Court dragged that tribunal into politics, aiming to
settle the question of slavery in the territories, but it stimulated
rather than suppressed the discussion of slavery, as was evident by
its outburst in the debates between Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Stephen A.
Douglas.[8] The main question was whether, according to the
Constitution, Congress could prohibit slavery in the territories.
Lincoln contended that it could but Douglas was evasive, as he hoped
to reconcile his popular sovereignty with the Dred Scott decision.
Lincoln, on the other hand, showed that the public estimate of the
Negro had become decidedly lower than it was prior to the industrial
revolution, when masters could emancipate their bondmen of their own
volition. Since then it had become common for the State Legislature,
which in the exercise of the sovereignty of the State had the power to
abolish slavery within its limits, to withhold that power and to make
legal restraints tantamount to prohibition.

Lincoln opposed Mr. Douglas in 1858 when he contested the latter's
reelection to the United States Senate. Toward this end he launched a
more determined antislavery program than ever before, advancing the
doctrine that "a house divided against itself cannot stand" and
likewise that "the Union could not endure permanently, half slave and
half free."[9] He further declared that either the advocates of
slavery would push the institution forward until it became alike
lawful in both North and South, or the opponents thereof would arrest
its extension. Douglas had charged the Republicans with the intent to
abolish slavery in the States and had asserted that their opposition
to the Dred Scott decision marked their desire for Negro equality and
amalgamation.[10] To this charge Lincoln replied that the Republicans
were not directing their efforts toward abolition in the slave States,
but toward the exclusion of slavery from the territories. He forcibly
denied the accusation that the Republicans solicited social equality
and amalgamation with the Negro, declaring that there was a physical
difference between the two races, which probably would forever forbid
their living together on equal footing; and that, inasmuch as it
became a necessity that there must be a difference, he, like Douglas,
favored his race for the superior position. Lincoln admitted that in
some respects the Negro, according to the Declaration of Independence,
was not the white man's equal; that in colo