Even so skillful a dialectician as Douglas found this compact structure of history and argument a serious matter.  Its simple solidity was not so susceptible to treatment by the perverting process as had been the figurative and prophetic utterance about the “house divided against itself.”  Neither could he find a chink between the facts and the inferences.  One aspect of the speech, however, could not be passed over.  Lincoln said that he had not charged “Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James” with collusion and conspiracy; but he admitted that he had “arrayed the evidence tending to prove,” and which he “thought did prove,” these things.[79] It was impossible for the four distinguished gentlemen[80] who owned the rest of these names to refuse to plead.  Accordingly Douglas sneered vehemently at the idea that two presidents, the chief justice, and he himself had been concerned in that grave crime against the State which was imputed to them; and when, by his lofty indignation, he had brought his auditors into sympathy, he made the only possible reply:  that the real meaning, the ultimate logical outcome, of what Lincoln had said was, that a decision of the Supreme Court was to be set aside by the political action of the people at the polls.  The Supreme Court had interpreted the Constitution, and Lincoln was inciting the people to annul that interpretation by some political process not known to the law.  For himself, he proclaimed with effective emphasis his allegiance to that great tribunal in the performance of its constitutional duties.  Lincoln replied that he also bowed to the Dred Scott decision in the specific case; but he repudiated it as a binding rule in political action.[81] His point seemed more obscure than was usual with him, and not satisfactory as an answer to Douglas.  But as matter of fact no one was deceived by the amusing adage of the profession:  that the courts do not make the law, but only declare what it is.  Every one knew that the law was just what the judges chose from time to time to say that it was, and that if judicial declarations of the law were not reversed quite so often as legislative makings of the law were repealed, it was only because the identity of a bench is usually of longer duration than the identity of a legislative body.  If the people, politically, willed the reversal of the Dred Scott decision, it was sure in time to be judicially reversed.[82]

Douglas boasted that the Democrats were a national party, whereas the “Black Republicans” were a sectional body whose creed could not be uttered south of Mason and Dixon’s line.  He was assiduous in fastening upon Lincoln the name of “Abolitionist,” and “Black Republican,” epithets so unpopular that those who held the faith often denied the title, and he only modified them by the offensive admission that Lincoln’s doctrines were sometimes disingenuously weakened to suit certain audiences:  “His principles in the north [of Illinois] are jet black; in the centre they are in color a decent mulatto; and in lower Egypt[83] they are almost white.”