"I ask the attention of the people here assembled to the course that
Judge Douglas is pursuing every day as bearing upon this question
of making slavery national. In the first place what is necessary
to make slavery national? Not war. There is no danger that the
people of Kentucky will shoulder their muskets, and, with a young
nigger stuck on every bayonet, march into Illinois and force them
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 Congress
nor the territorial legislature can do it. When that is decided
and acquiesced in the whole thing is done. * * * Let us consider
what Judge Douglas is doing every day to that end. What influence
is he exerting on public sentiment? 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 possible or impossible
to be executed. * * *
"Judge Douglas is a man of vast influence. Consider the attitude
he occupies at the head of a large party. This man sticks to
a decision which forbids the people of a Territory from excluding
slavery, and he does so not because it is right in itself, 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. * * * You will bear in mind that thus committing
himself unreservedly to this decision commits him to the next one
just as firmly as to this. The next decision, as much as this,
will be a 'Thus saith the Lord.' 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. He claims now 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 history on
the question of respect for judicial decisions belonging to a time
when the large party to which Judge Douglas belongs 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. I
know that he will not deny that he was then in favor of overslaughing
that decision by the mode of adding five new Judges, so as to vote
down the four older ones. Not only so, but it ended in the Judge's
sitting down on that very bench as one of the five new Judges to
break down the four old ones.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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