I suppose the institution of slavery really looks small to him.  He is so put up by nature that a lash upon his back would hurt him, but a lash upon anybody else’s back does not hurt him....

The Dred Scott decision expressly gives every citizen of the United States a right to carry his slaves into the United States Territories.  And now there was some inconsistency in saying that the decision was right, and saying, too, that the people of the Territory could lawfully drive slavery out again.  When all the trash, the words, the collateral matter was cleared away from it, all the chaff was fanned out of it, it was a bare absurdity; no less than that a thing may be lawfully driven away from where it has a lawful right to be....

The Judge says the people of the Territories have the right, by his principle, to have slaves if they want them.  Then I say that the people in Georgia have the right to buy slaves in Africa if they want them, and I defy any man on earth to show any distinction between the two things—­to show that the one is either more wicked or more unlawful; to show on original principles, that one is better or worse than the other; or to show by the Constitution, that one differs a whit from the other.  He will tell me, doubtless, that there is no constitutional provision against people taking slaves into the new Territories, and I tell him that there is equally no constitutional provision against buying slaves in Africa....

Then I say, if this principle is established, that there is no wrong in slavery, and whoever wants it has a right to have it; that it is a matter of dollars and cents; a sort of question how they shall deal with brutes; that between us and the negro here there is no sort of question, but that at the South the question is between the negro and the crocodile; that it is a mere matter of policy; that there is a perfect right according to interest to do just as you please—­when this is done, where this doctrine prevails, the miners and sappers will have formed public opinion for the slave trade....

  [Sidenote] Lincoln, Columbus Speech, Sept. 16, 1859.  Debates, pp.
  253-54

Public opinion in this country is everything.  In a nation like ours this popular sovereignty and squatter sovereignty have already wrought a change in the public mind to the extent I have stated.  There is no man in this crowd who can contradict it.  Now, if you are opposed to slavery honestly, as much as anybody, I ask you to note that fact, and the like of which is to follow, to be plastered on layer after layer, until very soon you are prepared to deal with the negro everywhere as with the brute.  If public sentiment has not been debauched already to this point, a new turn of the screw in that direction is all that is wanting; and this is constantly being done by the teachers of this insidious popular sovereignty.  You need but one or two turns