and elsewhere, to the course that Judge Douglas is pursuing every day as
bearing upon this question of making slavery national. Not going back to
the records, but taking the speeches he makes, the speeches he made
yesterday and the day before, and makes constantly, all over the
country, I ask your attention to them. In the first place, what is
necessary to make the institution national? Not war: there is no danger
that the people of Kentucky will shoulder their muskets and ... march
into Illinois to force the blacks upon us. There is no danger of our
going over there, and making war upon them. Then what is necessary for
the nationalization of slavery? It is simply the next Dred Scott
decision. It is merely for the Supreme Court to decide that no State
under the Constitution can exclude it, just as they have already decided
that under the Constitution neither Congress nor the territorial
legislature can do it. When that is decided and acquiesced in, the whole
thing is done. This being true and this being the way, as I think, that
slavery is to be made national, let us consider what Judge Douglas is
doing every day to that end. In the first place, let us see what
influence he is exerting on public sentiment. In this and like
communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment
nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who
moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or
pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or
impossible to be executed. This must be borne in mind, as also the
additional fact that Judge Douglas is a man of vast influence, so great
that it is enough for many men to profess to believe anything when they
once find out that Judge Douglas professes to believe it. Consider also
the attitude he occupies at the head of a large party,--a party which he
claims has a majority of all the voters in the country.
This man sticks to a decision which forbids the people of a Territory to
exclude slavery, and he does so not because he says it is right in
itself,--he does not give any opinion on that,--but because it has been
decided by the Court, and, being decided by the Court, he is, and you
are, bound to take it in your political action as law,--not that he
judges at all of its merits, but because a decision of the Court is to
him a "Thus saith the Lord." He places it on that ground alone, and you
will bear in mind that thus committing himself unreservedly to this
decision, commits himself just as firmly to the next one as to this. He
did not commit himself on account of the merit or demerit of the
decision, but it is a "Thus saith the Lord." The next decision as much
as this will be a "Thus saith the Lord." There is nothing that can
divert or turn him away from this decision. It is nothing that I point
out to him that his great prototype, General Jackson, did not believe in
the binding force of decisions. It is nothing to him that Jefferson did
not so believe. I have said that I have often heard him approve of
Jackson's course in disregarding the decision of the Supreme Court
pronouncing a national bank constitutional. He says I did not hear him
say so. He denies the accuracy of my recollection. I say he ought to
know better than I, but I will make no question about this thing, though
it still seems to me that I heard him say it twenty times. I will tell
him, though, that he now claims to stand on the Cincinnati platform,
which affirms that Congress cannot charter a national bank in the teeth
of that old standing decision that Congress can charter a bank. And I
remind him of another piece of Illinois history on the question of
respect for judicial decisions, and it is a piece of Illinois history
belonging to a time when a large party to which Judge Douglas belonged,
were displeased with a decision of the Supreme Court of Illinois,
because they had decided that a Governor could not remove a secretary of
State, and I know that Judge Douglas will not deny that he was then in
favour of over-slaughing that decision, by the mode of adding five new
Judges, so as to vote down the four old ones. Not only so, but it ended
in the Judge's sitting down on the very bench as one of the five new
judges to break down the four old ones. It was in this way precisely
that he got his title of Judge. Now, when the Judge tells me that men
appointed conditionally to sit as members of a Court will have to be
catechized beforehand upon some subject, I say, "You know, Judge; you
have tried it!" When he says a Court of this kind will lose the
confidence of all men, will be prostituted and disgraced by such a
proceeding, I say, "You know best, Judge; you have been through the
mill."
