Abraham Lincoln: Was Lincoln Equal Or Equal?

Abraham Lincoln did not truly believe that races were equal. At a speech in Springfield, Illinois, he openly says that in some respects, a black woman is “certainly not my equal” (3). Here he is focusing more on the fact that she is black rather than that she is a woman, but either way, he sees himself as more superior that her. But in respect to human rights, he believes that she does have her, for example, “natural right to eat bread [that] she earns with her own hands” (3). She is his equal and “equal of all others” in this case because of the basic human rights he sees in her as a human being. He elaborates on these rights in a reply at the Ottawa Joint debate, where he states that blacks are not his equal specifically in respects to “color”