# Abraham Lincoln — "it is all the same old serpent" > [!quote] "What are these arguments? They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will – whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent." > — Abraham Lincoln, speech at Chicago, Illinois, July 10, 1858 ## Context A public campaign speech, delivered from a balcony of the Tremont House the night after Senator Stephen A. Douglas opened his 1858 re-election campaign in the same city. "The Judge" is Douglas. Lincoln is answering Douglas's position that the Declaration of Independence's "all men are created equal" applied only to white men, and his professed indifference to whether slavery was "voted up or voted down." Earlier in the same speech Lincoln makes the argument that gives this passage its immigration dimension: perhaps half of Americans, he says, are not descended by blood from the revolutionary generation — "German, Irish, French and Scandinavian men" — and cannot trace a bloodline back to 1776. What connects them to the founding is the moral claim in the Declaration, "and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men… that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that declaration." He calls it "the electric cord in that declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty loving men together." He closes the sequence with the question the passage above is built to force: "I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop. If one man says it does not mean a negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man?" ## Why this matters The "serpent" is a claim about the **structure** of an argument rather than its subject. Lincoln's point is that the case for enslaving people by race is formally identical to the case a king makes for ruling subjects: both assert that some people are better off being governed by their betters, and both are advanced as benevolence. Because the form is the same, the argument is portable — it can be pointed at any group, including the one currently making it. That is why the passage carries into the [[Nativism]] material rather than only the slavery material. Lincoln's own extension is explicit: the Declaration is the mechanism by which people with no ancestral claim to the founding become full members of it. An argument that the Declaration admits exceptions is therefore an argument that membership is revocable — which is the premise of both the [[Birthright Citizenship Attack]] and the 2026 effort to exclude naturalized citizens from office (see [[Qualifications Clauses]]). ## Verification - **Source:** [Text of the Chicago speech, July 10, 1858](https://www.mrlincolnandfreedom.org/pre-civil-war/house-divided-speech/speech-at-chicago-july-10-1858/index.html). Authoritative text in Roy P. Basler, ed., *Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln*, vol. II, pp. 484–502. - **Status:** Verbatim as transcribed. ⚠️ **Provenance caveat:** unlike a letter, this speech survives only through **contemporary newspaper stenography** — Basler's text derives principally from the Chicago press reports. Wording is stable across sources and the passage is undisputed, but there is no Lincoln manuscript behind it, and punctuation and minor connectives vary between printings. Renderings beginning "Turn *it* whatever way you will" circulate alongside "Turn *in* whatever way you will"; the vault follows the collected-works reading. ## Related quotes - [[Abraham Lincoln - all men are created equal except]] — the private letter to Joshua Speed, August 24, 1855. **A separate occasion and a separate argument**, written three years earlier to one slaveholding friend rather than delivered to a campaign crowd. The two passages are frequently quoted back to back as though they were one continuous statement; they are not, and the vault keeps them apart deliberately. - [[Abraham Lincoln - reverence for the laws]] — the 1838 Lyceum Address on mob rule.