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1841 - The case about Nancy
Nathan Cromwell brought a Negro girl named Nancy to the Pekin area about 1828. He reportedly considered her a slave, though he supposedly paid her for her work. When Cromwell planned a move to Texas in 1836, he sold Nancy for a promissory note of $377. Cromwell died enroute to Texas and the executors of his estate attempted to collect on the note. The case went to trial in Tremont in 1839, and the Cromwell executors won. The appeal of the case before an Illinois Supreme Court Judge in 1841 is noted, as Abraham Lincoln's law firm was employed to try the case. Lincoln cited several state statues regarding indentured servitude. Nancy was proclaimed a free person. She lived in Pekin Illinois until her death about 1873.
1858 - Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln
When Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln took to the hustings in their famous debates around Illinois in the summer and fall of 1858, they debated few things quite so much as the role of African-Americans in the future United States of America. Douglas insisted that they would remain marginal for all time. Lincoln, despite his reservations about the workings of immediate black social equality and other concessions to American society's prevailing racial prejudice, boldly argued that blacks, as much as whites, deserved the Declaration of Independence's fundamental freedoms of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
This general claim, that slavery was wrong because it violated fundamental freedoms guaranteed to all Americans in the Declaration of Independence, became the Republican Party's standard and informed Lincoln's Civil War presidency.
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