# Abraham Lincoln — "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics" > [!quote] "I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy." > — Abraham Lincoln to Joshua F. Speed, Springfield, Illinois, August 24, 1855 ## Context A private letter, not a speech. Joshua Speed was Lincoln's closest friend from his Springfield years and, by 1855, a Kentucky slaveholder. Speed had written that he would sooner see the Union dissolved than yield his legal right to his slaves. Most of Lincoln's long reply is about Kansas and the Nebraska bill — "conceived in violence, passed in violence, is maintained in violence." The passage above comes near the end, when Speed asks him where he now stands politically. Lincoln's answer is that he thinks he is still a Whig, and that whatever he is, he is not a Know-Nothing. The [[Know-Nothing Party]] was at that moment one of the most powerful forces in American politics, and its anti-slavery wing overlapped heavily with the constituency Lincoln would need. Saying this to a slaveholding friend in a private letter, at the moment the party was cresting, is the opposite of positioning. Note the spelling: "hypocracy" is Lincoln's, reproduced as written. ## Why this matters The argument is not that nativism is unkind. It is that **exceptions are not additive but sequential**. Lincoln reads the Declaration as a text being progressively amended by practice — first with one exception, then with three — and treats the second amendment as the predictable consequence of having accepted the first. Once the principle of equality is conceded to be negotiable, the only remaining question is who negotiates and who gets excluded next. That is the through-line to the 2026 attempt to bar naturalized citizens from public office (see [[Qualifications Clauses]]), and to the [[Birthright Citizenship Attack]]. It is also why the letter is one of the few places where the anti-slavery and anti-nativist arguments are made as a single argument rather than as an alliance of convenience: Lincoln's point is that a person who abhors one form of degradation cannot coherently endorse another. ## Verification - **Primary source:** House Divided Project, Dickinson College — [annotated transcript and full searchable text of the letter](https://housedivided.dickinson.edu/sites/lincoln/letter-to-joshua-speed-august-24-1855/); the manuscript is held by the [Massachusetts Historical Society](https://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=456&img_step=1&mode=transcript). Authoritative text in Roy P. Basler, ed., *Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln*, vol. II. - **Status:** Verbatim, checked word for word against the collected-works text. Undisputed. - ⚠️ **Bracket warning.** This passage is frequently reproduced with bracketed substitutions — "except [Black people]" and similar — in place of Lincoln's word "negroes." Those brackets belong to the modern writer quoting him, not to Lincoln, and a quotation that carries them is a paraphrase of the sentence's referent rather than the sentence. [[Heather Cox Richardson]]'s letter of August 29, 2026 uses such substitutions. The vault carries Lincoln's own wording and flags the practice rather than reproducing it silently. ## Related quotes - [[Abraham Lincoln - all the same old serpent]] — the same argument made publicly three years later, at Chicago, July 10, 1858. **Different occasion, different genre, different audience** — the two are often braided together as one continuous argument and should not be.