Very unexpectedly to the public at large, the Supreme Court of the United States, a few days after Buchanan’s inauguration, announced its judgment in what quickly became famous as the Dred Scott decision.  Dred Scott, a negro slave in Missouri, sued for his freedom on the ground that his master had taken him to reside in the State of Illinois and the Territory of Wisconsin, where slavery was prohibited by law.  The question had been twice decided by Missouri courts, once for and then against Dred Scott’s claim; and now the Supreme Court of the United States, after hearing the case twice elaborately argued by eminent counsel, finally decided that Dred Scott, being a negro, could not become a citizen, and therefore was not entitled to bring suit.  This branch, under ordinary precedent, simply threw the case out of court; but in addition, the decision, proceeding with what lawyers call obiter dictum, went on to declare that under the Constitution of the United States neither Congress nor a territorial legislature possessed power to prohibit slavery in Federal Territories.

The whole country immediately flared up with the agitation of the slavery question in this new form.  The South defended the decision with heat, the North protested against it with indignation, and the controversy was greatly intensified by a phrase in the opinion of Chief Justice Taney, that at the time of the Declaration of Independence negroes were considered by general public opinion to be so far inferior “that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

This decision of the Supreme Court placed Senator Douglas in a curious dilemma.  While it served to indorse and fortify his course in repealing the Missouri Compromise, it, on the other hand, totally negatived his theory by which he had sought to make the repeal palatable, that the people of a Territory, by the exercise of his great principle of popular sovereignty, could decide the slavery question for themselves.  But, being a subtle sophist, he sought to maintain a show of consistency by an ingenious evasion.  In the month of June following the decision, he made a speech at Springfield, Illinois, in which he tentatively announced what in the next year became widely celebrated as his Freeport doctrine, and was immediately denounced by his political confreres of the South as serious party heterodoxy.  First lauding the Supreme Court as “the highest judicial tribunal on earth,” and declaring that violent resistance to its decrees must be put down by the strong arm of the government, he went on thus to define a master’s right to his slave in Kansas: 

“While the right continues in full force under the guarantees of the Constitution, and cannot be divested or alienated by an act of Congress, it necessarily remains a barren and a worthless right unless sustained, protected, and enforced by appropriate police regulations and local legislation prescribing adequate remedies for its violation.  These regulations and remedies must necessarily depend entirely upon the will and wishes of the people of the Territory, as they can only be prescribed by the local legislatures.  Hence, the great principle of popular sovereignty and self-government is sustained and firmly established by the authority of this decision.”