ion or of any other
that the settlers might make. The territory was open to settlement
by slaveholders and would continue to be so as long as it remained
a territory. The same conditions existed in Nebraska and in all the
Northwest. The Dred Scott decision was accepted as orthodox Democratic
doctrine by the South, by the Administration, and by the "Northern men
with Southern principles." The astute masters of the game of politics
on the Democratic side struck the note of legality. This was law, the
expression of the highest tribunal of the Republic; what more was to be
said? Though in truth there was but one other thing to be said, and that
revolutionary, the Republicans, nevertheless, did not falter over it.
Seward announced it in a speech in Congress on "Freedom in Kansas," when
he uttered this menace: "We shall reorganize the Court and thus reform
its political sentiments and practices."

In the autumn of 1858 Douglas attempted to perform the acrobatic feat
of reconciling the Dred Scott decision, which as a Democrat he had
to accept, with that idea of popular sovereignty without which his
immediate followers could not be content. In accepting the Republican
nomination as Douglas's opponent for the senatorship, Lincoln used these
words which have taken rank among his most famous utterances: "A house
divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot
endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union
to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall but I do expect it
will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.
Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it,
and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it
is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it
forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well
as new--North as well as South."

No one had ever so tellingly expressed the death-grapple of the sections:
slavery the weapon of one, free labor the weapon of the other. Though
Lincoln was at that time forty-nine years old, his political experience,
in contrast with that of Douglas, was negligible. He afterward aptly
described his early life in that expressive line from Gray, "The short
and simple annals of the poor." He lacked regular schooling, and it
was altogether from the practice of law that he had gained such formal
education as he had. In law, however, he ha