Lincoln begged leave to doubt the authenticity of this new evidence, in view of the little episode at Ottawa, concerning the Springfield resolutions.  At all events the whole story was untrue, and he had already declared it to be such.[733] Why should Douglas persist in misrepresenting him?  Brushing aside these lesser matters, however, Lincoln addressed himself to what had now come to be known as Douglas’s Freeport doctrine.  “I hold,” said he, “that the proposition that slavery cannot enter a new country without police regulations is historically false....  There is enough vigor in slavery to plant itself in a new country even against unfriendly legislation.  It takes not only law but the enforcement of law to keep it out.”  Moreover, the decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case had created constitutional obligations.  Now that the right of property in slaves was affirmed by the Constitution, according to the Court, how could a member of a territorial legislature, who had taken the oath to support the Constitution, refuse to give his vote for laws necessary to establish slave property?  And how could a member of Congress keep his oath and withhold the necessary protection to slave property in the Territories?[734]

Of course Lincoln was well aware that Douglas held that the Court had decided only the question of jurisdiction in the Dred Scott case; and that all else was a mere obiter dictum.  Nevertheless, “the Court did pass its opinion....  If they did not decide, they showed what they were ready to decide whenever the matter was before them.  They used language to this effect:  That inasmuch as Congress itself could not exercise such a power [i.e., pass a law prohibiting slavery in the Territories], it followed as a matter of course that it could not authorize a Territorial Government to exercise it; for the Territorial Legislature can do no more than Congress could do."[735]

The only answer of Douglas to this trenchant analysis was a reiterated assertion:  “I assert that under the Dred Scott decision [taking Lincoln’s view of that decision] you cannot maintain slavery a day in a Territory where there is an unwilling people and unfriendly legislation.  If the people are opposed to it, our right is a barren, worthless, useless right; and if they are for it, they will support and encourage it."[736]

Douglas made much of Lincoln’s evident unwillingness to commit himself on the question of admitting more slave States.  In various ways he sought to trip his adversary, believing that Lincoln had pledged himself to his Abolitionist allies in 1855 to vote against the admission of more slave States, if he should be elected senator.  “Let me tell Mr. Lincoln that his party in the northern part of the State hold to that Abolition platform [no more slave States], and if they do not in the South and in the center, they present the extraordinary spectacle of a house-divided-against-itself."[737]