It should not be overlooked that by the Nebraska bill the people of a State as well as Territory were to be left “perfectly free,” “subject only to the Constitution.”  Why mention a State?  They were legislating for Territories, and not for or about States.  Certainly the people of a State are and ought to be subject to the Constitution of the United States; but why is mention of this lugged into this merely territorial law?  Why are the people of a Territory and the people of a State therein lumped together, and their relation to the Constitution therein treated as being precisely the same?  While the opinion of the Court by Chief Justice Taney, in the Dred Scott case, and the separate opinions of all the concurring judges, expressly declare that the Constitution of the United States neither permits Congress nor a territorial legislature to exclude slavery from any United States Territory, they all omit to declare whether or not the same Constitution permits a State or the people of a State to exclude it. Possibly this is a mere omission; but who can be quite sure if McLean or Curtis had sought to get into the opinion a declaration of unlimited power in the people of a State to exclude slavery from their limits,—­just as Chase and Mace sought to get such declaration in behalf of the people of a Territory, into the Nebraska Bill,—­I ask, who can be quite sure that it would not have been voted down in the one case as it had been in the other?  The nearest approach to the point of declaring the power of a State over slavery is made by Judge Nelson.  He approaches it more than once, using the precise idea, and almost the language too, of the Nebraska act.  On one occasion his exact language is “except in cases where the power is restrained by the Constitution of the United States, the law of the State is supreme over the subject of slavery within its jurisdiction.”  In what cases the power of the State is so restrained by the United States Constitution is left an open question, precisely as the same question, as to the restraint on the power of the Territories, was left open in the Nebraska act.  Put this and that together, and we have another nice little niche, which we may, ere long, see filled with another Supreme Court decision, declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a State to exclude slavery from its limits.  And this may especially be expected if the doctrine of “care not whether slavery be voted down or voted up” shall gain upon the public mind sufficiently to give promise that such a decision can be maintained when made.

Such a decision is all that slavery now lacks of being alike lawful in all the States.  Welcome or unwelcome, such decision is probably coming, and will soon be upon us, unless the power of the present political dynasty shall be met and overthrown.  We shall lie down, pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free, and we shall awake to the reality instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State.  To meet and overthrow the power of that dynasty is the work now before all those who would prevent that consummation.  That is what we have to do.  How can we best do it?