In the first place, what is necessary to make the
institution national? Not war. There is
no danger that the people of Kentucky will shoulder
their muskets, and, with a young nigger stuck on every
bayonet, march into Illinois and force them upon us.
There is no danger of our going over there and making
war upon them. Then what is necessary for the
nationalization of slavery? It is simply the next
Dred Scott decision. It is merely for the Supreme
Court to decide that no State under the Constitution
can exclude it, just as they have already decided that
under the Constitution neither Congress nor the Territorial
Legislature can do it. When that is decided and
acquiesced in, the whole thing is done. This
being true, and this being the way, as I think, that
slavery is to be made national, let us consider what
Judge Douglas is doing every day to that end.
In the first place, let us see what influence he is
exerting on public sentiment. In this and like
communities, public sentiment is everything.
With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it,
nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who moulds
public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes
or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and
decisions possible or impossible to be executed.
This must be borne in mind, as also the additional
fact that Judge Douglas is a man of vast influence,
so great that it is enough for many men to profess
to believe anything when they once find out Judge
Douglas professes to believe it. Consider also
the attitude he occupies at the head of a large party,—a
party which he claims has a majority of all the voters
in the country. This man sticks to a decision
which forbids the people of a Territory from excluding
slavery, and he does so, not because he says it is
right in itself,—he does not give any opinion
on that,—but because it has been decided
by the court; and being decided by the court, he is,
and you are, bound to take it in your political action
as law, not that he judges at all of its merits, but
because a decision of the court is to him a “Thus
saith the Lord.” He places it on that ground
alone; and you will bear in mind that thus committing
himself unreservedly to this decision commits him
to the next one just as firmly as to this. He
did not commit himself on account of the merit or
demerit of the decision, but it is a “Thus saith
the Lord.” The next decision, as much as
this, will be a “Thus saith the Lord.”
There is nothing that can divert or turn him away
from this decision. It is nothing that I point
out to him that his great prototype, General Jackson,
did not believe in the binding force of decisions.
It is nothing to him that Jefferson did not so believe.
I have said that I have often heard him approve of
Jackson’s course in disregarding the decision
of the Supreme Court pronouncing a National Bank constitutional.
He says I did not hear him say so. He denies the
accuracy of my recollection. I say he ought to
know better than I, but I will make no question about