But I cannot shake Judge Douglas's teeth loose from the Dred Scott
decision. Like some obstinate animal (I mean no disrespect) that will
hang on when he has once got his teeth fixed--you may cut off a leg, or
you may tear away an arm, still he will not relax his hold. And so I may
point out to the Judge, and say that he is bespattered all over, from
the beginning of his political life to the present time, with attacks
upon judicial decisions,--I may cut off limb after limb of his public
record, and strive to wrench from him a single dictum of the Court, yet
I cannot divert him from it. He hangs to the last to the Dred Scott
decision.... Henry Clay, my beau ideal of a statesman, ... once said of
a class of men who would repress all tendencies to liberty and ultimate
emancipation, that they must, if they would do this, go back to the era
of our independence, and muzzle the cannon that thunders its annual
joyous return; that they must blow out the moral lights around us; they
must penetrate the human soul, and eradicate there the love of liberty;
and then, and not till then, could they perpetuate slavery in this
country! To my thinking, Judge Douglas is, by his example and vast
influence, doing that very thing in this community when he says that the
negro has nothing in the Declaration of Independence. Henry Clay plainly
understood the contrary. Judge Douglas is going back to the era of our
Revolution, and, to the extent of his ability, muzzling the cannon which
thunders its annual joyous return. When he invites any people, willing
to have slavery, to establish it, he is blowing out the moral lights
around us. When he says he "cares not whether slavery is voted down or
voted up,"--that it is a sacred right of self-government,--he is, in my
judgment, penetrating the human soul and eradicating the light of reason
and the love of liberty in this American people. And now I will only
say, that when, by all these means and appliances, Judge Douglas shall
succeed in bringing public sentiment to an exact accordance with his own
views; when these vast assemblages shall echo back all these sentiments;
when they shall come to repeat his views and avow his principles, and to
say all that he says on these mighty questions,--then it needs only the
formality of a second Dred Scott decision, which he indorses in advance,
to make slavery alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new,
North as well as South.
_Lincoln's Reply to Judge Douglas in the Second Joint Debate. Freeport,
Illinois. August 27, 1858_
... The plain truth is this. At the introduction of the Nebraska policy,
we believed there was a new era being introduced in the history of the
Republic, which tended to the spread and perpetuation of slavery. But in
our opposition to that measure we did not agree with one another in
everything. The people in the north end of the State were for stronger
measures of opposition than we of the southern and central portions of
the State, but we were all opposed to the Nebraska doctrine. We had that
one feeling and one sentiment in common. You at the north end met in
your conventions, and passed your resolutions. We in the middle of the
State and further south did not hold such conventions and pass the same
resolutions, although we had in general a common view and a common
sentiment. So that these meetings which the Judge has alluded to, and
the resolutions he has read from, were local, and did not spread over
the whole State. We at last met together in 1856, from all parts of the
State, and we agreed upon a common platform. You who held more extreme
notions, either yielded those notions, or if not wholly yielding them,
agreed to yield them practically, for the sake of embodying the
opposition to the measures which the opposite party were pushing forward
at that time. We met you then, and if there was anything yielded, it was
for practical purposes. We agreed then upon a platform for the party
throughout the entire State of Illinois, and now we are all bound as a
party to that platform. And I say here to you, if any one expects of me
in the case of my election, that I will do anything not signified by
our Republican platform and my answers here to-day, I tell you very
frankly, that person will be deceived. I do not ask for the vote of any
one who supposes that I have secret purposes or pledges that I dare not
speak out.... If I should never be elected to any office, I trust I may
go down with no stain of falsehood upon my reputation, notwithstanding
the hard opinions Judge Douglas chooses to entertain of me.
_From Lincoln's Reply at Jonesboro'. September 15, 1858_
Ladies and Gentlemen, There is very much in the principles that Judge
Douglas has here enunciated that I most cordially approve, and over
which I shall have no controversy with him. In so far as he insisted
that all the States have the right to do exactly as they please about
all their domestic relations, including that of slavery, I agree
entirely with him. He places me wrong in spite of all I tell him, though
I repeat it again and again, insisting that I have made no difference
with him upon this subject. I have made a great many speeches, some of
which have been printed, and it will be utterly impossible for him to
find anything that I have ever put in print contrary to what I now say
on the subject. I hold myself under constitutional obligations to allow
the people in all the States, without interference, direct or indirect,
to do exactly as they please, and I deny that I have any inclination to
interfere with them, even if there were no such constitutional
obligation. I can only say again that I am placed improperly--altogether
improperly, in spite of all that I can say--when it is insisted that I
entertain any other view or purpose in regard to that matter.
