Apr
30
Lincoln and Washington: Statesmen of Racial Reconciliation
Lecture 1: Abraham Lincoln and the Daughters of Dred Scott
The definitive refutation of the Supreme Court’s _Dred Scott _decision was delivered by Abraham Lincoln in an 1857 speech exploring the meaning of the Declaration’s principle of human equality. The lecture will highlight just how daring and original Lincoln’s approach was. No other critic of the decision even mentioned the fact that Dred Scott had daughters who, like him, would be returned to slavery. Lincoln made the fate of those daughters the crux of his critique, as he confronted the dilemma posed by “the public estimate of the Negro.”
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