Help with origen of Abe Lincoln quote re: human rights

[newcrasher]

“Whenever there is a conflict between human rights and property rights, human rights must prevail.”

I have seen this attributed to Abraham Lincoln, but never in context of when or where he said it. While he was certainly a brilliant man, I don’t imagine he was walking around dropping pithy one-liners.

Anyone have an idea from whence this quote comes?

[Northern_Piper]

I’m dubious that it came from Lincoln, because I think that the phrase “human rights” originated in the 20th century. However, I can’t find a cite for its origins, so I may be wrong.

[Captain_Amazing]

I’ve found this website:

http://pauillac.inria.fr/~lang/reperes/citations.html

that dates it to May 12, 1944. Does anyone have access to the Congressional Record of that date to find out if it’s there?

[Northern_Piper]

Here’s what wiki says about “human rights”:

The modern conception of human rights developed in the aftermath of the Second World War, in part as a response to the Holocaust, culminating in the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. However, while the phrase “human rights” is relatively modern the intellectual foundations of the modern concept can be traced through the history of philosophy and the concepts of natural law rights and liberties as far back as the city states of Classical Greece and the development of Roman Law. The true forerunner of human rights discourse was the enlightenment concept of natural rights developed by figures such as John Locke and Immanuel Kant and through the political realm in the United States Bill of Rights and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

(My undelring).

The earliest legal document that I can think of, off the top of my head, that uses the phrase “human rights” is the United Nations Charter, adopted in 1945. The Preamble states:

We the peoples of the United Nations determined: to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

(My underlining)

I’d be interested in knowing if there are earlier legal or constitutional documents which use the phrase.

[obfusciatrist]

In searching Google Books I find plenty of uses of “human rights” as a phrase contemporaneous to Abraham Lincoln.

I also find many instances of this general topic being covered in the slavery debate of what happens when human rights (as a person) conflict with property rights (as a slave). But I’m not finding the exact quote in question.

So far the only quote from Lincoln I’m finding with “must prevail” in it is in “The purposes of the Almighty are perfect and must prevail.”

All that said, the entire quote suddenly appears beginning in 1946 in labor literature so I wouldn’t be surprised if the quote got made up (or mangled) in a congressional speech and then picked up by the unions.

[Little_Nemo]

Prior to the development of the idea of a corporation as a legal person, weren’t all rights assumed to be human rights? There was nobody other than a human being to have a right. The idea of there being a divide between human rights and property rights wouldn’t have occurred to Lincoln or his contemporaries. Even an issue like slavery would have been seen as a conflict between two different human rights: the right of the owner to his property and the right of the slave to his liberty.

[samclem]

I don’t know if this is at all relevant to the modern concept, but Fred Shapiro over at my American Dialect Society mailing list posted an antedating in 2006–he took it back to 1766.

@Fred Shapiro

human rights (OED 1791)

1766 Providence Gazette 1 Nov. 1 (America’s Historical Newspapers) The
liberties of Germany (which are the powers of petty tyrants to trample
on all human rights).

Fred Shapiro

[Xema]

It seems obvious that “property rights” can sensibly be interpreted only as rights of the (human) owner(s) of the property, rather than of the property itself.

[Tammi_Terrell]

Following up on Xema’s observation (in response to Little Nemo’s post), I’ll note that Lincoln wrote in April, 1859 that

the Jefferson party was formed upon its supposed superior devotion to the personal rights of men, holding the rights of property to be secondary only, and greatly inferior, and assuming that the so-called Democracy of to-day are the Jefferson, and their opponents the anti-Jefferson, party, it will be equally interesting to note how completely the two have changed hands as to the principle upon which they were originally supposed to be divided. The Democracy of to-day hold the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing, when in conflict with another man’s right of property; Republicans, on the contrary, are for both the man and the dollar, but in case of conflict the man before the dollar.

(This is the same letter in which the pithy one-liner that “he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave” appears.)

– Tammi Terrell