While I am upon this subject, I will make some answers briefly to
certain propositions that Judge Douglas has put. He says, "Why can't
this Union endure permanently half slave and half free?" I have said
that I supposed it could not, and I will try, before this new audience,
to give briefly some of the reasons for entertaining that opinion.
Another form of his question is, "Why can't we let it stand as our
fathers placed it?" That is the exact difficulty between us. I say that
Judge Douglas and his friends have changed it from the position in which
our fathers originally placed it.
I say in the way our fathers originally left the slavery question, the
institution was in the course of ultimate extinction. I say when this
government was first established, it was the policy of its founders to
prohibit the spread of slavery into the new Territories of the United
States where it had not existed. But Judge Douglas and his friends have
broken up that policy, and placed it upon a new basis, by which it is to
become national and perpetual. All I have asked or desired anywhere is
that it should be placed back again upon the basis that the fathers of
our government originally placed it upon. I have no doubt that it would
become extinct for all time to come, if we had but readopted the policy
of the fathers by restricting it to the limits it has already
covered--restricting it from the new Territories.
I do not wish to dwell on this branch of the subject at great length at
this time, but allow me to repeat one thing that I have stated before.
Brooks, the man who assaulted Senator Sumner on the floor of the Senate,
and who was complimented with dinners and silver pitchers and
gold-headed canes, and a good many other things for that feat, in one of
his speeches declared that when this government was originally
established, nobody expected that the institution of slavery would last
until this day. That was but the opinion of one man, but it is such an
opinion as we can never get from Judge Douglas or anybody in favour of
slavery in the North at all. You can sometimes get it from a Southern
man. He said at the same time that the framers of our government did not
have the knowledge that experience has taught us--that experience and
the invention of the cotton gin have taught us that the perpetuation of
slavery is a necessity. He insisted therefore upon its being changed
from the basis upon which the fathers of the government left it to the
basis of perpetuation and nationalization.
I insist that this is the difference between Judge Douglas and
myself--that Judge Douglas is helping the change along. I insist upon
this government being placed where our fathers originally placed it.
... When he asks me why we cannot get along with it [slavery] in the
attitude where our fathers placed it, he had better clear up the
evidences that he has himself changed it from that basis; that he has
himself been chiefly instrumental in changing the policy of the fathers.
Any one who will read his speech of the twenty-second of March last,
will see that he there makes an open confession, showing that he set
about fixing the institution upon an altogether different set of
principles....
Now, fellow-citizens, in regard to this matter about a contract between
myself and Judge Trumbull, and myself and all that long portion of Judge
Douglas's speech on this subject. I wish simply to say, what I have said
to him before, that he cannot know whether it is true or not, and I do
know that there is not a word of truth in it. And I have told him so
before. I don't want any harsh language indulged in, but I do not know
how to deal with this persistent insisting on a story that I know to be
utterly without truth. It used to be the fashion amongst men that when a
charge was made, some sort of proof was brought forward to establish it,
and if no proof was found to exist, it was dropped. I don't know how to
meet this kind of an argument. I don't want to have a fight with Judge
Douglas, and I have no way of making an argument up into the consistency
of a corn-cob and stopping his mouth with it. All I can do is
good-humouredly to say, that from the beginning to the end of all that
story about a bargain between Judge Trumbull and myself, there is not a
word of truth in it....
When that compromise [of 1850] was made, it did not repeal the old
Missouri Compromise. It left a region of United States territory half as
large as the present territory of the United States, north of the line
of 36° 30', in which slavery was prohibited by act of Congress. This
compromise did not repeal that one. It did not affect nor propose to
repeal it. But at last it became Judge Douglas's duty, as he thought
(and I find no fault with him), as chairman of the Committee on
Territories, to bring in a bill for the organization of a territorial
government--first of one, then of two Territories north of that line.
