As Douglas journeyed southward soon after the November elections, he must have felt the poignant truth of Lincoln's shrewd observation that he was himself becoming sectional. Though he was received with seeming cordiality at Memphis and New Orleans, he could not but notice that his speeches, as Lincoln predicted, "would not go current south of the Ohio River as they had formerly." Democratic audiences applauded his bold insistence upon the universality of the principles of the party creed, but the tone of the Southern press was distinctly unfriendly to him and his Freeport doctrine.[776] He told his auditors at Memphis that he indorsed the decision of the Supreme Court; he believed that the owners of slaves had the same right to take them into the Territories as they had to take other property; but slaves once in the Territory were then subject to local laws for protection, on an equal footing with all other property. If no local laws protecting slave property were passed, slavery would be practically excluded. "Non-action is exclusion." It was a matter of soil, climate, interests, whether a Territory would permit slavery or not. "You come right back to the principle of dollars and cents ... If old Joshua E. Giddings should raise a colony in Ohio and settle down in Louisiana, he would be the strongest advocate of slavery in the whole South; he would find when he got there, his opinion would be very much modified; he would find on those sugar plantations that it was not a question between the white man and the negro, but between the negro and the crocodile." "The Almighty has drawn the line on this continent, on one side of which the soil must be cultivated by slave labor; on the other by white labor."[777] At New Orleans, he repeated more emphatically much the same thought. "There is a line, or belt of country, meandering through the valleys and over the mountain tops, which is a natural barrier between free territory and slave territory, on the south of which are to be found the productions suitable to slave labor, while on the north exists a country adapted to free labor alone.... But in the great central regions, where there may be some doubt as to the effect of natural causes, who ought to decide the question except the people residing there, who have all their interests there, who have gone there to live with their wives and children!"[778]