ican Constitutional law depended (though this could not be openly
said) on whether future appointments to the Supreme Court were to be
made by a President who shared Taney's views; whether the executive
action of the President was governed by the same views; and on the
subtle pressure which outside opinion does exercise, and in this case
had surely exercised, upon judicial minds. If the simple principle
that the right to a slave is just one form of the ordinary right to
property once became firmly fixed in American jurisprudence it is hard
to see how any laws prohibiting slavery could have continued to be held
constitutional except in States which were free States when the
Constitution was adopted. Of course, a State like New York where
slaves were industrially useless would not therefore have been filled
with slave plantations, but, among a loyally minded people, the
tradition which reprobated slavery would have been greatly weakened.
The South would have been freed from the sense that slavery was a
doomed institution. If attempts to plant slavery further in the West
with profit failed, there was Cuba and there was Central America, on
which filibustering raids already found favour in the South, and in
which the national Government might be led to adopt schemes of conquest
or annexation. Moreover, it was avowed by leaders like Jefferson Davis
that though it might be impracticable to hope for the repeal of the
prohibition of the slave trade, at least some relaxation of its
severity ought to be striven for, in the interest of Texas and New
Mexico and of possible future Territories where there might be room for
more slaves. Such were the views of the leaders whose influence
preponderated with the present President and in the main with the
present Congress. When Lincoln judged that a determined stand against
their policy was required, and further that no such stand could be
possible to a party which had embraced Douglas with his principle, "I
care not whether slavery be voted up or voted down," there is no doubt
now that he was right and the great body of Republican authority
opposed to him wrong.

When Lincoln and his friends in Illinois determined to fight Douglas,
it became impossible for the Republican party as a whole to fall far
behind them. This was in itself at that crisis an important thing.
Lincoln added greatly to its importance by the opening words in the
first speech of his campaign. They were the most