ight which is fixed in his favor in the
Constitution of the United States, which he has sworn to support?
Can he withhold it without violating his oath? and more
especially, can he pass unfriendly legislation to violate his
oath? Why this is a monstrous sort of talk about the Constitution
of the United States! There has never been as outlandish or
lawless a doctrine from the mouth of any respectable man on earth.
I do not believe it is a constitutional right to hold slaves in a
Territory of the United States. I believe the decision was
improperly made, and I go for reversing it. Judge Douglas is
furious against those who go for reversing a decision. But he is
for legislating it out of all force, while the law itself stands.
I repeat that there has never been so monstrous a doctrine uttered
from the mouth of a respectable man.

The announcement and subsequent defense by Douglas of his "Freeport
doctrine" proved, as Lincoln had predicted, something more important
than a mere campaign incident. It was the turning-point in Douglas's
political fortunes. With the whole South, and with a few prominent
politicians of the North, it served to put him outside the pale of
party fellowship. Compared with this his Lecompton revolt had been a
venial offense. In that case he had merely contended for the machinery
of a fair popular vote. This was the avowal of a principle as
obnoxious to the slavery propaganda as the unqualified abolitionism of
Giddings and Lovejoy. Henceforth all hope of reconciliation,
atonement, or chance of Presidential nomination by the united
Democratic party was out of the question. Before this, newspaper
zealots had indeed denounced him for his Lecompton recusancy as a
traitor and renegade, and the Administration had endeavored to secure
his defeat; now, however, in addition, the party high-priests put him
under solemn ban of excommunication. How they felt and from what
motives they acted is stated with singular force and frankness in a
Senate speech, soon after the Charleston Convention, by Senator Judah
P. Benjamin, of Louisiana, one of the ablest and most persistent of
the conspirators to nationalize slavery, and who, not long after, was
one of the principal actors in the great rebellion:

Up to the years 1857 and 1858 no man in this nation had a higher
or more exalted opinion of the character, the services, and the
political integrity of the S