When he did so, it ended in his inserting a provision substantially
repealing the Missouri Compromise. That was because the Compromise of
1850 had not repealed it. And now I ask why he could not have left that
compromise alone? We were quiet from the agitation of the slavery
question. We were making no fuss about it. All had acquiesced in the
compromise measures of 1850. We never had been seriously disturbed by
any Abolition agitation before that period.... I close this part of the
discussion on my part by asking him the question again, Why, when we had
peace under the Missouri Compromise, could you not have let it alone?
* * * * *
He tries to persuade us that there must be a variety in the different
institutions of the States of the Union; that that variety necessarily
proceeds from the variety of soil, climate, of the face of the country,
and the difference of the natural features of the States. I agree to all
that. Have these very matters ever produced any difficulty amongst us?
Not at all. Have we ever had any quarrel over the fact that they have
laws in Louisiana designed to regulate the commerce that springs from
the production of sugar, or because we have a different class relative
to the production of flour in this State? Have they produced any
differences? Not at all. They are the very cements of this Union. They
don't make the house a house divided against itself. They are the props
that hold up the house and sustain the Union.
But has it been so with this element of slavery? Have we not always had
quarrels and difficulties over it? And when will we cease to have
quarrels over it? Like causes produce like effects. It is worth while to
observe that we have generally had comparative peace upon the slavery
question, and that there has been no cause for alarm until it was
excited by the effort to spread it into new territory. Whenever it has
been limited to its present bounds, and there has been no effort to
spread it, there has been peace. All the trouble and convulsion has
proceeded from efforts to spread it over more territory. It was thus at
the date of the Missouri Compromise. It was so again with the annexation
of Texas; so with the territory acquired by the Mexican War; and it is
so now. Whenever there has been an effort to spread it, there has been
agitation and resistance. Now, I appeal to this audience (very few of
whom are my political friends), as rational men, whether we have reason
to expect that the agitation in regard to this subject will cease while
the causes that tend to reproduce agitation are actively at work? Will
not the same cause that produced agitation in 1820, when the Missouri
Compromise was formed,--that which produced the agitation upon the
annexation of Texas, and at other times,--work out the same results
always? Do you think that the nature of man will be changed; that the
same causes that produced agitation at one time will not have the same
effect at another?
This has been the result so far as my observation of the slavery
question and my reading in history extend. What right have we then to
hope that the trouble will cease, that the agitation will come to an
end, until it shall either be placed back where it originally stood, and
where the fathers originally placed it, or, on the other hand, until it
shall entirely master all opposition? This is the view I entertain, and
this is the reason why I entertained it, as Judge Douglas has read from
my Springfield speech.
... At Freeport I answered several interrogatories that had been
propounded to me by Judge Douglas at the Ottawa meeting.... At the same
time I propounded four interrogatories to him, claiming it as a right
that he should answer as many for me as I did for him, and I would
reserve myself for a future instalment when I got them ready. The Judge,
in answering me upon that occasion, put in what I suppose he intends as
answers to all four of my interrogatories. The first one of these I
have before me, and it is in these words:
_Question 1._ If the people of Kansas shall by means entirely
unobjectionable in all other respects, adopt a State constitution
and ask admission into the Union under it, before they have the
requisite number of inhabitants according to the English bill--some
93,000--will you vote to admit them?
As I read the Judge's answer in the newspaper, and as I remember it as
pronounced at the time, he does not give any answer which is equivalent
to yes or no,--I will or I won't. He answers at very considerable
length, rather quarrelling with me for asking the question, and
insisting that Judge Trumbull had done something that I ought to say
something about; and finally, getting out such statements as induce me
to infer that he means to be understood, he will, in that supposed case,
vote for the admission of Kansas. I only bring this forward now, for the
purpose of saying that, if he chooses to put a different construction
upon his answer, he may do it. But if he does not, I shall from this
time forward assume that he will vote for the admission of Kansas in
disregard of the English bill. He has the right to remove any
misunderstanding I may have. I only mention it now, that I may hereafter
assume this to have been the true construction of his answer, if he does
not now choose to correct me.
