of the United States to take a slave into a Territory of the United States and hold him as property, yet unless the Territorial Legislature will give friendly legislation, and, more especially, if they adopt unfriendly legislation, they can practically exclude him.  Now, without meeting this proposition as a matter of fact, I pass to consider the real constitutional obligation.  Let me take the gentleman who looks me in the face before me, and let us suppose that he is a member of the Territorial Legislature.  The first thing he will do will be to swear that he will support the Constitution of the United States.  His neighbor by his side in the Territory has slaves and needs Territorial legislation to enable him to enjoy that constitutional right.  Can he withhold the legislation which his neighbor needs for the enjoyment of a right which is fixed in his favor in the Constitution of the United States, which he has sworn to support?  Can he withhold it without violating his oath? and more especially, can he pass unfriendly legislation to violate his oath?  Why this is a monstrous sort of talk about the Constitution of the United States!  There has never been as outlandish or lawless a doctrine from the mouth of any respectable man on earth.  I do not believe it is a constitutional right to hold slaves in a Territory of the United States.  I believe the decision was improperly made, and I go for reversing it.  Judge Douglas is furious against those who go for reversing a decision.  But he is for legislating it out of all force, while the law itself stands.  I repeat that there has never been so monstrous a doctrine uttered from the mouth of a respectable man.

The announcement and subsequent defense by Douglas of his “Freeport doctrine” proved, as Lincoln had predicted, something more important than a mere campaign incident.  It was the turning-point in Douglas’s political fortunes.  With the whole South, and with a few prominent politicians of the North, it served to put him outside the pale of party fellowship.  Compared with this his Lecompton revolt had been a venial offense.  In that case he had merely contended for the machinery of a fair popular vote.  This was the avowal of a principle as obnoxious to the slavery propaganda as the unqualified abolitionism of Giddings and Lovejoy.  Henceforth all hope of reconciliation, atonement, or chance of Presidential nomination by the united Democratic party was out of the question.  Before this, newspaper zealots had indeed denounced him for his Lecompton recusancy as a traitor and renegade, and the Administration had endeavored to secure his defeat; now, however, in addition, the party high-priests put him under solemn ban of excommunication.  How they felt and from what motives they acted is stated with singular force and frankness in a Senate speech, soon after the Charleston Convention, by Senator Judah P. Benjamin, of Louisiana, one of the ablest and most persistent of the conspirators to nationalize slavery, and who, not long after, was one of the principal actors in the great rebellion: