o analyze this statement, and it is required
of me to notice it now. In point of fact it is untrue. I never have
complained especially of the Dred Scott decision because it held that a
negro could not be a citizen, and the Judge is always wrong when he says
I ever did so complain of it. I have the speech here, and I will thank
him or any of his friends to show where I said that a negro should be a
citizen, and complained especially of the Dred Scott decision because
it declared he could not be one. I have done no such thing; and Judge
Douglas, so persistently insisting that I have done so, has strongly
impressed me with the belief of a predetermination on his part to
misrepresent me. He could not get his foundation for insisting that I
was in favor of this negro equality anywhere else as well as he could by
assuming that untrue proposition. Let me tell this audience what is true
in regard to that matter; and the means by which they may correct me if I
do not tell them truly is by a recurrence to the speech itself. I spoke
of the Dred Scott decision in my Springfield speech, and I was then
endeavoring to prove that the Dred Scott decision was a portion of a
system or scheme to make slavery national in this country. I pointed out
what things had been decided by the court. I mentioned as a fact that they
had decided that a negro could not be a citizen; that they had done so, as
I supposed, to deprive the negro, under all circumstances, of the remotest
possibility of ever becoming a citizen and claiming the rights of a
citizen of the United States under a certain clause of the Constitution. I
stated that, without making any complaint of it at all. I then went on and
stated the other points decided in the case; namely, that the bringing
of a negro into the State of Illinois and holding him in slavery for two
years here was a matter in regard to which they would not decide whether
it would make him free or not; that they decided the further point that
taking him into a United States Territory where slavery was prohibited by
Act of Congress did not make him free, because that Act of Congress, as
they held, was unconstitutional. I mentioned these three things as making
up the points decided in that case. I mentioned them in a lump, taken in
connection with the introduction of the Nebraska Bill, and the amendment
of Chase, offered at the time, declaratory of the right of the people of
the Territories to exclude slavery, which was v