[ [4]] A striking example may be found in the utterance of Attorney-General Caleb Cushing, of the retiring Pierce Administration, in a little parting address to the Supreme Court, March 4, 1857:
"Yours is not the gauntleted hand of the soldier, nor yours the voice which commands armies, rules cabinets, or leads senates; but though you are none of these, yet you are backed by all of them. Theirs is the external power which sustains your moral authority; you are the incarnate mind of the political body of the nation. In the complex institutions of our country you are the pivot point upon which the rights and liberties of all, government and people alike, turn; or, rather, you are the central light of constitutional wisdom around which they perpetually revolve. Long may this court retain the confidence of our country as the great conservators, not of the private peace only, but of the sanctity and integrity of the Constitution."—"National Intelligencer," March 5, 1857.
[ [5]] "Mr. Buchanan was also preparing his inaugural address with his usual care and painstaking, and I copied his drafts and recopied them until he had prepared it to his satisfaction. It underwent no alteration after he went to the National Hotel in Washington, except that he there inserted a clause in regard to the question then pending in the Supreme Court, as one that would dispose of a vexed and dangerous topic by the highest judicial authority of the land."—Statement of James Buchanan Henry (President Buchanan's private secretary) in the "Life of James Buchanan," by George Ticknor Curtis, Vol. II., p. 187.
[ [6]] "It may not be improper for me here to add that so great an interest did I take in that decision, and in its principles being sustained and understood in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, that I took the trouble at my own cost to print or have printed a large edition of that decision to scatter it over the State; and unless the mails have miscarried, there is scarcely a member elected to the Legislature who has not received a copy with my frank."—Vice-president Breckinridge, Frankfort Speech, December, 1859.
[ CHAPTER V ]
DOUGLAS AND LINCOLN ON DRED SCOTT
Manifestly, when the educated intellects of the learned judges differed so radically concerning the principles of law and the facts of history applicable to the Dred Scott question, the public at large could hardly be expected to receive the new dogmas without similar divergence of opinion. So far from exercising a healing influence, the decision widened immensely the already serious breach between the North and the South. The persons immediately involved in the litigation were quickly lost sight of;[1] ] but the constitutional principle affirmed by the court was defended by the South and denounced by the North with zeal and acrimony. The Republican party did not further question or propose to disturb the final judgment in the case; but it declared that the Dred Scott doctrines of the Supreme Court should not be made a rule of political action, and precisely this the South, together with the bulk of the Northern Democrats, insisted should be done.
19 Howard, pp. 460-1.
A single phase of the controversy will serve to illustrate the general drift of the discussion throughout the Union. Some three months after the delivery of the opinion of the court, Senator Douglas found himself again among his constituents in Illinois, and although there was no political campaign in progress, current events and the roused state of public feeling seemed to require that he should define his views in a public speech. It marks his acuteness as a politician that he already realized what a fatal stab the Dred Scott decision had given his vaunted principle of "Popular Sovereignty," with which he justified his famous repeal of the Missouri Compromise. He had ever since argued that Congressional prohibition of slavery was obsolete and useless, and that the choice of slavery or freedom ought to be confided to the local Territorial laws, just as it was confided to local State constitutions. But the Dred Scott decision announced that slaves were property which Congress could not exclude from the Territories, adding also the inevitable conclusion that what Congress could not do a Territorial Legislature could not.
Difficult as this made his task of reconciling his favorite theory with the Dred Scott decision, such was his political boldness, and such had been his skill and success in sophistry, that he undertook even this hopeless effort. Douglas, therefore, made a speech at Springfield, Illinois, on the 12th of June, 1857, in which he broadly and fully indorsed and commended the opinion of Chief-Justice Taney and his concurring associates, declaring that "Their judicial decisions will stand in all future time, a proud monument to their greatness, the admiration of the good and wise, and a rebuke to the partisans of faction and lawless violence. If unfortunately any considerable portion of the people of the United States shall so far forget their obligations to society as to allow the partisan leaders to array them in violent resistance to the final decision of the highest judicial tribunal on earth, it will become the duty of all the friends of order and constitutional government, without reference to past political differences, to organize themselves and marshal their forces under the glorious banner of the Union, in vindication of the Constitution and supremacy of the laws over the advocates of faction and the champions of violence."