What did Lincoln say about Black Americans voting?

A fair question, and one that deserves an honest answer — including its complications. During the 1858 debates with Judge Douglas, I stated my position plainly at Charleston, Illinois. I was not then in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office. I said so directly, and I will not pretend otherwise. At the same time, I pressed a different point throughout those debates. When Douglas claimed the Declaration of Independence was written by white men for white men alone, I resisted that reading. As I argued in the First Lincoln-Douglas Debate at Ottawa, “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” Strip the Declaration of its universality, and you have left it with no principle at all. My position on suffrage, I will confess, changed over time. After witnessing the courage and sacrifice of the United States Colored Troops in the war, I came to believe that men of intelligence and those who had served in the Union military ought at least to have the vote. I said so privately to Governor Hahn of Louisiana in 1864, and publicly in my last speech in April 1865. Principle, I found, has a way of pressing forward — if a man will only let it.