[78] Letter to Hon. Geo. Robertson, N. and H. i. 392; and see Lamon, 398; also see remarks of von Holst, vi. 277.
[79] Lincoln and Douglas Deb. 93. W.P. Fessenden, "who," says Mr. Blaine, "always spoke with precision and never with passion," expressed his opinion that if Fremont had been elected instead of Buchanan, that decision would never have been given. Twenty Years of Congress, i. 133.
[80] Stephen A. Douglas, Franklin Pierce, Roger B. Taney, James Buchanan.
[81] Lincoln and Douglas Deb. 198. At Chicago he said that he would vote for the prohibition of slavery in a new Territory "in spite of the Dred Scott decision." Lincoln and Douglas Deb. 20; and see the rest of his speech on the same page. The Illinois Republican Convention, June 16. 1858, expressed "condemnation of the principles and tendencies of the extra-judicial opinions of a majority of the judges," as putting forth a "political heresy." Holland, 159.
Years ago Salmon P. Chase had dared to say that, if the courts would not overthrow the pro-slavery construction of the Constitution, the people would do so, even if it should be "necessary to overthrow the courts also." Warden's Life of Chase, 313.
[82] For Lincoln's explanation of his position concerning the Dred Scott decision, see Lincoln and Douglas Deb. 20.
[83] A nickname for the southern part of Illinois.
[84] Henry Wilson has made his criticism in the words that "some of his [Lincoln's] assertions and admissions were both unsatisfactory and offensive to anti-slavery men; betrayed too much of the spirit of caste and prejudice against color, and sound harshly dissonant by the side of the Proclamation of Emancipation and the grand utterances of his later state papers." Rise and Fall of the Slave Power, ii. 576.
[85] Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, i. 145
[86] N. and H. ii. 159, 160, 163; Arnold, 151; Lamon, 415, 416, and see 406; Holland, 189; Wilson, Rise and Fall of the Slave Power, ii. 576; Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, i. 148.