ture of American jurisprudence. They characterized
it as the distilled diabolism of two hundred years of slavery,
stealthily aiming at the overthrow of our Republican institutions,
while seeking to hide its nakedness under the fig-leaves of judicial
fairness and dignity. They branded it as the desperate attempt of
slave-breeding Democracy to crown itself king, by debauching the
Federal judiciary and waging war against the advance of civilization.
Their denunciations of the Chief Justice were unsparing and
remorseless; and they described him as "pouring out the hoarded
villainies of a life-time into a political opinion which he tried
to coin into law." When Senator Douglas sought to ridicule their
clamor by inquiring whether they would take an appeal from the
Supreme Court of the United States to a town meeting, they answered:
"Yes, we appeal from the court to the people, who made the
Constitution, and have the right, as the tribunal of last resort,
to define its meaning." Nothing could more clearly have marked
the degradation to which the power of slavery had reduced the
country than this decision, and no other single event could have
so prepared the people for resistance to its aggressions. It was
thoroughly cold-blooded in its letter and spirit, and no Spanish
Inquisitor ever showed less sympathy for his victim than did the
Chief Justice for the slave.

But the Dred Scott iniquity did not stand alone. It had been
procured for the purpose of fastening slavery upon all the Territories,
and it had, of course, a special meaning when applied to the
desperate struggle then in progress to make Kansas a slave State.
The conduct of the Administration during this year, in its treatment
of the free State men of that Territory, forms one of the blackest
pages in the history of slavery. The facts respecting their labors,
trials, and sufferings, and the methods employed to force upon them
the Lecompton Constitution, including wholesale ballot-stuffing
and every form of ruffianism, pillage, and murder, need not be
recalled; but all these were but the outcroppings and counterpart
of the Dred Scott decision, and the horrid travesty of the principle
of popular sovereignty in the Territories. The whole power of the
Administration, acting as the hired man of slavery, was ruthlessly
employed for the purpose of spreading the curse over Kansas, and
establishing it there as an irreversible fact; and all the departments
of the Gover