Lincoln, as we know, supported that Act as part of the Compromise of 1850. But in his inaugural address he mentioned several respects in which that l… - Harry V. Jaffa

Ask yourself, if you or a loved one is to undergo brain or heart surgery, does it matter whether the surgeons who will operate had been selected for medical school for any other reason than their aptitude for medicine and surgery? Even if there were no quotas, should race have been "taken into consideration" in their selection? Consider the hairline life and death decisions that surgeons make all the time. Does not every consideration, however slight, apart from aptitude, dilute the qualifications of surgeons for surgery? The next time you are crossing a great bridge, do you not rely upon the qualifications of the engineers and builders to ensure your safety? What does the skin color of the classmates of doctors or engineers have to do with their medicine or their engineering? Is it not their professional qualification that matters, and not either the sameness or the differences from which they came? Is not the same true if we are seeking mathematicians, physicists, economists, or generals? In each case, what is apt for the end in view may be regarded as good, what is inapt may be regarded as bad.

When people speak about the results of the 1860 Presidential election, it’s usually given out that Lincoln had, I think, 39 percent of the popular vote in that election. But, of course, there were 10 states in the South who formed part of the ten or the eleven states of the Confederacy, in which no Republican electors were on the ballots. And since we know that at least 100,000 men from those states came north to join the Union Army, there were at least 100,000 votes that weren't counted.

That the equality of human souls in the sight of God ought to be translated into a political structure of equal political rights has come to be regarded as the most authentic interpretation of the Gospel itself. Slavery, and the imposition of all arbitrary forms of inequality of man by man, has come to be seen as demeaning to the souls of God's creation.