The great panacea for the slavery trouble put forth by Mr. Douglas at that time was briefly this:  that the people of the new territories should decide for themselves, subject to the Constitution, whether they should have slavery or not, and also decide for themselves all other questions under the Constitution.  Unhappily for Mr. Douglas, there was the famous Dred Scott decision, which had set the South wild with joy the year before, and had cast a gloom over the North.  The Chief Justice of the United States had declared that under the Constitution slaves were property,—­and as such every American citizen owning slaves could carry them about with him wherever he went.  Therefore the territorial legislatures might pass laws until they were dumb, and yet their settlers might bring with them all the slaves they pleased.

And yet we must love the Judge.  He was a gentleman, a strong man, and a patriot.  He was magnanimous, and to his immortal honor be it said that he, in the end, won the greatest of all struggles.  He conquered himself.  He put down that mightiest thing that was in him,—­his ambition for himself.  And he set up, instead, his ambition for his country.  He bore no ill-will toward the man whose fate was so strangely linked to his, and who finally came to that high seat of honor and of martyrdom which he coveted.  We shall love the Judge, and speak of him with reverence, for that sublime act of kindness before the Capitol in 1861.

Abraham Lincoln might have prayed on that day of the Freeport debate: 

“Forgive him, Lord.  He knows not what he does.”  Lincoln descried the danger afar, and threw his body into the breach.

That which passed before Stephen’s eyes, and to which his ears listened at Freeport, was the Great Republic pressing westward to the Pacific.  He wondered whether some of his Eastern friends who pursed their lips when the Wrest was mentioned would have sneered or prayed.  A young English nobleman who was there that day did not sneer.  He was filled instead with something like awe at the vigor of this nation which was sprung from the loins of his own.  Crudeness he saw, vulgarity he heard, but Force he felt, and marvelled.

America was in Freeport that day, the rush of her people and the surprise of her climate.  The rain had ceased, and quickly was come out of the northwest a boisterous wind, chilled by the lakes and scented by the hemlocks of the Minnesota forests.  The sun smiled and frowned Clouds hurried in the sky, mocking the human hubbub below.  Cheering thousands pressed about the station as Mr. Lincoln’s train arrived.  They hemmed him in his triumphal passage under the great arching trees to the new Brewster House.  The Chief Marshal and his aides, great men before, were suddenly immortal.  The county delegations fell into their proper precedence like ministers at a state dinner.  “We have faith in Abraham, Yet another County for the Rail-sputter, Abe the Giant-killer,”—­so the banners