was no territorial enactment before the Court; and because there was no fact in the case alluding to or connected with territorial legislation.[799] All this was perfectly true.  The opinion of the Court was obiter dicens; but the Court expressed its opinion nevertheless.  As Lincoln said, men knew what to expect of the Court when a territorial act prohibiting slavery came before it.  Yet this was what Douglas would not concede.  He would not admit the inference.  Congress could confer powers upon a territorial legislature which it could not itself exercise.  The dividing line between Federal and local authority was so drawn as to permit Congress to institute governments with legislative, judicial, and executive functions but without permitting Congress to exercise those functions itself.  From Douglas’s point of view, a Territory was not a dependency of the Federal government, but an inchoate Commonwealth, endowed with many of the attributes of sovereignty possessed by the full-fledged States.

So unusual an event as a political contribution by a prominent statesman to a popular magazine, created no little excitement.[800] Attorney-General Black came to the defense of the South with an unsigned contribution to the Washington Constitution, the organ of the administration.[801] And Douglas, who had meantime gone to Ohio to take part in the State campaign, replied caustically to this critique in his speech at Wooster, September 16th.  Black rejoined in a pamphlet under his own name.  Whereupon Douglas returned to the attack with a slashing pamphlet, which he sent to the printer in an unfinished form and which did him little credit.[802]

This war of pamphlets was productive of no results.  Douglas and Black were wide apart upon their major premises, and diverged inevitably in their conclusions.  Holding fast to the premise that a Territory was not sovereign but a “subordinate dependency,” Black ridiculed the attempts of Douglas to clothe it, not with complete sovereignty but with “the attributes of sovereignty."[803] Then Douglas denounced in scathing terms the absurdity of Black’s assumption that property in the Territories would be held by the laws of the State from which it came, while it must look for redress of wrongs to the law of its new domicile.[804]

The Ohio campaign attracted much attention throughout the country, not only because the gubernatorial candidates were thoroughgoing representatives of the Republican party and of Douglas Democracy, but because both Lincoln and Douglas were again brought into the arena.[805] While the latter did not meet in joint debate, their successive appearance at Columbus and Cincinnati gave the campaign the aspect of a prolongation of the Illinois contest.  Lincoln devoted no little attention to the Harper’s Magazine article, while Douglas defended himself and his doctrine against all comers.  There was a disposition in many quarters to concede that popular sovereignty, whether theoretically