The second interrogatory I propounded to him was this:
_Question 2._ Can the people of a United States Territory in any
lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the United States,
exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a State
constitution?
To this Judge Douglas answered that they can lawfully exclude slavery
from the Territory prior to the formation of a constitution. He goes
on to tell us how it can be done. As I understand him, he holds that
it can be done by the territorial legislature refusing to make any
enactments for the protection of slavery in the Territory, and
especially by adopting unfriendly legislation to it. For the sake of
clearness, I state it again: that they can exclude slavery from the
Territory,--first, by withholding what he assumes to be an indispensable
assistance to it in the way of legislation; and second, by unfriendly
legislation. If I rightly understand him, I wish to ask your attention
for a while to his position.
In the first place, the Supreme Court of the United States has decided
that any congressional prohibition of slavery in the Territories is
unconstitutional: they have reached this proposition as a conclusion
from their former proposition that the Constitution of the United States
expressly recognizes property in slaves; and from that other
constitutional provision that no person shall be deprived of property
without due process of law. Hence they reach the conclusion that as the
Constitution of the United States expressly recognizes property in
slaves, and prohibits any person from being deprived of property without
due process of law, to pass an act of Congress by which a man who owned
a slave on one side of a line would be deprived of him if he took him on
the other side, is depriving him of that property without due process of
law. That I understand to be the decision of the Supreme Court. I
understand also that Judge Douglas adheres most firmly to that decision;
and the difficulty is, how is it possible for any power to exclude
slavery from the Territory unless in violation of that decision? That is
the difficulty.
In the Senate of the United States, in 1856, Judge Trumbull in a speech,
substantially if not directly, put the same interrogatory to Judge
Douglas, as to whether the people of a Territory had the lawful power to
exclude slavery prior to the formation of a constitution? Judge Douglas
then answered at considerable length, and his answer will be found in
the "Congressional Globe," under date of June 9, 1856. The Judge said
that whether the people could exclude slavery prior to the formation of
a constitution or not, was a question to be decided by the Supreme
Court. He put that proposition, as will be seen by the "Congressional
Globe," in a variety of forms, all running to the same thing in
substance,--that it was a question for the Supreme Court. I maintain
that when he says, after the Supreme Court has decided the question,
that the people may yet exclude slavery by any means whatever, he does
virtually say that it is not a question for the Supreme Court. He shifts
his ground. I appeal to you whether he did not say it was a question for
the Supreme Court? Has not the Supreme Court decided that question? When
he now says that the people may exclude slavery, does he not make it a
question for the people? Does he not virtually shift his ground and say
that it is not a question for the court, but for the people? This is a
very simple proposition,--a very plain and naked one. It seems to me
that there is no difficulty in deciding it. In a variety of ways he said
that it was a question for the Supreme Court. He did not stop then to
tell us that, whatever the Supreme Court decides, the people can by
withholding necessary "police regulations" keep slavery out. He did not
make any such answer. I submit to you now, whether the new state of the
case has not induced the Judge to sheer away from his original ground?
Would not this be the impression of every fair-minded man?
I hold that the proposition that slavery cannot enter a new country
without police regulations is historically false. It is not true at all.
I hold that the history of this country shows that the institution of
slavery was originally planted upon this continent without these "police
regulations" which the Judge now thinks necessary for the actual
establishment of it. Not only so, but is there not another fact,--how
came this Dred Scott decision to be made? It was made upon the case of a
negro being taken and actually held in slavery in Minnesota Territory,
claiming his freedom because the act of Congress prohibited his being so
held there. Will the Judge pretend that Dred Scott was not held there
without police regulations? There is at least one matter of record as to
his having been held in slavery in the Territory, not only without
police regulations, but in the teeth of congressional legislation
supposed to be valid at the time. This shows that there is vigour enough
in slavery to plant itself in a new country, even against unfriendly
legislation. It takes not only law, but the enforcement of law to keep
it out. That is the history of this country upon the subject.