tive knocked another down.

Douglas was again at the center of the stage, but his term as Senator
was nearing its end. He and the President had split their party. Pursued
by the vengeful malice of the Administration, Douglas went home in
1858 to Illinois to fight for his reelection. His issue, of course,
was popular sovereignty. His temper was still the temper of political
evasion. How to hold fast to his own doctrine, and at the same time
keep to his programme of "nothing doing"; how to satisfy the negative
Democrats of the North without losing his last hold on the positive
men of the South--such were his problems, and they were made still more
difficult by a recent decision of the Supreme Court.

The now famous case of Dred Scott had been decided in the previous
year. Its bewildering legal technicalities may here be passed over;
fundamentally, the real question involved was the status of a negro,
Dred Scott. A slave who had been owned in Missouri, and who had been
taken by his master to the State of Illinois, to the free territory
of Minnesota, and then back to Missouri, now claimed to be free. The
Supreme Court undertook to decide whether his residence in Minnesota
rendered him free, and also whether any negro of slave descent could
be a citizen of the United States. The official opinion of the Court,
delivered by Chief Justice Taney, decided both questions against
the suppliant. It was held that the "citizens" recognized by the
Constitution did not include negroes. So, even if Scott were free, he
could not be considered a citizen entitled to bring suit in the Federal
Courts. Furthermore, he could not be considered free, in spite of his
residence in Minnesota, because, as the Court now ruled, Congress, when
it enacted the Missouri Compromise, had exceeded its authority;
the enactment had never really been in force; there was no binding
prohibition of slavery in the Northwestern territories.

If this decision was good law, all the discussion about popular
sovereignty went for nothing, and neither an act of Congress nor the
vote of the population of a territory, whether for or against slavery,
was of any value whatsoever. Nothing mattered until the newmade state
itself took action after its admission to the Union. Until that time, no
power, national or local, could lawfully interfere with the introduction
of slaves. In the case of Kansas, it was no longer of the least
importance what became of the Lecompton constitut