We believe as much as Judge Douglas (perhaps more) in obedience to, and respect for, the judicial department of government.  We think its decisions on constitutional questions, when fully settled, should control not only the particular cases decided, but the general policy of the country, subject to be disturbed only by amendments of the Constitution as provided in that instrument itself.  More than this would be revolution.  But we think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous.  We know the court that made it has often overruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it to overrule this.  We offer no resistance to it.

Judicial decisions are of greater or less authority as precedents according to circumstances.  That this should be so accords both with common sense and the customary understanding of the legal profession.

If this important decision had been made by the unanimous concurrence of the judges, and without any apparent partisan bias, and in accordance with legal public expectation and with the steady practice of the departments throughout our history, and had been in no part based on assumed historical facts which are not really true; or, if wanting in some of these, it had been before the court more than once, and had there been affirmed and reaffirmed through a course of years, it then might be, perhaps would be, factious, nay, even revolutionary, not to acquiesce in it as a precedent.

But when, as is true, we find it wanting in all these claims to the public confidence, it is not resistance, it is not factious, it is not even disrespectful, to treat it as not having yet quite established a settled doctrine for the country.  But Judge Douglas considers this view awful.  Hear him: 

“The courts are the tribunals prescribed by the Constitution and created by the authority of the people to determine, expound, and enforce the law.  Hence, whoever resists the final decision of the highest judicial tribunal aims a deadly blow at our whole republican system of government—­a blow which, if successful, would place all our rights and liberties at the mercy of passion, anarchy, and violence.  I repeat, therefore, that if resistance to the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, in a matter like the points decided in the Dred Scott case, clearly within their jurisdiction as defined by the Constitution, shall be forced upon the country as a political issue, it will become a distinct and naked issue between the friends and enemies of the Constitution—­the friends and the enemies of the supremacy of the laws.”

Why, this same Supreme Court once decided a national bank to be constitutional; but General Jackson, as President of the United States, disregarded the decision, and vetoed a bill for a recharter, partly on constitutional ground, declaring that each public functionary must support the Constitution “as he understands it.”  But hear the General’s own words.  Here they are, taken from his veto message: