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CHAP. IV.

19 Howard,

p. 619.

has excluded slavery from the territory of the United States; and six distinct instances in which Congress organized governments of Territories by which slavery was recognized and continued, beginning also with the first Congress, and coming down to the year 1822. These acts were severally signed by seven Presidents of the United States, beginning with General Washington, and coming regularly down as far as Mr. John Quincy Adams, thus including all who were in public life when the Constitution was adopted. If the practical construction of the Constitution, contemporaneously with its going into effect, by men intimately acquainted with its history from their personal participation in framing and adopting it, and continued by them through a long series of acts of the gravest importance, be entitled to weight in the judicial mind on a question of construction, it would seem to be difficult to resist the force of the acts above adverted to."

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CHAPTER V

DOUGLAS AND LINCOLN ON DRED SCOTT

MAN

ANIFESTLY, when the educated intellects CHAP. V. of the learned judges differed so radically concerning the principles of law and the facts of history applicable to the Dred Scott question, the public at large could hardly be expected to receive the new dogmas without similar divergence of opinion. So far from exercising a healing influence, the decision widened immensely the already serious breach between the North and the South. The persons immediately involved in the litigation were quickly lost sight of;1 but the constitutional principle affirmed by the court was defended by the South and denounced by the North with zeal and acrimony. The Republican party did not further question or propose to disturb the final judgment in the case; but it declared that the Dred Scott doctrines of the Supreme Court should not be made a rule of political action, and precisely

1 The ownership of Dred Scott and his family passed by inheritance to the family of a Massachusetts Republican member of Congress. The following telegram, copied from the "Providence Post" into the "Washington

VOL. II.-6

81

Union," shows the action of the
new owner: "ST. LOUIS, May 26
[1857]. Dred Scott with his wife
and two daughters were emanci-
pated to-day by Taylor Blow, Esq.
They had been conveyed to him
by Mr. Chaffee for that purpose."

CHAP. V. this the South, together with the bulk of the Northern Democrats, insisted should be done.

A single phase of the controversy will serve to illustrate the general drift of the discussion throughout the Union. Some three months after the delivery of the opinion of the court, Senator Douglas found himself again among his constituents in Illinois, and although there was no political campaign in progress, current events and the roused state of public feeling seemed to require that he should define his views in a public speech. It marks his acuteness as a politician that he already realized what a fatal stab the Dred Scott decision had given his vaunted principle of "Popular Sovereignty," with which he justified his famous repeal of the Missouri Compromise. He had ever since argued that Congressional prohibition of slavery was obsolete and useless, and that the choice of slavery or freedom ought to be confided to the local Territorial laws, just as it was confided to local State constitutions. But the Dred Scott decision announced that slaves were property which Congress could not exclude from the Territories, adding also the inevitable conclusion that what Congress could not do a Territorial Legislature 19 Howard, could not.

pp. 450-1.

Difficult as this made his task of reconciling his favorite theory with the Dred Scott decision, such was his political boldness, and such had been his skill and success in sophistry, that he undertook even this hopeless effort. Douglas, therefore, made a speech at Springfield, Illinois, on the 12th of June, 1857, in which he broadly and fully indorsed and commended the opinion of Chief-Justice Taney

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