seward and Salmon Chase, later members of Lincoln’s cabinet, carried it to the nation’s highest court, where the verdict was unfavorable.

Quincy, Illinois · United States